Elizabeth S. Anderson

Elizabeth Secor Anderson (born December 5, 1959) is an American philosopher at the University of Michigan specializing in social and political philosophy, ethics, feminist philosophy, and political economy.

Early life Anderson was born December 5, 1959 to Evelyn Anderson (née Gordon), a freelance journalist, and Olof Anderson, an aeronautical engineer at United Technologies. Her mother was Jewish and her father was raised Swedish Lutheran. Anderson has one brother, Andrew Anderson. She was born premature and underweight, and she remained smaller than her peers throughout childhood. Anderson had a lisp as a child. In contrast, Anderson often felt awkward and anxious growing up. This discomfort in part led her to reading. “Books were secure—this was something I could master and control," she said of her childhood. Anderson became interested in philosophy in high school after her father introduced her to On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and Plato's Republic, but she anticipated studying math and economics. She began her undergraduate studies as a "really confirmed capitalist libertarian." She was primarily interested in economics but found that it was "making all kinds of assumptions with moral content, but which it wasn't really able to justify or understand," leading her to study philosophy instead.

In 1979, while on summer break from Swarthmore, Anderson worked as a bookkeeper at a bank in Harvard Square (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Her experiences working at the bank led her to reflect on inequality, freedom, and the nature of work—all of which later became subjects of her academic writing.

In 1987, Anderson completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard University. From 2005 to 2013, she was the John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies. In 2011, Anderson helped found and served as the director of the University of Michigan's Philosophy, Politics, and Economics undergraduate program. In 2013, she was elevated to the University of Michigan's highest professorship and selected John Dewey as her chair, making her the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies.

Anderson is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and holds numerous honorary academic positions. In 2013, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2019, a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, to the British Academy in 2020, and the American Philosophical Society in 2021. Anderson was named a Progress Medal Laureate in February 2018 by the Society for Progress for her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). Anderson was also among the unranked portion outside the top ten in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era. In 2025, she was an H.L.A. Hart Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Philosophical work Anderson's research covers topics in social philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, including: democratic theory, equality in political philosophy and American law, racial integration, the ethical limits of markets, theories of value and rational choice (alternatives to consequentialism and economic theories of rational choice), the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science.

Anderson's most cited work is her article in Ethics journal, titled "What is the Point of Equality?" Within the article, she harshly criticises luck egalitarianism: a contemporaneously popular view espoused by writers such as Ronald Dworkin. She advocates for a more relational understanding of equality founded upon democratic principles. was winner of the American Philosophical Association's 2011 Joseph B. Gittler Award, for "an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences." She is also author of Value in Ethics and Economics, and dozens of articles.

Work ethic In a variety of lectures and publications, Anderson has explored the work ethic in terms of its origins and continued influence on culture. Much of her work focuses on American culture and history, but is broadly influenced by, and applicable to European countries which prominently feature shareholder capitalism. Anderson reiterates Max Weber (in his 1905 "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism") who points to the Protestants, most prominently Richard Baxter, as being the originators of the work ethic. Calvinists believed that to enter heaven and become a saint, one must have faith. Baxter argued that there is no way to know by simple self reflection whether one has faith or not. Instead, one must look to action, specifically a person's work ethic. Laziness and sloth were seen as evidence of declining faith. In his The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), Baxter set out the core tenets of the Protestant work ethic. Many formative puritan thinkers, such as Robert Sanderson, saw workers as doing their duty to God and promoted distinctly pro-worker values.