A surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America’s franchise economy means for its workers.

Walk into a McDonald’s anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald’s in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an “independent” franchisee. While McDonald’s presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under its control and the workers preparing its product to its standards. How then does McDonald’s—and its big business peers—manage to be two things at once?

In this revelatory work, economist Brian Callaci shows how franchisors have altered the legal treatment of corporations in their favor through a decades-long crusade of lobbying and litigation. Their efforts subsequently unleashed a slew of legal and economic sins upon the US economy and labor force, allowing multinational corporations to control continent-spanning empires while outsourcing employment and scapegoating legal responsibilities onto small businesses. The result: the unfettered growth of some of America’s most recognizable businesses, at the aggregate expense of America’s workers.

Remarkable in both its scale and synthesis, Callaci’s story is the first chronicle of this business movement—initially resisted by US courts before experiencing a dramatic reversal of fortune after decades of campaigning by some of America’s most established entrepreneurs. An urgent and erudite history, Chains of Command reveals how the US labor market was tamed one small business at a time.

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world.

Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others.

Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential episodes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these episodes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.