Michael Sandel's America

...Sandel sees the welfare state and a renewal of public spiritedness as mutually reinforcing: Only a heightened sense of civic solidarity will sustain our willingness to pay higher taxes to underwrite civic equality, which is in turn a condition of true communal self-government...

...While communitarians like Sandel lean leftward, they differ from earlier leftists in stressing political concerns rather than economic and social ones...

...He devotes only 10 pages to solutions...

...Sandel sees clearly that America faces a moral crisis...

...The "interventionist" branch of procedural liberalism believes that, to empower the individual, the role of government must be expanded...

...Whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian or Jacksonian, Whig or Republican, they all recognized that citizenship mattered, and that in every realm of public concern the only good policy was a republican policy...

...Politically, however, it has sparked anything but a resurgence of republicanism...

...Sandel's proposals have already been tried, and could doubtless be tried harder, but if the earth were to open to swallow every Wal-Mart, whom would that benefit except K-Mart...

...As Woodrow Wilson once put it, "our Constitution has thrown [the individual] upon his own resources, as if it honored him enough to release him from leading strings and trust him to seek his own rights...

...Here, the politics of membership prevails over the politics of individualism...

...Not until we are again willing to take responsibility for ourselves as individuals will we be fit to assume responsibility as a community...

...The result, he says, has been the steady erosion of citizenship as an object of public policy due to the influence of an ideology he calls "procedural liberalism...

...Clifford Orwin is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton University Press...

...Its premise is that "no man must look to have the government take care of him, but that every man must take care of himself...

...Dwelling on judicial decisions and on the formation of economic and regulatory policies, he shows how, from the Progressive era onward, private welfare has steadily usurped citizenship as the object of public action...

...no such thing as reason simply, only black, white, or female reason...

...On matters ranging from religious liberty and freedom of speech to privacy rights and family law, he shows that many of our reigning public dogmas flout not only common sense but the conditions of healthy republicanism...

...For lately this liberalism has wreaked a great deal of mischief precisely by deferring to "community...

...By demanding competitive prices the public also supports free trade, downsizing, and ever greater economies of scale...

...These are not the only difficulties with the book...

...Consumers have made it clear they would rather pay $8.49 to Ace Hardware than $300 for the same wrench at whatever family-owned store the Pentagon shops at...

...Such a system, Wilson continued, "elicits intelligence and creates independence of spirit...

...Sandel does us a favor by reminding us that America was originally republican as well as liberal, so let us repay him by reminding him that it has always been liberal as well as republican...

...Consider the policies that go by the names of affirmative action and multiculturalism...

...Sandel's critique of the "abstract individual" is not the jeremiad of a voice crying in the desert but the conventional wisdom...

...So yes, Americans have always aspired to constitute a community, but a community of free, self-reliant individuals...

...John Rawls and Lyndon Johnson, on the one hand, and Milton Friedman and Barry Gold-water, on the other, have agreed in limiting the task of government to securing and enhancing the right of the individual to pursue his "values"-whatever these "values" might be...

...And so, deprived of a meaningful public life and thrown back on our individuality, we are to congratulate ourselves that the state keeps out of our bedrooms and that some anonymous agency out there protects our interests as consumers...

...Sandel paints his historical account in broad strokes, but it does provide an effective backdrop for his critique of current tendencies...

...Sandel's "encumbered self" is not actually an American ideal but an import, straight out of Martin Heidegger...

...But early in our century, he says, America's opinion leaders began singing in a different choir-with private life increasingly taking precedence over public virtue, and individualism over communitarianism...

...But this is to put the cart before the horse...

...Nor, as Sandel implies, does this relativism lead only to an excess of individualism...

...By bracketing moral judgments, celebrating self-sufficiency, and loosening the relation between the self and its roles, the law is not neutral among competing visions of married life, but recasts the institution of marriage in the image of the unencumbered self...

...Like many social critics, Sandel is more persuasive in describing problems than in solving them...

...This seems doubtful, given his emphatic support for greater income redistribution, which he considers necessary "less for the sake of distributive justice than for the sake of...

...Procedural liberalism, then, typecasts us as "unencumbered selves," free agents for whom freedom of agency is the ultimate publicly recognizable good...

...They eschew cosmopolitanism and extol "participation" and seek to empower local communities at the expense of big business and big government both...

...In its assault on the notion of a common human reason, it encourages an intransigent assertion of communal rights...

...Rechristen welfare as "civic identity payments" and you still won't find the underclass so dumb as to believe that they're standing on their own two feet...

...While cherishing their country, their families, their churches, their associations of every sort, they are not submerged in them or defined by them...

...rather our moral principles must furnish the basis of our community...

...It is on the premise that we are defined by our communities that loyalty to our communities overrides any broader patriotism...

...The "libertarian" branch believes government must be reduced to achieve the same end...

...American leaders in earlier times recognized that public policy should seek to foster the virtues required for republican self-government...

...It is on that premise that there is no such thing as science or history simply, only black, white, or female science and history...

...these include community development corporations, sprawlbusting (opposition to the proliferation of Wal-Marts and their ilk), a new urbanism, and community organizing...

...Sandel brilliantly expounds the bankruptcy of this new "procedural republic...

...These enshrine Sandel's premise that we are not primarily individuals but members of communities-and that we are to be publicly catalogued and treated as such...

...forming the civic identity of rich and poor alike...

...It is not, however, merely state action or inaction derived from this relativism but the doctrine of relativism itself that has subverted our communal institutions...

...Sandel has it right the first time, when he recommends community development as the proper approach to the problems of the poor-an approach incompatible with their continued reliance on a dole from above...

...Books Michael Sandel's America By Clifford Orwin Michael J. Sandel tackles the widely shared dissatisfaction with contemporary America from a "communitarian" perspective in his newly published Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 417 pages, $24.95...

...The response to Sandel's powerful call for the revival of American republicanism at its best is that such a revival depends on a renewal of American individualism at its best...

...Communities"-the African American, the gay and lesbian, the Hispanic, etc., etc.-are all the rage among liberals today...

...He trusts too much in the power of rhetoric...

...It has encouraged not renewed autonomy (individual or communal) but "victimology" and the culture of complaint...

...Sandel seems to suggest that the "value" of community itself can help to resolve our present crisis...

...Rather it has helped judges and bureaucracies break new ground in encroaching on civil society as well as on the political process...

...However hard Sandel squeezes the republican tradition, he'll find no encouragement to expect civic virtue from the economically dependent...

...Here as elsewhere Sandel's remedies resemble whistling in the dark, brave and earnest but not likely efficacious...

...He demonstrates that professed judicial "neutrality" among human "values" has proved anything but neutral in practice, as in this description of contemporary divorce law: "By making of dependence a dangerous thing," he writes, this law "burdens the practice of marriage as a community in the constitutive sense...

...It is hard, however, to reconcile this call for more redistribution with the idea that we need to be more self-governing...

...Even if you call it "republicanism," community cannot serve as a moral principle...

...This form of communitarianism has proved every bit as corrosive of the bond of common citizenship as the individualism Sandel dislikes...

...On the level of national politics, Sandel agrees with many conservatives in favoring a "New Federalism...

...Because he does not acknowledge that our republicanism was from its genesis in the Declaration of Independence an individualist republicanism, he does not explore the crucial question of the proper interaction of the two components...

...But is he willing to pay the price, namely less fiscal dependence on the federal government...

...But procedural liberalism has no public goal beyond the maximization of private opportunity...

...There was, Sandel says, a national consensus in favor of republican self-government in days gone by...

...Sandel's analysis of "procedural liberalism," while forceful, is also curiously one-sided...

...In his critique of the "procedural republic" he even hints at the root of that crisis: the relativism that reduces human life to the strife of arbitrary values, with the state playing neutral arbiter...

...But it is hard to imagine that such measures will change the way many of us live now: overworked, overstressed, economically pressed, without deep roots in the places where we live or the leisure and energy for local citizenship...