Search
Search results
Sandel Michael J. 2007. The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Cambrige: Harvard University Press.Abstract
Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?
The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.
In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.
“In the future, genetic manipulation of embryos is expected to have the potential to go beyond the treatment of diseases to improvements: children who are taller, more athletic, and have higher IQs… In The Case against Perfection, Michael Sandel argues that the unease many people feel about such manipulations have a basis in reason… This beautifully crafted little book…quickly and clearly lays out the key issues at stake.”—Gregory M. Lamb, The Christian Science Monitor
“Sandel worries that more genetic choice will undermine our appreciation of the gifted character of human life—our sense that the way we are is not solely the product of our own doing…. Many of us feel uneasy about such a future, without being quite able to say why. Michael Sandel’s graceful and intelligent new book, The Case against Perfection, is an extended effort to diagnose that unease.”—Carl Elliott, The New England Journal of Medicine
“The Case against Perfection by Michael Sandel is a brief, concise, and dazzling argument by one of America’s foremost moral and political thinkers that brings you up to speed on the core ethical issues informing current debates about genetic engineering and stem cell research.”—Gabriel Gbadamosi, BBC Radio
“Given the vast gulf between progressive and conservative thinking, the time is ripe for a philosopher to take on the issues of biotechnology. And in The Case against Perfection Harvard’s Michael Sandel does just that, attempting to develop a new position on biotechnology, one that, like Sandel himself, is not easily identified as either left or right. A former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Sandel is uniquely well suited for this task, and to challenge the left to get its bearings on the brave new biology… Sandel poses an important challenge to contemporary progressives who have failed to grasp the importance of the emerging biopolitics.”—Jonathan Moreno, Democracy
“Just what exactly is wrong with an athlete tweaking his genes to perform better, if all the other athletes are doing it? And why shouldn't parents with the means to do so shape the genes of their future children? Many of us find these ideas disturbing, but it's difficult to articulate why. In The Case Against Perfection, political philosopher Michael Sandel, presents a moral explanation for this unease…. He makes the compelling case that genetic engineering to gain advantage for ourselves and our children is deeply disempowering, because it turns us away from the communal good, toward self-centered striving.”—Anne Harding, The Lancet
A “marvelous little book about the moral issues raised by genetic engineering and other forms of biotechnology…. The care with which Sandel examines arguments for and against various forms of biotechnology makes this an excellent primer on how to formulate and assess moral arguments…. The greatest strength of this book is Sandel’s understanding of how the Promethean aspiration to mastery erodes a sense of what he calls the ‘giftedness of life,’ and how the eclipse of this sense diminishes our humanity.” –Paul Lauritzen, Commonweal
“Sandel’s arguments ultimately speak to our gut-level qualms about enhancement; and his aim in fact is to give these qualms a coherent moral basis… His book in the end is more a lyrical plea for reverence and humility than a lawyer’s watertight ‘case against.’ …The ethicist Michael Sandel wants us…to think about where, in a hyper-competitive world, re-engineering our natures will ultimately lead.”—Michele Pridmore-Brown, The Times Literary Supplement
“Michael Sandel‘s dive into the sea of genetic engineering provides a great tasty gulp of contemporary ethical controversy. Quickly read, The Case Against Perfection is nonetheless dense with challenging quandaries, loaded with moral puzzles and filled with facts. An inveterate highlighter, I underlined half the book.”—John F. Kavanaugh, America
“Anyone who thinks our culture is too competitive and consumer-driven should find that Sandel’s diagnosis resonates. He provides not only a warning about the shape of the future, but equally an indictment of—or at least a call to examine—our individual moral lives and our contemporary social values. Those who support the practice of genetic enhancement argue that the technology is not substantially different from other forms of ‘enhancement’ we use to improve our lives and the lives of our children. Sandel agrees, but he does not base his argument on any particular distinction about the means of enhancement; rather he is deeply concerned about the underlying impetus of mastery and dominion.”—Debra Greenfield, Bioethics Forum
“For many years I have been ambivalent about reproductive innovations, from surrogate gestation to preimplantation screening for gender selection. After reading Sandel’s exceedingly elegant little book, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, I could finally put satisfactory names to core values implicit in my hesitation: acceptance and solidarity. I encountered Sandel’s book as a participant in the intellectual discourse about parenting. But the book’s greatest value to me was its validation of the commitments of solidarity expressed in my volunteer work on behalf of poor mothers and of acceptance implicit in my determination to mother a child with catastrophic mental illness.”—Anita L. Allen, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“In this short and provocative treatise, Sandel, who is professor of government at Harvard and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, takes on the question of why certain kinds of newly available genetic technologies make us uneasy…[his] book reminds us that the proper starting point for bioethics is not, ‘what should we do?’ but rather, ‘what kind of society do we want?’ And ‘what kind of people are we?’”—Faith McLellan, The Scientist
“In a highly readable, wise and little book titled The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael Sandel argues that parents’ quest to create the ideal child reflects a drive for mastery and domination over life.”—Douglas Todd, The Vancouver Sun
“An illuminating ethical analysis of stem-cell research concludes this stellar work of public philosophy.”—Ray Olson, Booklist
“Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion. We emerge from this book feeling edified and inspired.”—Jerome Groopman, Harvard Medical School, author of How Doctors Think
“We live in a world, says Michael Sandel, where ‘science moves faster than moral understanding.’ But thanks to Sandel, moral understanding is catching up. Cloning, stem cell research, performance-enhancing drugs, pills that make you stronger or taller: if some scientific development bothers you, but you can’t explain why, Michael Sandel will help you to figure out why you’re troubled. And then he’ll tell you whether you should be.”—Michael Kinsley
“Michael Sandel has engaged in a bioethical debate that has produced similar front lines in Germany and in the USA…. [He] is after a philosophically illuminating explanation of the injunction not to convert all that is technically do-able into marketable technologies…. [His] eloquently presented…opinion on the question of the desirability and permissibility of eugenic changes in the human organism rests on a well thought-out neo-Aristotelian position. This argumentative background gives the book a philosophical interest quite independent of the for-and-against of particular political decisions…. His analysis draws on the idea that eugenic practices undermine a ‘sense of giftedness’ that is indispensable for a civilized common life.” –Jürgen Habermas, preface to the German edition
Videos
Photos
Justice Course Videos
Michael Sandel Photos
Justice
Books
Sandel Michael J. 2012. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Abstract
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?
In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
“In a culture mesmerized by the market, Sandel’s is the indispensable voice of reason…. What Money Can’t Buy…must surely be one of the most important exercises in public philosophy in many years.”
--John Gray, New Statesman
Sandel, “the most famous teacher of philosophy in the world, [has] shown that it is possible to take philosophy into the public square without insulting the public’s intelligence…. [He] is trying to force open a space for a discourse on civic virtue that he believes has been abandoned by both left and right.”
--Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic
“Brilliant, easily readable, beautifully delivered and often funny,…an indispensable book on the relationship between morality and economics.”
--David Aaronovitch, The Times (London)
“Sandel is probably the world’s most relevant living philosopher.”
--Michael Fitzgerald, Newsweek
“Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy is a great book and I recommend every economist to read it…. The book is brimming with interesting examples that make you think. I read this book cover to cover in less than 48 hours. And I have written more marginal notes than for any book I have read in a long time.”
--Timothy Besley, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics, Journal of Economics Literature
What Money Can’t Buy is that rare thing: a work of philosophy addressed to non-philosophers that is neither superficial nor condescending. Its prose is clear and elegant. Its message is simple and direct. Yet the questions it raises are deep ones…. What Money Can’t Buy is, among other things, a narrative of changing social mores in the style of Montesquieu or Tocqueville.”
--Chris Edward Skidelsky, Philosophy
Sandel “is such a gentle critic that he merely asks us to open our eyes…. Yet What Money Can’t Buy makes it clear that market morality is an exceptionally thin wedge…. Sandel is pointing out…[a] quite profound change in society.”
--Jonathan V. Last, The Wall Street Journal
“What Money Can’t Buy is the work of a truly public philosopher…. [It] recalls John Kenneth Galbraith’s influential 1958 book, The Affluent Society…. Galbraith lamented the impoverishment of the public square. Sandel worries about its abandonment—or, more precisely, its desertion by the more fortunate and capable among us…. [A]n engaging, compelling read, consistently unsettling,…it reminds us how easy it is to slip into a purely material calculus about the meaning of life and the means we adopt in pursuit of happiness.”
--David M. Kennedy, Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Sandel “is currently the most effective communicator of ideas in English.”
--Editorial, The Guardian
“[An] important book…. Michael Sandel is just the right person to get to the bottom of the tangle of moral damage that is being done by markets to our values.”
--Jeremy Waldron, The New York Review of Books
“Michael Sandel is probably the most popular political philosopher of his generation…. The attention Sandel enjoys is more akin to a stadium-filling self-help guru than a philosopher. But rather than instructing his audiences to maximize earning power or balance their chakras, he challenges them to address fundamental questions about how society is organized…. His new book [What Money Can’t Buy] offers an eloquent argument for morality in public life.”
--Andrew Anthony, The Observer (London)
“What Money Can’t Buy is replete with examples of what money can, in fact, buy…. Sandel has a genius for showing why such changes are deeply important.”
--Martin Sandbu, Financial Times
Michael Sandel is “one of the leading political thinkers of our time…. Sandel’s new book is What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, and I recommend it highly. It’s a powerful indictment of the market society we have become, where virtually everything has a price.”
--Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
“To understand the importance of [Sandel’s] purpose, you first have to grasp the full extent of the triumph achieved by market thinking in economics, and the extent to which that thinking has spread to other domains. This school sees economics as a discipline that has nothing to do with morality, and is instead the study of incentives, considered in an ethical vacuum. Sandel's book is, in its calm way, an all-out assault on that idea…. Let's hope that What Money Can't Buy, by being so patient and so accumulative in its argument and its examples, marks a permanent shift in these debates.”
--John Lancaster, The Guardian
“Sandel is among the leading public intellectuals of the age. He writes clearly and concisely in prose that neither oversimplifies nor obfuscates…. Sandel asks the crucial question of our time: ‘Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?’”
--Douglas Bell, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“[D]eeply provocative and intellectually suggestive…. What Sandel does…is to prod us into asking whether we have any reason for drawing a line between what is and what isn’t exchangeable, what can’t be reduced to commodity terms…. [A] wake-up call to recognize our desperate need to rediscover some intelligible way of talking about humanity.”
--Rowan Williams, Prospect
“There is no more fundamental question we face than how to best preserve the common good and build strong communities that benefit everyone. Sandel's book is an excellent starting place for that dialogue.”
--Kevin J. Hamilton, The Seattle Times
“Poring through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel's new book. . . I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, 'I had no idea.' I had no idea that in the year 2000, 'a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space.’. . . I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now 'even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event.'. . . I had no idea that in 2001 an elementary school in New Jersey became America's first public school 'to sell naming rights to a corporate sponsor.' Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices.”
—Thomas Friedman, New York Times
“An exquisitely reasoned, skillfully written treatise on big issues of everyday life.”
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In his new book, Michael Sandel —the closest the world of political philosophy comes to a celebrity — argues that we now live in a society where ‘almost everything can be bought and sold.’ As markets have infiltrated more parts of life, Sandel believes we have shifted from a market economy to ‘a market society,’ turning the world — and most of us in it — into commodities. And when Sandel proselytizes, the world listens…. Sandel’s ideas could hardly be more timely.
-- Rosamund Urwin, Evening Standard (London)
“What Money Can’t Buy is an excellent book…. Drawing upon a vast amount of fascinating empirical examples…Sandel explains why markets and market reasoning should not govern the distribution and allocation of all our social goods. He invites us to a renewed discussion of market principles in the public sphere…. The book is a clear, sharp and timely attack on the cult of the market which has been spreading since the 1970s.
--Christian Olaf Christiansen and Patrick J. L. Cockburn, European Journal of Social Theory
“The renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel asks what has become a pressing question for our age: Is there anything money can’t buy? .... Sandel’s central worry is that commodification is corrupting. There are certain goods, such as education, nature, health and sex, and certain approaches to life…that instantiate values and norms that are fundamentally incompatible with those that we associate with markets. When markets interfere with these goods and approaches to life they ‘crowd out’ the appropriate values and norms and thereby corrupt and diminish their value…. Sandel has made a useful and I think lasting contribution.”
--Prince Saprai, International Journal of Law in Context
Sandel Michael J. 1996. Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Belknap Press; English Language edition.Abstract
“Michael Sandel… has written an important book about the meaning of liberty. Sandel argues that over the last century, Americans have abandoned an earlier communitarian view of liberty, rooted in participation in self-government, for a narrower, individualistic definition, based on the power of personal choice. That has led to the great paradox of American politics: Just as Americans have become freer in the conduct of their personal lives, they have become more constrained in their public lives. The strength of Sandel’s book is his account of how this definition of liberty has changed over the last 200 years. He argues persuasively that the new definition reinforces undesirable trends in court decisions and public policy… Sandel argues brilliantly that the change in this definition of liberty took place after the Civil War and was based primarily on economic change… His analysis is superb… By revealing the shallowness of liberal and conservative views of democracy, [this book] inspires us to reevaluate what American politics is really about.”—John B. Judis, Washington Post Book World
“Among liberalism’s critics, few have been more influential or insightful than Michael Sandel, a proponent of what has come to be called the ‘communitarian’ alternative...In Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel… offer[s] a full historical account of the evolution of liberalism in the United States… This carefully argued, consistently thought-provoking book is grounded in a sophisticated understanding of past and present political debates. Democracy’s Discontent is well worth reading as we near yet another presidential election in which soundbites and poll-generated slogans substitute for reasoned debate about the nation’s future.”—Eric Foner, The Nation
“In times of trouble men and women ransack their past and their traditions. In Democracy’s Discontent… Michael Sandel… has raided that great American attic and returned with a bold narrative of the ancestors and the civic tradition they bequeathed… Sandel gives us one of the most powerful works of public philosophy to appear in recent years… [and] weaves a seamless web between the American present and the American past… [A] brilliant diagnosis.”—Fouad Ajami, U.S. News & World Report
“A profound contribution to our understanding of the present discontents.”—Paul A. Rahe, Wall Street Journal
“The publication of Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent is a long-awaited and important event in political and constitutional theory. In 1982, through his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Sandel emerged as a leading communitarian or civic republican critic of liberalism…. What is distinctive about his new book is its application of the critique to an analysis of the competing liberal and republican strands of the American political and constitutional tradition.” – James E. Fleming & Linda C. McClain, Texas Law Review
“Democracy’s Discontent is a wonderful example of immanent social criticism, which is to say, of social criticism as it ought to be written. It criticizes a certain tendency in American life, and at the same time claims to find in that same American life a different possibility, a better expression of our political culture…. Sandel gives us a double narrative, part constitutional, part socio-economic, with a single message: that a certain kind of procedural liberalism has supplanted a more substantive republicanism, with effects that we ought to regret, and that it is still possible to turn back, to recapture important elements of republican America.”
-- Michael Walzer, in Debating Democracy’s Discontent (edited by Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr.)
“Sandel is a republican thinker in the classic sense, which means that he is just as much concerned with civic virtue as he is with liberty. Like Thomas Jefferson, he understands the fate of the two to be intertwined. Liberty, understood as the effective control of one’s destiny, is something that can only be realized through the exercise of self-government.” – R. Bruce Douglas, Commonweal
“American political discourse has become thin gruel because of a deliberate deflation of American ideals. So says Michael Sandel in a wonderful new book, Democracy’s Discontent… Sandel’s book will help produce what he desires—a quickened sense of the moral consequences of political practices and economic arrangements...Sandel is right to regret the missing moral dimension of public discourse. Or he was until recently. Suddenly politics has reacquired a decidedly Sandelean dimension. Political debate is reconnecting with the concerns Sandel so lucidly examines… Statecraft is again soulcraft, and the citizens who will participate best, and with most zest, will be the fortunate readers of Sandel’s splendid expansion of our rich political tradition.”—George F. Will, Newsweek
“It is the great achievement of Democracy’s Discontent to weave around… lofty abstractions a detailed, coherent and marvelously illuminating narrative of American political and legal history. Recounting the debates over ratifying the Constitution, chartering a national bank, abolishing slavery, the spread of wage labor, Progressive Era reforms and the New Deal, Sandel skillfully highlights the presence (and, increasingly, absence) of republican ideology, the shift from a ’political economy of citizenship’ to a political economy of growth.”—George Scialabba, Boston Globe
“A provocative new book… Democracy’s Discontent argues that modern democracies will not be able to sustain themselves unless they can find ways of contending with the global economy, while also giving expression to their people’s distinctive identities.”—Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
“A rich and beautifully written account of American jurisprudence and political history, one which… is always informative and thought-provoking.”—Michael Rosen, Times Literary Supplement
“On ’public philosophy’ of the most philosophical kind I recommend Michael J. Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent… Sandel is delightfully non- or bipartisan in his probes, chastenings and recommendations. Among those asking for a civil civic voice and a re-engagement with the grand themes of citizenship and the common life, he is a leader.”—Martin E. Marty, Christian Century
“This thoughtful book offers a mirror which reflects the complex organization of our political souls… Sandel assiduously draws upon the republican vision to recover forgotten dimensions of American history. He shows the importance of that tradition to the founding of America and, at least until very recently, to constitutional law.… These pages, full of reflective argument and vivid examples, will repay attention by anyone seeking to come to terms with the contemporary state of American politics.”—William Connolly, Raritan
“[Through] detailed historical analysis and eloquent prose, Sandel tells the story of the republican tradition in the United States that demonstrates the central importance character formation and civic virtue once had in American government.”—James F. Louckes III, Canadian Review of American Studies
“Democracy’s Discontent… is a good guide to the awkward questions we need to ask as we lurch into the next century, as unsure as ever about how to make the democracy of the twenty-first century a shade less disconnected—or at least less pointlessly disconnected—than today’s… Indeed, this may well be one of those particularly valuable books that do more good to their skeptical readers than to their fans. The… former will have to think quite hard.”—Alan Ryan, Dissent
“Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent is by far the most ambitious recent attempt to make the civic republican tradition relevant to current dilemmas. It is entirely appropriate, then, that it has elicited…responses by many of the leading political and constitutional theorists of our time.” – Ronald S. Beiner, in Debating Democracy’s Discontent (edited by Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr.)
“Democracy’s Discontent valuably traces the historical origins and development of what Sandel names the ’procedural republic’, the political model within which the unencumbered self reigns supreme… The strengths of [the book] lie in Sandel’s lucid exposition and analysis; more importantly, he is concerned with illuminating basic issues in political thought by actual historical examples and situations. In making full use of Supreme Court decisions, Sandel is acknowledging that much of the most vital American political thought is to be found in constitutional debates rather than academic treatises.”—Richard H. King, Political Studies
“Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent is an inspired and deeply disturbing polemic about citizenship… The last two-thirds of [the book]… explore with great historical acumen just how [liberalism and republicanism] have become manifest in the real world of labour, class and capitalist development. Sandel earns his theory by this history…. Michael Sandel’s is the most compelling…account I have read of how citizens might draw on the energies of everyday life and the ties of civil society to reinvigorate the public realm.”—Richard Sennett, Times Literary Supplement
“A bold and compelling critique of American liberalism that challenges us to reassess some basic assumptions about our public life and its dilemmas. It is a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship, and it confirms Sandel’s reputation as one of America’s most important political theorists.”—Alan Brinkley, Columbia University
“An impressive work. It consolidates Sandel’s position as the leading American republican-communitarian critic of rights-based liberalism… A major figure in the world of political theory has written a major book.”—George Kateb, Princeton University
“Beautifully and mildly argued… Mr. Sandel conveys ideas with patient lucidity… The book’s strength is historical… Mr. Sandel’s philosophical take on history, however, does more than nudge us out of our contemporaneity. He shows, through close readings of Supreme Court decisions, how philosophical conceptions of the person changed—from a premise that an American will inherit a belief in God, for example, to one in which Americans are viewed as people whose religious faith is chosen like desserts at a restaurant… American history is, in Mr. Sandel’s telling, a story of the tragic loss of civic republicanism—the notion that liberty is not about freedom from government, but about the capacity for self-government, which alone makes the practice of freedom possible.”—Andrew Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
“Sandel’s latest contribution… is notable for its seriousness, its intelligence and its illuminating excursions into constitutional law… His brand of soulcraft is not about soul-engineering, but about protecting social environments that are conducive to the development of the habits and the virtues upon which all liberal welfare states finally depend.”—Mary Ann Glendon, New Republic
“Distinctive merits of Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent include its admirable combination of conceptual analysis and historical investigation, and the impression throughout of a genuinely thoughtful mind and generous spirit.”—Hilliard Aronovitch, Canadian Journal of Philosophy
“A wide-ranging critique of American liberalism that, unlike many other current books on the matter, seeks its restoration as a guiding political ethic… A book rich in ideas.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Out of step with many of his colleagues in the political science trade, Michael Sandel takes ideas and ideals seriously…. According to historians such as Louis Hartz, individualistic liberalism has long been the public philosophy of every major contender in the American political debate…. Contradicting this claim, other historians—notably Gordon Wood—find in American political thought since the founding a powerful communitarian current, which they call ‘republicanism.’ Where Sandel breaks new ground is in his claim that republicanism was in fact dominant throughout most of America’s history, and that only recently has it been superseded by individualistic liberalism.” – Samuel H. Beer, Wilson Quarterly
“Democracy’s Discontent is clear, readable, and important…. The meticulous historico-philosophical analysis of key Supreme Court decisions, showing the historical transition from the republicanism of the past to the liberalism of today, is ingenious and enlightening.” – Joseph Tusa, Cross Currents
“Sandel here examines virtually the entire sweep of American history, searching assiduously for the wrong choices and missed opportunities that have led us into our present discontent. The result is a work of impressive scope and ambition, and one which has already won praise from readers across the political spectrum.” – Wilfred McClay, Commentary
“In Democracy’s Discontent, Michael Sandel, the most widely cited political theorist of his generation, portrays contemporary Americans as discontented…. He traces [the discontent] to two concerns: a sense of ‘loss of self-government’ and a sense of ‘the erosion of community’…. The questions that motivate Sandel’s book and his answers to them are tremendously important.” – Rogers M. Smith, Critical Review