Hijacked
How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back

Albeit a bit dense and belabored for a plebeian like me, this is a very impressive book. Anderson knows her shit, that cannot be disputed. She traces the intellectual history of the concept of a “work ethic” all way back to Martin Luther, up through the Puritans and John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, soc......more

Top shelf!......more

Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, by Elizabeth Anderson, is an extremely well-researched and argued look at how what had once (to some) been a positive has been turned into a weapon and thus a negative. Unless, of course, you're eithe......more

Anderson argues that in the late eighteenth century, classical political economic thinking on the Protestant work ethic was “split” between a progressive version that eventually nurtured social democracy (all work is dignified, and all workers deserve a decent life) and a conservative version that e......more

This is a kind of book I am always happy to read: it took an idea that is not necessarily revolutionary (there's something employable to leftist ends in the work ethic), and then really thoroughly historicizes it. Anderson clearly and comprehensively works through a lot of people you (or I, anyway)......more