“Every child,” Marx quipped in a letter to his friend the social democratic activist and theorist Ludwig Kugelmann, “knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish.” That work is central to the functioning of any society is undeniable, but whether this provides a justification for its positive valuation is deeply contested by both the Left and the Right. Members of the former camp sometimes conceive of work as pointless drudgery and view esteem for it as confused. On the Right, work takes on a quasi-religious status in a worldview that pits welfare queens up against hardworking citizens.

Entering the fray of these vexed debates is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, the author of four books largely on ethics and political economy and one of the few voices in a complacently liberal academy to advance a critique of inequality. Her latest, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, picks up the set of problems of her earlier work but approaches them from the perspective of intellectual history. The task she sets herself is ambitious: retrieving the radical potential of the work ethic from the grips of conservatives who have used it to justify neoliberalism.

Hijacked makes a compelling case that the work ethic was at its Puritan inception largely a progressive force. Her task is to lay the ground for a rapprochement between liberals and the Left. Throughout the long history of the work ethic, conservatives have reinterpreted the concept and turned it against workers and the poor. These narratives live on today in neoliberal policies and discourse that have overseen rises in inequality whose analogy can only be found in the gilded age of robber barons.