Liberalism and Limited Justice

Description: Sandel talks about the impact of his first book.

Question: What are you best known for?

Transcript: Well my first book was “Liberalism and the Limited Justice”. And it was an attempt to respond to the philosophical account . . . the great philosophical account of liberalism that had been provided by John Rawls – a former colleague here at Harvard – probably the greatest political philosopher of the 20th Century, certainly in the Anglo-American world. And his book came out in 1971, which was four years before I went off to England to graduate school. And it was the most important, and the most impressive philosophical account of the moral basis of American liberalism. And in many ways I found it very compelling and inspiring. But my first book was actually a critique of John Rawls’ version of liberalism. And the main argument was that contemporary liberalism didn’t take adequate account of the role of moral and spiritual questions in political life, and conceived the individual to narrowly as not sufficiently bound up with claims of community, and history, and tradition. So that was my first book, and that . . . some people, they liked to describe my position as communitarian which, in some ways, I can understand, but I’m not completely comfortable with. And so the liberal _________ debate flourished in . . . sort of in political philosophy during the 1980s. And so I think I was first identified with that debate.

Question: What are you working on now?

Transcript: Well since “Liberalism and the Limited Justice”, I wrote a book on the American political and constitutional tradition of democracy’s discontent. And that was . . . tried to . . . that was an attempt to go all the way back to the origins of the American republic to see what became of stronger civic or republican – and I mean small “r” – republican notions of citizenship. The idea that we’re not fully free, except in so far as we participate effectively as citizens in a shared public life, and in a common public venture . . . a politics of the common good. That was the political tradition I wanted to try to recover. And in order to try to recover it for our time, I found myself having to look back and see when were those understandings – strong understandings of civic life and of civic obligation – most prominent in the American experience. And how do they become a _________ out in the years . . . really in the decades since the New Deal . . . the New Deal to the present? So that was one project.

My most recent projects are two. One of them is on ethics and biotechnology, and the whole question of genetic engineering and the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. That’s one project, and it came to fruition in a short book that just came out called “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering”. And then I have a new project that I’m hoping to turn to next on the moral limits of markets. There’s some things that money shouldn’t buy.

Recorded on: 6/12/07