Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent

...The latter will find their communitarian prejudices gently flattered, but the former will have to think quite hard...

...The failure of republicanism in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 owed much to the fact that republicanism seemed to demand far too much sacrifice of economic interest, and to threaten far too much intrusion into people's private existences...

...Sandel's histories of constitutional and economic transformation are slanted toward two ends...

...They would surely have said they wanted both citizen virtue and an emphasis on the self-chosen life—Mill was certainly a good deal more emphatic about the latter than Tocqueville, but neither of them was inclined to throw out the liberal baby in order to play around in the republican bathwater...

...There are constraints, of course, but the only ones intrinsic to the marketplace are those that ensure that buyers and sellers are for the appropriate purpose willing...

...Send in the postcard and stop depending on your friends, your dentist, or your local bookstore...

...A society with a robust conception of a common good cannot regard choice as a value...

...On the one hand, he wants to depict the constitutional order as having increasingly set us adrift to work out our own spiritual, emotional, familial, and sexual salvations according to ideas of our own devising...

...what makes us the individuals we are, rather than biologically distinct but otherwise undifferentiated entities, is the fact that we are socially situated...

...This hardly lessens the need for a public philosophy, because the negotiation of moral and intellectual pluralism is a complicated business—and it needs an intelligence that is philosophical in a wide sense, even if it is a sense entirely independent of metaphysical assumptions...

...What we lack is any sense that we can make collective decisions and then carry them out effectively...

...I do not see how an answer to the methodological question can prescribe the answer to the political argument...

...For it won't yield him what he wants...

...We do not have a serious public debate about the meaning of procreation, childbirth, the proper roles of men and women in the business of bringing the next generation into the world...

...WINTER • 1997 • 123 Books ask...

...It does not take a great deal of hard work to find illustrations of this theme, but it must be said that Professor Sandel has put in a lot of work to find some thoroughly depressing examples of cabinet officers, senior administrators, and judges leaning over backward so far to avoid "judgmental" responses that they all but suggest that cannibalism, infanticide, and necrophilia are lifestyle choices that it would be wrong to judge too harshly...

...We are not, that is, on the edge of a fascist takeover or in danger of plunging into civil war...

...If not, why not subscribe now...

...and it is indifferent as to how goods are produced...

...It serves only to bring willing buyers and sellers together, and they may sell their labor, their ambitions, and anything else for which there is a demand...

...what we suffer is discontent...

...The end result is the same...

...we live in a world where the only absolute value is choice...

...We cannot kidnap the doctor to get his services for nothing...

...Indeed, it won't yield what this book is after, namely, a new public philosophy...

...it was therefore necessary for political leaders to know how to crush private interests or to work with them for the sake of promoting whatever project they had in mind...

...Hegel knew better than his most famous disciple, and offered only to show us how we could accept the inevitable tensions between our lives at home and our lives at work, our aspirations for ourselves and our aspirations for our children, our country, or our profession...

...A society of mutually concerned, unaggressive communitarians like Michael Sandel would be a wholly satisfactory place to live for a great many people...

...As Marx observed, liberty, equality, and Bentham reign...

...The history ofAmerican constitutional practice and the history of American economic life are thus called in to illuminate a story of decline and fall...

...What we have is two slogans—right-tolife versus right-to-choose...

...We value religious liberty, not because we take religion seriously but because we do not...

...What we need is not methodological moralizing but a sophisticated grasp of when rather arms-length and utilitarian considerations are appropriate, when deeper and less instrumental considerations are appropriate, how to inculcate enough citizen virtue to keep the republic in good heart, and so on...

...If what is wanted is a new public philosophy, it will have to share one thing with this book, but will have to do the job properly...

...Indeed, this may well be one of those particularly valuable books that do more good to their skeptical readers than to their fans...

...Their whole lives were a testimony to the power of choice...

...The procedural republic, as its name suggests, is a set of legal, political, and economic arrangements that allow people to do whatever they choose, within the limits set by the procedures we have in place for reconciling my doing what I want with your doing what you want...

...Indeed, at a still higher level of abstraction, I'd rather Sandel was peddling his gloomy communitarian wares than have a cheerfully insensitive individualism win for lack of any understanding of the costs of individualism...

...For the marketplace is indifferent to what anyone wants...

...What he seems reluctant to recognize is that it is just because Americans are situated in the kind.of culture they are, and have had the sort of political history they have had, that "choice" is such a central element in American public discourse...

...But this confuses two kinds of argument...

...Whether the cure for such an impoverished public discourse is the politics of the virtuous republic is another question entirely, but one might readily concede that a society that cannot talk seriously about its beliefs about mortality and the ties between one generation and the next is short of a public philosophy...

...On the face of it, Sandel is surely right that there is something very odd about a society that discusses its view of life and death in such truncated terms...

...It was the great virtue of Charles Taylor's little book The Politics of Authenticity to see that the demand to live a life that is really our own is not inevitably and always a sign of alienation but is more often a response to the moral demands of the modern world...

...There are some extrinsic constraints, too...

...On the other, he wants to argue that whereas once governments thought that work and virtue went hand in hand, and controlled economic development for the sake of citizen virtue, now they care only to give the consumer a good time...

...Al of which raises an interesting question...

...Few classical republics would have thought they could carry on without a hereditary ruling elite, but the United States was from the beginning committed to trying the experiment...

...The insight of writers such as Hegel, Carlyle, Marx, and other earlynineteenthcentury students of the disasters of the French Revolution, was that this was not possible...

...Even Thomas Hobbes, urging us to consider men as if "new sprung out of the ground like mushrooms" did so only as a methodological device...

...I suspect that value pluralism is the order of the day...

...For Sandel has chosen his title quite neatly...

...It is the sense of living in a society that cares nothing for the quality of life and nothing for the quality of the individuals who make up that society that distresses them...

...we cannot force the local shop to accept the currency we have just created on the kitchen table by pointing a gun at the shopkeeper's head...

...Libertarians, to be sure, think that this is what the government does when it declares its currency to be the only legal tender within the territory it controls, but that is another matter...

...This claim, which is obviously true, has seemed to many critics, and certainly seems to me, to be much too slight to build anything very interesting on...

...In that sense, I am entirely on Sandel's side as to the need to raise the level of argument in law, politics, economics, and in the classroom and the bedroom, too...

...The United States as a political undertaking could live with this form of low-level dissatisfaction for decades or even centuries...

...Or perhaps not quite fall...

...But the real history of the United States, like that of any country, is much more quirky than that, and the country's possibilities for good or evil are much more complicated than a straight choice between virtue and selfishness...

...We cannot sell any service we are not anyway allowed to perform—no matter what the price you offer me, I cannot hire myself out as a hitman...

...By the same token, even if only about 15 percent of the population is first- or second-generation immigrant, most Americans are descended from people who came to these shores in the past 120 years...

...Nobody would or could experience life behind "the veil of ignorance" that Rawls invited us to imagine in order to answer the familiar question of what rules we would consent to live under if we knew nothing about whether we would win or lose from their implementation...

...It would be particularly wicked therefore not to begin by praising some of its many virtues...

...The obvious riposte to this, that the repressive features of real classical republics—Athens, Sparta, the Roman Republic of Cato the Elder, or the Geneva that threw Rousseau's works on the bonfire— are not essentially connected with the republican ideal of a politics of the common good, leaves anyone who makes it vulnerable to another complaint...

...Even the most enthusiastic sociobiologist, who would wish to say that much of what we can learn in such a process is constrained by our innate enWINTER • 1997 • 121 Books dowment, would have to agree that the form our beliefs and aspirations take is to be explained by our upbringing...

...That is, his concern with the metaphysical issue—are we socially situated individuals or are we free-floating monads—means that the history he tells is excessively slanted...

...Michael Sandel's point is that this is the model to which politics increasingly approximates...

...Once we would have thought that the role of religion is to discipline the will and determine our choices, to provide us with fixed and stable allegiances, a known and predictable character...

...Of course, all societies need a large element of public spirit and a willingness to pursue the public good even at some cost to its citizens' own interests, but in the modern world, it is impossible to ask even for this much public spirit except on terms that respect the private pursuit of happiness, private conscience, the sheer diversity of tastes and interests that modern prosperity has brought into existence...

...At a time when many critics of liberalism paint liberals as fools or knaves, Sandel writes with perfect courtesy—and is all the more persuasive in consequence...

...Sandel writes from the perspective of a "republican" alternative to the liberalism of the procedural republic...

...the pursuit of happiness, conceived as doing as much as possible WINTER • 1997 • 119 Books of what we want, doesn't work...

...This is, after all, a country that not only refused to have a hereditary monarch as its head of state, but insisted on having no hereditary aristocracy either...

...Old-fashioned republicanism lost out to liberalism for very good reasons—it was repressive, anti-individualist, backwardlooking, religiously exclusive, and offered nothing to women...

...The debate over abortion shows much the same features...

...Now, on Sandel's view of it, we have swallowed the idea that religious allegiances are a matter of free expression...

...An obvious objection to the entire enterprise of the book is that the merits of this alternative are taken for granted, and its costs—general moral repressiveness, the imposition of religious orthodoxy in the name of civic cohesion, the blurring of the line between private and public life, the monopolizing of public space by men and the relegation of women to domestic and other forms of supporting roles—are never squarely confronted...

...There is an obvious affinity between a society in which the economy is largely left to run itself according to the dictates of the market and a politics of a largely procedural sort...

...The effect is particularly marked in the sphere of religion...

...Are we going to pin our faith on freedom construed as collective self-government, follow Aristotle in insisting that "the polis exists prior to the individual," and try to win the battle that the Country party lost in the eighteenth century, or are we going to struggle on with the program of Mill's essay On Liberty...

...It would not be in any serious sense illiberal, though it would be nonliberal in setting so little value on autonomy, and any passing Nietzscheans would surely think that its moral vision emphasized dependency in a mildly disgusting fashion...

...That is, its focus is on our present discontents, but it sets them in an account of the constitutional and economic history of the United States, and it draws its philosophical and political morals from that history...

...The real 120 • DISSENT Books republican tradition, as represented by tough customers like Machiavelli, had no doubt that private interest was often and perhaps generally opposed to the pursuit of the public interest...

...The theme of the book is simply that a society that is governed by a robust conception of a common good is happier than one that is not...

...I would not wish to live there myself...

...Sandel raises many good questions about the price we have paid for this emancipation, and he raises them in just the right tone of voice to still the doubts of those who think that talk of community leads inevitably to talk of Blut and Boden, and that a desire to restore small-town America is a desire to make the world safe for Babbittry...

...The other is political: are we to side with what Benjamin Constant described as the liberty of the ancients or the liberty of the moderns...

...People didn't want to stay on the farm once they had seen Paree, and the price of trying to keep them there was much too high for a society like ours to pay...

...For all the interest of the history that Sandel tells, the way he tackles the task seems to me to miss the target...

...Here as everywhere else, the consumer is king, and substantive conceptions of what forms of religious practice are and are not acceptable have vanished...

...Granted, they often made their choices under pretty rough conditions, but their great-grandchildren can hardly be blamed for thinking that knowing what you want and then setting out to get it is a central element in the good life...

...we cannot buy sexual services from any willing seller, and we cannot sell sexual services to any willing buyer...

...Sandel's insistence that we are "situated" is no argument against such a strategy...

...I do not think schizophrenia looms if we have different moral standards for work and the family, for sexual relations and commercial ones...

...It would have disappointed the expectation of its founders, and indeed of most of its citizens, but it would not necessarily be a violent, oppressive, or otherwise disgusting place to live in...

...At a time when the discussion of politics is either focused on the partisan debates of this week and next or else vitiated by an Olympian detachment from the politics of any particular time and place, Democracy's Discontent is pitched at just the right level...

...The effect of persuading late-eighteenthcentury Frenchmen to think that they might recreate the virtuous republican citizen praised by the ancient world's propagandists was to give power to persons such as Saint-Just and Robespierre...

...No doubt the exaggerations of such ideals cause discontent, but the exaggerations of the ideal of community have caused a great deal worse than that...

...Has Sandel laid out the question properly...

...To have one of those, we need something quite other than a commitment to the methodological allegiances of Hegel, Marx, John Dewey, and Charles Taylor—all of whom were (or are) enthusiastic "situationists," but whose politics are of many different kinds, and in two cases recognizably liberal kinds at that...

...To this overemphasis on "choice," Sandel opposes the thought that individuals are "situated" creatures, which is to say that they are social beings, and indeed social creations...

...It was just because we are in fact so thoroughly encumbered with our histories that he wanted, for analytical and theoretical purposes, to get behind the facts by wiping clean in the imagination a human nature that nobody could wipe clean in fact...

...The contrast that this implies is with a republic that has a robust conception of a common good, whose procedures are not judged by their success in reconciling each person's pursuit of their own ends with everyone else's pursuit of their ends, but by their success in promoting the common good...

...For whatever else one might want to say about Democracy's Discontent, it 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 discontented— or at least less pointlessly discontented—than today's...

...This is that they want to have their cake and eat it too...

...But in a modern society there is almost no suggestion that only certain sorts of people may engage in certain sorts of occupation or sell certain sorts of good...

...The book is built around a rather simple thought: we live in what Professor Sandel calls "the procedural republic...

...Nor would those resolutely historical-minded liberals Mill and Tocqueville accept the choice offered by Sandel...

...and I do not think social breakdown looms if different settings demand very different loyalties and responses...

...the mere fact that something is the result of a person's voluntary choice leaves it wide open as to whether they chose wisely or foolishly, and whether they advanced the general well-being in making the choice they made...

...This in essence was the response that John Rawls made to the attack on his "deontological" or Kantian liberalism leveled by Sandel in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice...

...Marx offered to square the circle but only on the far side of the communist revolution, when it would become possible to abolish the distinction between public and private, individual and collectivity...

...It will have to speak to the particular, peculiar history and culture of the United States in a historically informed fashion...

...Who, we may ask, has ever denied that human beings grow up in some sort of social setting and acquire the beliefs and aspirations they do in the process of socialization...

...He writes as though the argument lies between liberals who believe that individuals are in some deep fashion unattached to their surroundings and republicans who believe the reverse...

...For there is only one meaning it can bear: the loss of republican virtue and the rise of an unhealthy detachedness...

...If liberalism had to deny such banalities, who could be a liberal...

...Most of Sandel's readers are in no danger of suffering economic want and in little danger of encountering the sort of physical violence that fills the evening news on television...

...But that is because I doubt whether there is only one truth about our kind of society, and whether most of us either can or need to live by only one creed...

...I began by observing that Sandel builds his case around a simple dichotomy between the procedural republic of liberal political aspiration and the republic whose legitimacy rests on the pursuit of a common good...

...The requirement that we should try to live authentically is a moral requirement, and if it appears often in a corrupted or exaggerated form 122 • DISSENT Books as a demand for mere "choice," that does not impugn the underlying ideal...

...If the historical examples Michael Sandel relies on are slanted rather too heavily toward his own concerns, they raise questions other than those he tackles—questions that a moderately perceptive reader will surely want to Is this your own copy of DISSENT...

...Most forms of communitarianism lost out for similar reasons...

...The first is methodological: what is the most illuminating way of approaching social and political theory...

...Indeed, to press this point a little further, it is an oddity not only of this book but of all Sandel's work that he returns so obsessively to the methodological issue...

...It is neither a party-political manifesto nor an exercise in arid conceptual analysis, but an exercise in social and political criticism aimed squarely at late twentieth-century citizens of the United States...