Seeing Like a Firm: Working as Equals and the Challenge of Conservatism

Résumé En

To think about the prospects for building more egalitarian relationships in the workplace, as advocates of relational egalitarianism do, we need to think in reverse. We need to take seriously conceptions of the corporation that tend to erase the importance of social equality and instead praise workplace hierarchies. Yet the emphasis on hierarchies is usually justified from a normative perspective on utilitarian or libertarian grounds. Moreover, and more generally, in our ways of thinking about economic institutions, we tend to use libertarianism to make theoretical sense of right-wing intuitions, which goes hand in hand with the use of a certain kind of normative vocabulary, centered on notions of private property, self-ownership and voluntariness, etc. I argue in this article that this approach is at least partially misleading. To put it quickly, the way that the corporation “sees” is a conservative one, probably much more than a libertarian one, strictly speaking. To normatively unveil what it means to “see” as a firm, we need to move from a focus on libertarianism to a focus on conservatism.More generally, I argue that taking conservatism more seriously allows for a better understanding of what the proponents of relational egalitarianism are up against, its “enemy”. In this sense, this paper aims to provide a contribution that could be called “negative” to the relational theory of equality, and the way it can help us think critically about economic institutions.