“Introduction: Work, Democracy, and Freedom”

Work as a domain of life of central significance to the values of democracy and freedom suffered comparative neglect from the 1980s until relatively recently in Anglophone political theory and philosophy.This was due, in part, to influential socio-political imaginaries conceiving work as embedded within an economic system characterised, in contrast to the "communicative lifeworld" realms of the family, civil society, and the public sphere, by a "norm-free sociality" in which instrumental imperatives of productivity and organisational efficiency, rather than equality or freedom, hold sway. 1 It was also due to presumptions within dominant strands of liberalism, which understood calls for more meaningful or freer work as preferences specific to individual "conceptions of the good" that, in line with liberal neutrality over questions of the good life, ought not to be privileged over rival conceptions. 2These currents combined with other factors, most notably a surgent forceful neoliberalism, to