Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1987, she earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University, and joined the Philosophy Department at University of Michigan. Professor Anderson designed University of Michigan’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program, and was its founding director. She has won fellowships from the ACLS and Guggenheim Foundations, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard UP, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton UP, 2010), Private Government (How Employers Rule our Lives, and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (Princeton UP, 2017), and Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers, and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge UP, 2023), and numerous, widely reprinted articles in journals of philosophy, law, and economics. She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences. She has written extensively on egalitarianism, the interaction of facts and values in social science research, the intersection of democratic theory and social epistemology, and pragmatism. Her current research reconsiders the history of the Protestant work ethic from the 17th century to 21st century neoliberalism, including the impact of the work ethic on classical political economy and public policy, including welfare policy, labor rights, and regulation.
Isabelle Ferreras is a senior tenured fellow (maître de recherches) of the Belgian National Science Foundation (F.N.R.S.-F.R.S., Brussels), a professor of sociology at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) where she is a permanent research of the CriDIS (IACCHOS-Centre for interdisciplinary research Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity, Louvain), and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (Cambridge, MA). Ferreras was elected in 2017 a permanent member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts of Belgium (Class Technology and Society). She has been elected Director of her Class, and president of the Royal Academy starting January 2021. Ferreras’s research agenda focuses on understanding work in the context of the service-based production regime. She has developed a critical, political sociology of work. She is developing a companion, critical ‘political theory of the firm’ that seeks to grasp firms as “political entities” in the broader context of capitalist democracies at the global age, and to explore implications at both levels of efficiency and justice via the proposal of “economic bicameralism” for democratizing the government of capitalist firms. Ferreras’s proposal for democratizing corporations was the last ‘real utopia’ that Erik Olin Wright helped & readied for a Real Utopia Conference. As arranged by Erik, the conference was scheduled to take place in March 2020 at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, with funding from the Central Bank of Sweden. Due to the covid-19 crisis, the conference had to be postponed to January 2021. Isabelle Ferreras’ main publications include: Firms as Political Entities. Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism (2017. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/NYC) ; Gouverner le capitalisme ? Pour le bicamérisme économique (2012, Presses universitaires de France, Paris); Critique politique du travail. Travailler à l’heure de la société des services (2007, Les Presses de Sciences Po, Paris).
Roberto Gargarella is a lawyer and sociologist from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA 1983-5); Doctor in Law (UBA, 1991). Master in Law (University of Chicago, 1992); Doctor in law (University of Chicago, 1993). Post-doctoral studies at Balliol College, Oxford (1995). Senior researcher at CONICET. He received a John Simon Guggenheim grant (1999) and also a Harry Frank Guggenheim grant (2002). He published numerous books and articles, including, “Razones para el socialismo,” with F. Ovejero (Paidós, 2000); “Courts and Power in Latin America and Africa,” with S. Gloppen et al. (Palgrave, 2009); “The Legal Foundations of Inequality” (Cambridge U.P., 2010), “Latin American Constitutionalism” (Oxford U.P., 2013); “The Latin American Casebook. Courts Constitutions and Rights,” with J. G. Bertomeu (Routledge 2016); “Constituent Assemblies”, with J. Elster et al (Cambridge U.P. 2018); and “La derrota del derecho en América Latina. Siete Tesis” (Siglo XXI, 2020).
Suresh Naidu is Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has a B.Math in Pure Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, a MA in economics from the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008-2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. He has interests in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. He is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-director of the Columbia Center on Political Economy.
Joshua Cohen is a political philosopher. He has written on issues of democratic theory, freedom of expression, religious freedom, political equality, democracy and digital technology, good jobs, and global justice. His books include On Democracy (with Joel Rogers); Democracy and Associations (with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy; Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals; and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays. He is co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Philosophy. Cohen taught at MIT (1977-2005), Stanford (2005-2014), is currently on the faculty at Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Law, Philosophy, and Political Science at Berkeley. Cohen held the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professorship in 2002-3; was Tanner Lecturer at UC Berkeley in 2007; gave the Comte Lectures at LSE in 2012; and the Annual Lecture on Ethics and AI at Oxford in 2024. Since 1991, he has been an editor-in-chief of Boston Review.
Tom Malleson (they/them) is Associate Professor in the Social Justice and Peace Studies Department at King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, Canada (territory of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron). Following the wishes of Erik Olin Wright, they are the new Coordinator of the Real Utopias Project. Their recent books include After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2014), Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich (Oxford UP, 2023), Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford UP, 2023) co-authored with Jennifer Nedelsky, and Democratizing the Corporation: The Bicameral Firm and Beyond (Verso, 2024), co-edited with Isabelle Ferreras and Joel Rogers. They are also a longtime anti-authoritarian community activist and organizer, and co-founder of Showing Up for Racial Justice – Toronto. They are queer and non-binary.
As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, AJ Julius studied class structure and class politics with Erik Wright. In 2006 he completed a PhD in economics at the New School. He’s taught philosophy at UCLA since 2007. He’s written about several topics: the dynamics of competition, exploitation, accumulation, and technical progress; the natures of property, coercion, exchange, commodity production, and wage labor; rationality and freedom in a person’s action over time and in her interactions with other persons; self knowledge, self liberation, and mutual recognition in friendship, work, and struggle.
Roberto Veneziani is Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include topics of liberal principles of distributive justice, axiomatic exploitation theory, macrodynamic models of growth and distribution, egalitarian principles, distribution of resources between generations, sustainable development, and normative principles in economics. He is also interested in the history of economic thought and in political economy from a mathematical perspective. He has published articles in a number of outlets in economics (including the Journal of Economic Theory, the Economic Journal, Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the Journal of Mathematical Economics, Social Choice and Welfare, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics, political science (including the British Journal of Political Science, Political Studies, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics), and philosophy (including Analysis, Economics and Philosophy, the European Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences). He has refereed for more than sixty different journals in economics, political science and philosophy. He is a co-founder and co-organiser of the Analytical Political Economy Workshop (together with Leila Davis, Amitava K. Dutt, Peter H. Matthews, Simon Mohun, Gil Skillman and Peter Skott) which has met annually since 2007, and sits on the Editorial Board of Reviews of Economic Literature, the Review of Social Economy, and Studies in Microeconomics. He is a member of the September Group.
Joel Rogers is the Noam Chomsky Professor of Law, Public Affairs, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directs the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice and the High Road Strategy Center, a think-and-do tank on high-road development that also operates the Mayors Innovation Project, State Smart Transportation Initiative (with Smart Growth America), Government Performance Action & Learning (GPAL), and ProGov21. Rogers has written widely on party politics, democratic theory, and cities and urban regions. Along with many scholarly and popular articles, his books include The Hidden Election, On Democracy, Right Turn, Metro Futures, Associations and Democracy, Works Councils, Working Capital, What Workers Want, Cites at Work, and American Society: How It Really Works. Joel is an active citizen as well as academic. He has worked with and advised many politicians and social movement leaders, and has initiated or helped lead several progressive NGOs (including the New Party (now the Working Families Party), EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network), WRTP (Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership), Apollo Alliance (now part of the Blue Green Alliance), Emerald Cities Collaborative, State Innovation Exchange, and EPIC-N (Educational Partnership for Innovation in Communities Network). He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 living Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.