What does democracy demand of business? This deceptively simple question grounds Everyone’s Business, Abraham Singer and Amit Ron’s compelling attempt to rethink the relationship between firms and a democratic society. Rejecting both the narrow constraints of technocratic compliance and the aspirational breadth of corporate virtue-talk, the authors propose a reframing of familiar frameworks for theorizing the firm—stakeholder theory, the market failures approach, integrative social contract theory, and shareholder primacy—through a political lens. Their guiding intuition is that corporate power must be understood and evaluated as a site of democratic concern. The result is a carefully argued and timely book that seeks to give business ethics a new home within democratic theory—a move that is both urgent and overdue.
At the heart of the book is what they call a “social subcontract” model. Firms, they argue, are essentially licensed participants in a system of social cooperation. They are granted a degree of discretion to pursue parochial ends—above all, profits—but only on the condition that they do so in ways that do not erode the democratic foundations of that broader system. This reorientation marks a “political” shift: from seeing businesses as merely economic actors with moral side-constraints to treating them as political agents whose legitimacy depends on their effects on democratic institutions, discourse, and norms. And yet, the authors are careful not to collapse business into a civic mission. They explicitly resist the claim that firms must be “public-minded” in the strong sense of promoting collective ideals. For Ron and Singer, the democratic responsibilities of firms emerge not from their moral aspirations but from their institutional position within democratic societies.
This is an important and original move. Where some democratic theorists may be tempted to impose demanding civic roles on corporate actors, Ron and Singer take a more pragmatic route. Businesses do not need to take specific moral stands, they argue. However, they do need to avoid leveraging their power in ways that undermine democratic processes—such as elections, protests, or the integrity of public discourse. Their account, therefore, centers on two key duties: critical reflection and publicity. Firms must reflect on how their actions shape democratic life, and they must offer public justifications for decisions with democratic implications. These duties apply not only to overtly political interventions, such as lobbying, but also to ordinary practices, including advertising, hiring, wage-setting, and governance structures.
To develop this framework, Ron and Singer offer a lucid reinterpretation of several major traditions in business ethics (Chapters 1 and 2). Rather than discard older approaches, they read them politically—suggesting, for instance, that stakeholder theory carries latent democratic commitments, or that the market failures approach presupposes normative ideals of institutional legitimacy. At the same time, they argue that a political conception of business ethics must retain some insights from fiduciary models. Businesses are still structured around delegated authority and bounded discretion. The task is not to moralize the firm from the outside, but to situate it within a broader political ecology of democratic responsibility.
One of the great strengths of Everyone’s Business is how seriously it takes the informal ways firms shape democratic life. Chapter 5 offers a compelling analysis of marketing campaigns, showing how they frame public issues, influence the quality of popular deliberation, and often bypass critical engagement. Elsewhere (Chapters 3 and 6), the authors address how firms respond to social movements, dissent, and boycotts—not simply as reputational risks but as moments that demand reflexive accountability. Throughout, Ron and Singer remain attentive to real-world cases, including corporate responses to anti-trans legislation, racial justice protests, and labor organizing. These discussions ground their theory in lived political tensions, making the book especially accessible to readers across subfields. Their thoughtful analysis of corporate lobbying (Chapter 4) offers a particularly good example. While lobbying can serve democracy by contributing to collective problem-solving and informing public deliberation, it poses a serious threat when conducted opaquely. In such cases, they argue, lobbying becomes a form of corruption—not necessarily because it distorts outcomes, but because it excludes citizens “by the virtue of being left in the dark” (p. 103).
Crucially, Ron and Singer frame these interventions as part of a larger reorientation. The business world, they suggest in the first pages, is already undergoing a kind of normative shift. Gordon Gekko’s infamous “greed is good” ethos has lost its grip. Corporate social responsibility has evolved, and “brand activism” is now mainstream. As the authors note (p. 3), Pride flags adorn corporate logos every June. Firms now speak the language of purpose, justice, and inclusion—at least at the level of public relations. Everyone’s Business does not uncritically embrace this trend—it contains a nuanced analysis of the problem of “justice-washing” (Chapter 5)—but it treats it as a backdrop that makes their argument both timely and plausible. Firms are already engaged in public discourse, and democratic theory must now catch up.
And yet, it is precisely this sense of normative momentum that invites deeper questioning. While the authors acknowledge the risks of hypocrisy and firm overreach, one might ask whether their account is ultimately too accommodating of the current corporate landscape. What if the issue is not just that firms are insufficiently reflective, but that they are actively anti-democratic? Recent developments—from Elon Musk’s crusade against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to Mark Zuckerberg’s celebration of “masculine energy” in the workplace—suggest that corporate influence is not drifting leftward, but becoming more ideologically assertive in illiberal directions. Moreover, the systematic redirection of value from labor to capital over the past five decades, the entrenchment of shareholder primacy, and the role of firms in exacerbating racial and class hierarchies point not to failures of reflection but to deeper structural contradictions between capitalist firmhood and democratic equality.
Ron and Singer are not blind to these dangers. They are careful to avoid utopianism, and they explicitly reject calls for firms to act as moral leaders or civic educators. However, their subcontractor model ultimately rests on a picture of the firm as capable of ethical self-regulation—of recognizing its role within a democratic society and acting accordingly. That assumption, though plausible in principle, may falter in practice. It may underestimate the extent to which the firm’s very structure—its governance, incentives, and legal personhood—is designed to protect it from precisely the kind of democratic scrutiny the authors call for.
The question, then, is not only whether firms will meet their democratic obligations, but whether they are institutionally configured to even recognize them. Here, the book’s treatment of internal governance is notably restrained. While the authors acknowledge the importance of workplace democracy, they stop short of theorizing it as a necessary condition of external legitimacy. However, if we are concerned about how firms affect democracy, we must ask whether their internal structures reproduce domination and exclusion. Can a firm that silences workers internally be trusted to engage democratic publics externally? This is not just a normative question—it is an institutional one, and perhaps a historical one.
Still, Everyone’s Business succeeds on its own terms. It does not aim to remake the firm or challenge capitalism writ large. It aims, more modestly, to bring democratic theory to bear on business ethics—and to insist that the moral obligations of firms cannot be understood outside of their political context. In this, it is remarkably effective. The book is theoretically rigorous, practically engaged, and normatively serious. It offers a fresh vocabulary for rethinking what we ask of firms—not in terms of virtue or compliance, but in terms of democratic responsibility. And it opens the door to further debate. What if, contrary to the book’s assumptions, the corporate “progressive turn” is already reversing? What if the subcontractor is not merely under-reflective, but actively undermining the contractor’s democratic foundations? What if democratic theory must not only hold the firm to account, but fundamentally reimagine its form? These are not questions Ron and Singer attempt to answer—but they are precisely the kind of questions Everyone’s Business helps us articulate more clearly.
In sum, Ron and Singer have produced a remarkable work of political theory—clear in argument, rich in insight, and timely in its interventions. While readers may differ on how far the subcontractor model can take us, there is little doubt that Everyone’s Business will become a central reference point in debates over business ethics and democratic legitimacy. It deserves a wide readership—and, perhaps, a more skeptical one than the authors themselves allow.
