I thank Amit Ron and Abraham Singer for their thoughtful engagement with Seeing Like a Firm. While their work rethinks corporate responsibility from within democratic theory, mine offers a darker view—tracing how corporations have served conservative and anti-egalitarian projects. We share a commitment to treating the firm as a central site of political theorizing.
They raise two concerns. First, my emphasis on intra-firm hierarchy may obscure broader dynamics of relational inequality—including those between firms or between firms and democratic publics. I share that concern. One of the book’s central claims is that firms undermine democratic equality not only through their public actions but through the forms of hierarchies they normalize. The aestheticization of inequality—what I call the “conservatism of commerce”—extends beyond the shop floor; it diffuses across society and its social imaginaries. My interest lies less in procedures and more in how firms shape the background conditions of democratic life: its hierarchies, affective regimes, norms of recognition, and modes of existence. I, thus, draw on a conception of democracy not merely as a procedure for resolving disagreement, but as a form of life—a normative horizon within which people relate to one another as equals.
Second, they ask whether I romanticize workplace democracy or embrace a form of perfectionism, requiring workers to embrace democratic participation where they might prefer passivity. I appreciate the provocation. In response, I would stress that my account of workplace democracy is less an exhortation than a diagnostic claim. The normative heart of the book lies not in demanding constant participation but in unsettling the legitimacy of asymmetric authority where no mechanisms of standing or contestation exist. My concern is not to intervene in debates over ideal democratic decision-making mechanisms or the relative merits of different institutional designs. Rather, I aim to document and debunk powerful logics of superiority and inferiority that corporations normalize, amplify, and magnify. The ideal is not that all workers become hyperactive citizens but that corporate command structures be rendered contestable—and compatible with the demands of social equality. This does not require moral perfectionism, only that we take democratic equality seriously and recognize that today’s corporations play a central role in conservative and anti-democratic projects.
More broadly, their concern raises a larger question: Can the firm, as currently structured, ever be a site of democratic equality? Or must democratic theory also challenge its form? On this, we likely share concerns, though we differ in tone and emphasis. Seeing Like a Firm introduces a more genealogical and skeptical narrative into a field that often remains invested in the moral promise of corporations—as agents of efficiency or of progressive reform. It is also a field that, I believe, needs to take more seriously the kind of story it tells about the intellectual history of corporations. I aim to interrogate how corporate power shapes our social imaginaries—and what forms of domination are concealed by the narrative of corporate progress. That, I believe, is a pressing challenge for political theorists of the firm.
