Many Masters? Rethinking the Labor Republican Critique of Capitalist Employment
Friday, October 3, 2014, 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Dan Layman, a postdoctoral research fellow in political science at Brown University, discusses recent criticisms of Philip Pettit's view that workers can escape domination if they enjoy a basic income that allows them to move freely among employers. According to Alex Gourevitch, drawing on 19th-century labor republicanism, a basic income does not secure nondomination for workers, as they must still sell their labor, and this arrangement is intentionally maintained by those who benefit from it. Free.
Location:
Humanities Building, Humanities Auditorium
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Sponsor:
Philosophy Department
Contact:
Lily Simmons
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Event extras:
Layman’s research in moral and political philosophy is centered on freedom as a political ideal, its history, and its implications for distributive justice. In my dissertation and related papers, he argues that John Locke was committed to an intuitively plausible conception of political liberty as freedom from arbitrary power, and that this notion of liberty is a live option for political theory today. In Layman’s most recent work, he has taken up the question of how our economic lives must be structured in order to secure all citizens against arbitrary power.