Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America by Erik Baker Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society by Amit Ron and Abraham A. Singer

Abstract

In the study of polit i cal econ omy, civil soci ety is on the rise.Economics, once focused nar rowly on states and mar kets, has broad ened its hori zons."What we think of as the econ omy con sists in non-mar ket inter ac tions," Sam uel Bowles, Wendy Carlin, and Sahana Subramanyam (2025: 2) explain, not ing the dis ci pline's grow ing atten tion to fam i lies, social move ments, and iden tity groups as con sti tu tive ele ments of eco nomic life.Within this evolv ing frame work, norms, iden ti ties, and social and eth i cal obli gations have joined self-inter est as key driv ers of eco nomic behav ior (Bowles et al. 2025).Critics of cap i tal ism have like wise shifted their focus: from insti tu tions of produc tion and redis tri bu tion to social rela tions as a key locus of eco nomic jus tice."The goal of polit i cal econ omy . . . is to build empowering econ o mies, econ o mies that empower the cit i zenry broadly to suc ceed as civic par tic i pants," writes phi los o pher Danielle Allen (2023: 159).Civil soci ety, in this view, is no lon ger periph eral to cap ital ism; it is foun da tional.Two recent works of polit i cal econ omy con trib ute pro duc tively to this emerg ing par a digm.In Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, his to rian Erik Baker traces how a per va sive cul tural norm-entre pre neur ship -has redefined the mean ing of work, value, and pro duc tiv ity in Amer i can soci ety.In Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society, polit i cal the o rists Amit Ron and Abra ham A. Singer apply a dem o cratic frame work to busi ness eth ics, ask ing what it means to make the cor po ra tion account able to democ racy.Both works invite read ers to con sider what it means to cen ter civil soci ety in interpreting cap i tal ism's past and reimagining its future.