You’re well known for writing and lecturing about the ‘encumbered self’, as it were, and how our identities are profoundly formed by our attachments. So, the obvious place to start is to ask that question of you – in particular, your upbringing, the ideas passed to you by your parents: How, if you like, did your parents encumber you with an identity?
I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the upper Mid-West of the United States, which has a very strong civic tradition in its politics, and so I suppose that had some effect. I attended public [state] schools, and when I was young, after school I would attend Hebrew school, five days a week, until I was about 13 or so.
There was a very strong Jewish community [around me as I was growing up] and it wasn’t only defined as a synagogue community but as the broader Jewish community. So, I’m sure in some indirect ways of which I’m unaware there was some influence.
If Rawls and Kant shook you out of utilitarian presuppositions, whence came the growing disaffection with Rawls’ Theory of Justice? Because, moving on to the publication of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, obviously some time in the later Seventies you began to have problems with that. How did your mind change over that period?
Well, part of what I found exciting about Rawls and Kant was not only that they provided a devastating critique of utilitarianism but they, and in particular Rawls, gave eloquent expression to the version of liberalism that I as an American growing up during that period of time more or less subscribed to: the idea of certain fundamental rights, and of equality – that there’s no reason to assume that market outcomes yield a just distribution of income and wealth. These were the basic ideas that informed American political liberalism which I found, broadly speaking, attractive, and certainly the egalitarianism and the idealism of Rawls’ view I found powerful and compelling.
I found myself disagreeing along two dimensions, which were related: the aspiration to neutrality with respect to substantive moral views in politics I found tempting but unsatisfying; and then the idea of the freely-choosing individual self I saw the appeal of, but also questioned. Those aspects of Rawls’ theory pointed up what I came to think were limitations of liberalism as understood and practised in the United States.
As I read Hegel’s critique of Kant I found that it was actually very suggestive, for precisely these issues. Hegel criticised Kant’s conception of morality as being overly abstract and provided a historically situated conception of human agency, of the human subject; and I found this an exciting challenge to Kant and I saw parallel issues at stake in Rawls’ formulation – Rawls, after all, being partly influenced himself by Kant. I saw parallel questions to be raised about Rawls’ version of a Kantian ethic applied to political theory.
Then, the fact that I was studying Aristotle, who provides a very different conception from the modern Kantian/post-Kantian conception of politics, reinforced that line of thinking. So I wrote my dissertation on Rawls’ version of liberalism, and that dissertation became Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
Which was received how? Rawls was then (and to some extent remains) profoundly influential, mainstream and orthodox, and here is someone questioning some of the very foundations of Rawlsian liberalism. Was it taken to heart as a critique?
Well, by some more than others. It provoked a wide range of reactions, some in agreement, some in strong disagreement. At about the same time, a number of other philosophers were raising similar questions about Kantian and Rawlsian liberalism – Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue came out just before Liberalism and the Limits of Justice did, and Charles Taylor was continuing to write, not only about Hegel but also about the contemporary debates over liberalism and atomism. He and Ronald Dworkin taught at a graduate seminar that I attended on liberalism and atomism, debating just these kinds of issues, so that was part of the experience that shaped my thinking. Michael Walzer a year or two later wrote Spheres of Justice, which from a somewhat different angle raised similar questions about the unsituated self in relation to justice.
So, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice was one among a handful of works that came out in the early Eighties raising some similar and overlapping questions about liberal individualism. This generated what came to be called ‘the liberal-communitarian debate’. The term ‘communitarian’ didn’t quite capture the view that I took myself to be advancing, but it was plausible insofar as I was questioning the idea that we can think about justice and human agency without reference to the particular moral ties that constitute a common life. So, in that respect it’s a perfectly understandable term to have applied to that debate.
Could you say something about why you think that Anglo-American political philosophy, or public philosophy, has been so heavily influenced by the liberalism that we’ve been talking about? Why has Rawls been so profoundly influential?
I think, for two reasons. One of them is that we live in pluralist societies. People are increasingly aware of that fact, and in some respects many of our societies are becoming more intensely pluralistic and diverse, with a great many different conceptions of the good life and, in some cases, of faith. There’s very little agreement, or convergence, on moral and spiritual questions in modern democratic societies, so it’s tempting to seek principles of justice in a framework of rights that can be agreed to without having to argue about people’s particular moral or religious convictions.
It’s an appealing project because it would seem to provide a way of avoiding the contention and the disagreement and the conflict that can arise if people have to base the fundamental framework of their collective lives on one or another particular conception of the good life. It is tempting to seek some such principles, and I think that Rawls has articulated the strongest case for their existence. A Theory of Justice is a magnificent work of philosophy, and one of the finest statements of liberal political philosophy that we have in the English-speaking world, probably since John Stuart Mill. So, there are plenty of good reasons why it should have a wide influence.
I think another reason it has particular appeal in the US and in other market democracies is that the idea of basing justice and law on what individuals freely choose is an idea that’s inspiring in its own right but is also seemingly compatible with the premises of market societies. In many ways, Rawlsian liberalism tries to provide a more egalitarian alternative to laissez-faire, market-oriented versions of liberalism, and yet it’s an alternative that in some ways leaves in place many of the underlying premises of the original. It accepts the idea that justice requires respect for the free choices individuals make and it gives that underlying idea a more egalitarian interpretation by insisting that the free choices we make in markets take place against fair background conditions. But its starting-point is a certain idea of free individual choice that is compatible with many of the deep assumptions of market freedom. And so it seems to offer – and in many ways does offer – a case for a decent welfare state that is nonetheless broadly compatible with the assumptions of a market society.
( Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University)
Michael
Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at
Harvard University, - See more at:
http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2010/05/28/freedom-and-justice#sthash.ILVVjeXY.dpuf
Michael
Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at
Harvard University, - See more at:
http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2010/05/28/freedom-and-justice#sthash.ILVVjeXY.dpuf
- For full interview see at: http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2010/05/28/freedom-and-justice
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