0 Against analogy: why analogical arguments in support of workplace democracy must necessarily fail Roberto Frega (Forthcoming in Democratic Theory) Abstract This article asks whether the analogy between state and firm is a promising strategy for promoting workplace democracy and provides a negative answer, explaining why analogical arguments are not a good strategy for justifying workplace democracy. The article contends that the state-firm analogy is misguided for at least three reasons: (1) it is structurally inconclusive, (2) it is based on a category mistake, and (3) it leads us away from the central question we should ask, which is: What would concretely imply, and what is required, in order to democratize the workplace? I begin by offering an interpretation of the most promising case (Robert Dahl’s) for the state-firm analogy which shows that use of the analogical argument in his justification of workplace democracy engenders excessive and unnecessary theoretical costs which bear negatively on his conclusion. I then proceed to examine more recent contributions to the debate and show that supporters and critics of the state-firm analogy alike do not advance our understanding of the analogical argument. In the last part of the article I provide a general theoretical explanation of why arguments based on the state-firm analogy are not good candidates for defending workplace democracy. I claim, in particular, that the institutional asymmetry that exists between the state and the firm makes the analogical strategy unsuited to the task. The negative strategy undertaken in the article is meant to open the way for more promising approaches to the justification workplace democracy. Keywords: workplace democracy, analogy, parallel argument, Robert Dahl, social interactionism, pragmatism 1 Introduction The “liberal pax” of the last three decades of the 20th century was based on the assumption that the political and the socio-economic spheres could, and indeed had to be, ruled by different types of social norms. Democracy as a norm was considered appropriate for the political sphere, whereas the market was considered the appropriate steering mechanism for the economy. This compromise has come to a sudden halt with the 2008 financial crisis which, among other things, has shown that a new normative framework is needed to rethink the basis on which a just society could and should be built. Within this context, and under the pressure of increasingly endangered and degraded working conditions for so many employees throughout the world, political philosophers are paying greater attention to the normative question of how social and economic institutions that lie outside the domain of formal politics should be organized 1 . Searching for a new political theory of the economy 2 , 1 Among the most recent publications, see for example Anderson (2017); Thomas (2016); Malleson (2014).