Michael Sandel: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Michael J. Sandel was born on March 5, 1953, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was educated at Brandeis and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he joined the faculty of Harvard in 1980, where he has remained ever since. His course "Justice" became the first Harvard course made freely available online, and its videos have been watched by tens of millions of people — making Sandel the most famous public philosopher of his generation. His major works are Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), his critique of Rawls; Democracy's Discontent (1996); Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009); and What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012). He is the leading representative of the communitarian and civic-republican critique of the liberal individualism that has dominated modern political philosophy.

Historical Context

Sandel's philosophy belongs to the communitarian reaction against the liberalism of John Rawls. Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) had grounded justice in the choice of the principles behind the veil of ignorance — the choice of the unencumbered self, stripped of its attachments. Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) made the objection that would define his career: the self of the liberal theory is too thin — the person is not a bare chooser but a being constituted by its commitments, its community, and its history, and the justice that abstracts from the attachments misses the moral substance of the person. The objection grounds the positive program: the justice of the common good, the ethics of the citizen, and the revival of the civic tradition that the Enlightenment's individualism had displaced.

Core Ideas

Justice as the Common Good

Sandel's most famous book, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009), presents the three great theories of justice — the utilitarian, the libertarian, and the civic-republican — and argues for the third. The justice of the common good asks not only what rights we have but what kind of society we want to be: the good life, the shared values, the common purpose. The account recovers the tradition of Aristotle — justice as the distribution according to the good of the community — and it criticizes the liberal neutrality that refuses to judge the conceptions of the good.

The Critique of the Market

What Money Can't Buy (2012) applies the critique to the market society: the expansion of the market into every domain — the paid queue-cutters, the sold naming rights, the priced friendships — corrupts the goods it touches. Sandel's argument is not that the markets are always wrong but that they change the character of what they price: the money changes the meaning, and the goods that should not be for sale — the civic honors, the human organs, the intimacy — are corrupted by the sale. The critique is the ethics of the common good applied to the economy.

The Public Philosophy

Sandel's larger project is the revival of the public philosophy: the recovery of the civic language in which the political questions are discussed as questions of the common good, not merely as questions of the rights and the preferences. The public discourse of the modern democracies has been impoverished — the arguments about the economy, the family, and the community have been reduced to the language of the market and the rights — and the public philosophy restores the language in which the questions of the good life can be publicly discussed.

Philosophy

Sandel's philosophy is the ethics of the common good against the ethics of the contract. The person is not the unencumbered self of the liberal theory but the embedded self: constituted by the family, the community, the tradition, and the history. The justice is not the fairness of the neutral procedure but the good of the common life. The ethics is not the neutrality of the rights but the deliberation about the good: the public reason that discusses what kind of society we want to be. The philosophy is at once a critique and a recovery: the critique of the thin self and the market society, and the recovery of the civic tradition that the modern philosophy had displaced.

Major Works

Sandel's major works are Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), the founding text of the communitarian critique; Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996); Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005); Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009); and What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012).

Famous Quotes

Sandel's most quoted lines are from his account of justice: "Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things." His account of the person: "The self is not a bare chooser but a being constituted by its commitments — the family, the community, the tradition that make it who it is." And his critique of the market: "The market is a way of organizing life, and the question is not only whether the markets are efficient but whether they corrupt the goods they touch."

Related Thinkers

Sandel's philosophy engages John Rawls at every point — his first book is the critique of Rawls's theory of justice — and it recovers the ethics of Aristotle, the civic republicanism of Rousseau and Hegel, and the community of MacIntyre. His critique of the market connects to the philosophy of the common good in the whole civic tradition.

Sources

• Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
• Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
• Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.