Review of a Book I have not Read: Christopher McMahon's Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management

By John-Michael Kuczynski

This is not a conventional book review. I have not read Christopher McMahon's Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management (Oxford University Press, 2021). But I have read the abstract. And that’s enough to know what’s going on.

Here is the abstract:

Should the democratic exercise of authority that we take for granted in the realm of government be extended to the managerial sphere? Exploring this question, Christopher McMahon develops a theory of government and management as two components of an integrated system of social authority that is essentially political in nature. He then considers where in this structure democratic decision making is appropriate. McMahon examines the main varieties of authority: the authority of experts, authority grounded in a promise to obey, and authority justified as facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation. He also discusses the phenomenon of managerial authority, the authority that guides nongovernmental organization, and argues that managerial authority is best regarded not as the authority of a principal over an agent, but rather as authority that facilitates mutually beneficial cooperation among employees with different moral aims. Viewed in this way, there is a presumption that managerial authority should be democratically exercised by employees.

The Old Proceduralist Move

McMahon’s abstract makes what is by now a familiar move: take the formal logic of democracy and apply it to another domain—in this case, the workplace.

The logic is:

• Democracy is fair in government.

• Management is a form of governance.

• Therefore, management should be democratic.

It sounds reasonable. It even sounds moral. But it hides a crucial flaw—the same flaw that plagues all forms of proceduralist moral theory: it equates procedural fairness with moral legitimacy, while quietly evacuating the question of substance.

Governance Is Not Morality

In proceduralist thinking, legitimacy comes not from the content of decisions, but from the fairness of the process.

That’s the move Rawls made in political theory: design a fair procedure, and whatever it produces is presumed just.

McMahon extends this move to management: design a fair process of cooperation among employees with different moral aims, and whatever it produces is presumed legitimate.

But that ignores the basic fact that the workplace is not a morally neutral zone.

• It is governed by capital, not consensus.

• It is structured by ownership, not shared deliberation.

• And the "cooperation" that takes place is often asymmetrical and enforced.

Calling managerial authority "democratic" just because it facilitates cooperation is like calling a corporate compliance training session a Socratic dialogue.

It’s not.

Cooperation Is Not Justice

There’s another deeper assumption here: that if a structure facilitates mutually beneficial cooperation, then it deserves to be called morally legitimate—even democratic.

But this is a functional criterion, not a moral one.

• Mafias cooperate.

• Cartels cooperate.

• Colonizers and their local proxies cooperated.

That does not make the authority that coordinates them morally good. It makes it operationally effective.

So McMahon’s argument, as far as the abstract shows, is just another attempt to pull moral weight out of processual lightness. It smuggles legitimacy into systems that are structurally unequal by calling their mechanisms "cooperative" and therefore implicitly just.

But there is no account of what is actually being cooperated toward. No account of what counts as substantive good. Only aesthetic neutrality.

The Rhetorical Sleight-of-Hand

The idea that employees should exercise managerial authority democratically is a nice idea, in theory.

But in practice:

• Most workers have no meaningful control over managerial decision-making.

• The most important workplace decisions are made at levels far above employee deliberation.

• And when "input" is gathered, it is almost always filtered, sterilized, and folded into decisions already made.

So what does it mean to say that managerial authority should be democratic?

In most real cases, it means nothing.

It is rhetorical cover for a system that retains its old structure while speaking the language of fairness.

Final Thought

Again, I have not read the full book. Maybe McMahon addresses these objections. Maybe he doesn’t.

But the abstract already gives away the game: it is an attempt to apply the moral prestige of democracy to the managerial sphere, using the same empty logic that Rawlsian proceduralism applied to politics.

It is an effort to derive substantive moral legitimacy from structural neutrality.

But neutrality is not virtue.

And cooperation, no matter how smoothly it runs, does not tell us whether a system is just.

It only tells us that it’s running.

And sometimes, that’s the problem.