Elizabeth Anderson at Lund: 'Libertarianism, inequality and the slide to authoritarianism'

Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan gave Lund University's Pufendorf Lectures on 11-13 May 2026. The series was titled "Libertarianism, Inequality, and the Inexorable Slide to Authoritarianism".

Anderson's thesis#

Anderson has long been asking one question: how does a tradition of thought that defends market freedom end up producing arrangements in which people are less free in their daily lives?

Her 2017 book Private Government carried that question into the workplace. Most employees, on Anderson's account, count as citizens in the public sphere while living under an all but absolute authority at work — over their dress, their speech, their conduct off the clock and what they post on social media. It is a structure that is not the state but exercises the power of government: private government.

The title of the lecture series lifts that line to the political level: as economic inequality intensifies, the capacity of political institutions to resist that concentration of power declines.

Relational equality#

Anderson's name in the equality debate is attached to the relational approach. What matters about equality, on this view, is not who holds how much of a resource but the relations in which people stand to one another. The aim is a society in which nobody is subordinate to anybody.

The Pufendorf Lectures#

The series takes its name from the seventeenth-century natural law theorist Samuel von Pufendorf and is organised by the Department of Philosophy at Lund University.