This is a preprint of: Ellerman, David. 2025. “The Historical and Modern Arguments Against Contractual Slavery.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Modern Slavery, edited by Maria Krambia Kapardis, Colin Clark, Ajwang Warria, and Michel Dion. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58614-9_9.
The Kantian Person/Thing Principle in Political Economy
June 1, 2024 by
This is Chapter 4 in my book: Ellerman, David. 1995. Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ethical theories can be broadly grouped into utilitarian theories and rights-based theories. Modern economics is so thoroughly utilitarian that most economists would be hard-pressed to cite the application of a rights-based argument to economic institutions. Yet the normative principles outlined in the first two chapters, the labor theory of property and the de facto theory of inalienability, are squarely within the rights-based tradition. The democratic principle of self-determination is also a closely allied rights-based theory [see Ellerman 1992].
Talk: A Tale of Two Invalid Contracts: Coverture and Employment
November 28, 2017 by
These are the slides for a talk that focuses on the parallel inalienable rights arguments against the now-outlawed coverture marriage contract and the yet-to-be-outlawed employment contract.
Review-Essay on Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government” book
October 23, 2017 by
In her recent book Private Government [2017], Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful but pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay is to contrast Anderson’s pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relation with a principled critique of the employment relationship itself.
Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy
December 19, 2012 by
This book presents a modern version of the old Labor (or Natural Rights) Theory of Property and of an Inalienable Rights Theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. Together these theories re-solve the basic problem of distribution in the sense of giving a basis for the just appropriation of property and a basis for answering the question of who is to be the firm, e.g., the suppliers of share capital as in conventional capital, the government as in socialism, or the people who work in the firm as in the system of economic democracy (or labor-managed market economies).
Inalienable Rights: A Litmus Test for Liberal Theories of Justice
December 12, 2012 by
This paper published in the European journal, Law and Philosophy, examines the intellectual history of inalienable rights theory, and critically examines the work of liberal philosophers of justice, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, from that perspective.
On Rawls and Nussbaum
December 8, 2012 by
This paper was delivered at a 2008 conference in Leuven on Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice. The paper was to be published in the conference proceedings, but somehow that never happened.
Employment Contract and Liberal Thought
November 17, 2012 by
This was the first of several papers that focused on the employment contract and inalienable rights, rather than on the labor theory of property.
Rethinking Common vs. Private Property
August 14, 2012 by
The purpose of this paper is to suggest a rethinking of the common-versus-private framing of the property rights issue in the Commons Movement. The underlying normative principle we will use is simply the basic juridical principle that people should be legally responsible for the (positive and negative) results of their actions, i.e., that legal or de jure responsibility should be imputed in accordance with de facto responsibility. In the context of property rights, the responsibility principle is the old idea that property should be founded on people getting the (positive or negative) fruits of their labor, which is variously called the labor or natural rights theory of property.