Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
By Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press
417 pp.; $24.95

Worry over the state of the American soul is as old as Massachusetts Bay Colony. Are we, as Judge Robert Bork has it, Slouching Towards Gomorrah? Maybe, maybe not--but we can reliably place Bork's book and others like it in a long tradition, what Sacvan Bercovitch has called "the American Jeremiad." We hear such public outcries whenever America seems to be failing its promise as "a city set on a hill."

In their earliest form, among the Puritans, such jeremiads were expressed in theological terms. Over time, however, as America developed into a pluralistic culture, philosophy replaced theology as the authoritative lingua franca wherein America's ills were to be diagnosed and prescriptions proffered. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a distinctive genre, public philosophy, emerged as an effort to address the ills besetting the modern America polity. A direct line of descent can be drawn from John Dewey to Walter Lippman to Robert Bellah and Bill Bennett.

Anxiety and public philosophy go hand in hand. Whenever the national mood grows tense, we should expect to see the public philosopher arise, ready to offer his cure. Indeed, as we lurch toward the century's end, the field is crowded with contenders, among whom Michael Sandel is one of the most worthy of our attention. His book Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy is one part litany of woe, one part naming of evil, but also with a promised deliverance at hand.

Taking Sandel seriously

This past spring the Atlantic Monthly ran an excerpt from Democracy's Discontent as a cover story. The editors chose wisely. Sandel is no stranger to the central networks of intellectual and political discourse of our day. Professor of government at Harvard University (where he has taught since 1980), a distinguished scholar, a popular lecturer, an articulate speaker who appears regularly on public television and radio, Sandel knows and is known in the public places where the informed and sophisticated voice is heard. At a recent national conference for political scientists, a plenary session on this book's thesis was attended by hundreds of fellow academics, with the single respondent being America's best-known philosopher, Richard Rorty.

In the academic world, Sandel is best known as the philosopher who launched the most cogent critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, that epic work of liberal theory that defined a generation's justification for the welfare state. Sandel is credited with pinpointing the key chink in liberalism's armor, hastening the overthrow of the kind of liberal philosophy developed by Rawls, Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin (and a host of lesser champions), which holds that the modern liberal state must remain neutral on the issues pertaining to the Good Life. Given his accomplishments, when Sandel speaks, many listen.

The philosopher's discontent

Sandel's is a big book, a full 350 pages of carefully written prose followed by an additional 50 pages of notes. Aficionados of American history, politics, and constitutional law will find here a rich banquet of favorites as well as some interesting tidbits that may have previously eluded their cognizance.

The book is divided into two unequal sections. The first four chapters (about a third of the text) survey the constitutional basis for our current political regime. In a discussion deeply steeped in the interpretive work of the Supreme Court, Sandel argues that this judicial body has been central to the creation of "the procedural republic," a term that for him signals the practical thrust of a deleterious contemporary public philosophy. Public philosophy he defines as "the political theory implicit in our practice, the assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life." It is thus not surprising that the Court, the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, has such a central place in his account.

In the next five chapters (the remaining two-thirds of the text), Sandel shifts his focus from the Constitution to political economy. Here his concern is to point out how the shift from the rural, local economy of the young American nation to that of our present-day postindustrial, global corporate structure has sapped the vitality and resources of democratic self-government.

Taken together the two parts of the book set out his case for why "the public philosophy of contemporary liberalism fails to answer democracy's discontent." Throughout, Sandel's assumption is clear: Since public philosophy has in some way damaged the American soul, it also can (and should) be part of the cure.

The philosopher's tale

Sandel tells a story that at one level resembles the conservative critique of liberalism. In his account, the birth of America witnessed the momentary cohabitation of what would ultimately emerge as rival traditions: liberalism, with its notion of liberty defined in terms of the individual's rights over and against the institutions of popular government; and republicanism, with its notion of liberty as a consequence of self-government, or the condition of being an active part of the decision-making structure of one's community. Liberalism possesses a juridical conception of the citizen, republicanism a political conception. The former concerns the self, the latter the citizen.

Like contemporary conservatives, Sandel reads American history in some ways as tragedy: "The loss of self-government and the erosion of community . . . together define the anxiety of the age." This condition has come to pass not due to any absence of public philosophy, but rather because the wrong form of public philosophy has gained historical ascendancy: "broadly speaking, republicanism predominated earlier in American history; liberalism later."

The particular cast of our contemporary public philosophy "is a recent arrival, a development of the last forty or fifty years." This version of liberalism he calls the "procedural republic." Readers familiar with Sandel will recognize this term from his earlier Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), wherein he critiqued Rawls's account of liberal justice. There, Sandel mounted a powerful philosophic argument, demonstrating how liberalism as articulated by Rawls possesses only a thin theory of the human self, one that does not sufficiently recognize the thickness of human personality and self-understandings. (Rawls has subsequently shifted his argument to include elements of this critique. But, for Sandel, he has not moved far enough.) In Democracy's Discontent, Sandel demonstrates historically how a complex, pluralistic human community under the thralldom of liberal proceduralism begins to unravel. Proceduralism cannot by itself secure public justice. And worse. As the possibility of public justice has become despaired of, additional social and political pathologies have been released, deepening the sense of anxiety.

When future historians chronicle the demise of liberalism, Sandel's critique will figure in the narrative. However, despite his analytical acuity, Sandel's historiography is somewhat suspect. For in discussing liberalism and republicanism as formative traditions upon the development of the American personality, he pointedly ignores another tradition that has been powerfully recovered in the recent work of American historians, that is, the tradition of Protestant Christianity. One wonders at such a glaring omission by such a thoughtful scholar.

But Sandel is not the kind of conservative that he may at first glance appear to be. Where contemporary conservatives delight in tweaking liberal constitutionalism, they are usually tone-deaf to the other side of Sandel's civic concern, what he calls "the political economy of citizenship." Sandel traces historically how from a nation of craftsmen and artisans schooled in the practices of local self-government we have become a mass society of passive consumers more concerned with our private lives and pleasures than the common good. (For a historian's tracing of this same story, see Robert Wiebe's Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy.)

The result: today, our economic debates have shifted from a concern about how "public policy should cultivate the qualities of character self-government requires" (the Jeffersonian notion that certain forms of economic work should be privileged for the direct contribution they make to good citizenship) to our contemporary preoccupation with "prosperity and fairness" (the modern debate between conservatives and liberals as to who should get how much of the national product and why). As Sandel notes, "So familiar are the terms of our economic debates--about prosperity and fairness, employment and inflation, taxes and spending, budget deficits and interest rates--that they seem natural, even timeless. If economic policy is not about the size and distribution of national wealth, what else could it be about?"

But his survey of these debates over economic policy reveals a startling shift: from the beginning of American history up through the age of the Progressive reformers, political economy was chiefly a debate about citizenship, and how and which policy would best serve the needs of democratic citizenship. So, for example, as late as the great presidential contest of 1912 between Woodrow ("New Freedom") Wilson and Theodore ("New Nationalism") Roosevelt, one thing was held in common: the candidates

agreed despite their differences that economic and political institutions should be assessed for their tendency to promote or erode the moral qualities self-government requires. Like Jefferson before them, they worried about the sort of citizens the economic arrangements of their day were likely to produce. They argued, in different ways, for a political economy of citizenship.

Sandel identifies the Keynesian revolution in fiscal policy that surfaced in the 1930s as signaling the disengagement of political economy from its traditional concern for citizenship. Keynesianism soon attained hegemonic control over public debate. Whether Republican or Democratic, liberal or conservative, in the half-century following the New Deal, the economic policy of all administrations was tilted toward the stimulation of consumption over production, deficit spending, and the consequent rejection of the republican concern with forming particular habits and virtues of citizenship. Once republican yeoman farmers have now become liberal couch potatoes. "The Keynesian revolution can thus be seen as the counterpart in political economy of the liberalism that emerged in constitutional law after World War II, as the economic expression of the procedural republic." Thus, by the 1930s the twin forces of proceduralist constitutional interpretation and Keynesian economic policy had laid the foundation for the dominant postwar philosophy of liberalism.

In reviewing the performance of recent administrations, Sandel records the baneful effect this liberal public philosophy has had upon the democratic faith of Americans. Citing "confidence gap" research and National Election Survey polling data, Sandel tells a grim tale indeed. One example: in 1964 more than three-quarters of Americans believed they could trust the government in Washington to do what is right most of the time, but by the 1990s this rate had dropped to 20 percent.

Not surprisingly, in reaction millions of American citizens have restlessly sought their salvation in sometimes exotic political figures who have felt their pain and promised them relief: a George Wallace in 1968 or a Ross Perot in 1992. But where most presidential candidates (and all the eventual electoral winners) were tied to the twin evils of the liberal public philosophy, the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan offered the first real prospect of a major party candidate who was "unbound by the strictures of the procedural republic, and [whose] rhetoric resonated with the ideals of self-government and community." Once in office, however, Reagan was ultimately unable to hold together the strands of libertarian and communal conservatism that informed his campaign rhetoric. Implacable foe of big government (and its threat to self-government) though he was, Reagan nevertheless was a champion of big business (and its threat to community).

At this point, Sandel invokes Christopher Lasch's assessment: "Reagan's rhetorical defense of 'family and neighborhood' could not be reconciled with his championship of unregulated business enterprise, which has replaced neighborhoods with shopping malls and superhighways." The most potent recent promise of republican renewal died aborning.

The philosopher's vision

After 300 pages detailing the failure of modern liberal theory and economic practice, Sandel concludes by setting out "in search of a public philosophy." The remedy for too much liberalism Sandel finds in the revitalization of a republicanism of civic virtue and local self-government. He is careful to note two common objections to this project of renewal: its practical possibility (or, is it too nostalgic?) and its political desirability (or, is it too oppressive?). Sandel understands that any claims for localism will be immediately countered by the liberal recitation of local intolerance, racism, and Jim Crow legislation.

Sandel's response to these familiar criticisms is to accept that both have been and are potential problems for republicanism. But, he insists, they can be avoided. These problems are not necessarily inherent in republicanism. But politics, whether liberal or republican, is still a risky business. And Sandel promises no safe formula. While republicanism rightly understood and practiced promises to answer "democracy's discontent" in a way that the reigning liberal public philosophy has failed to do, nevertheless it is still the case that

republican politics is risky politics, a politics without guarantees. And the risks it entails inhere in the formative project. To accord the political community a stake in the character of its citizens is to concede the possibility that bad communities may form bad characters. Dispersed power and multiple sites of civic formation may reduce these dangers but cannot remove them.

Sandel ends his book in upbeat fashion by pointing to those emerging trends in thought and practice that lend credence to his argument. Republicanism has never completely disappeared from American political life, and it is presently enjoying a kind of rebirth. Both the formative project of civic virtue and the political economy of citizenship have witnessed a renaissance in the past two decades. The former is characterized by the flourishing of virtue-talk at professional, popular, and policy levels, while the rise of community development corporations, antisprawl legislation, the new urbanism, and other manifestations of local community organization throughout the United States point to a rekindled understanding that it takes a community to raise a citizen. Statism, globalism, and one-worldism will always fuel the imaginations of modern liberals. But increasingly, Sandel claims, the emerging view is that "the more promising basis for a democratic politics that reaches beyond nation is a revitalized civic life in the more particular communities we inhabit."

Taking public philosophy (not so) seriously

Michael Sandel has written an impressive book, an important book. But I am haunted by the question of whether we really need a public philosophy. Certainly all sides in the public debate appear to be in agreement that such is the case and compete to make their preferred account the winner. The present situation of our society seems to cry out for that healing voice that would speak to us all, to bring us together and make us all get along.

However, I think public philosophy-talk should give us pause. A careful read of the modern text, an understanding of the way of life that has been developing in the West for the past three centuries, along with the justifications for this way of life, may in fact point to the conclusion that while public philosophy-talk reflects the crisis of the modern nation-state, it is not our crisis.

Indeed, we might ponder whether the Christian narrative has not been one of the main victims of public philosophy-talk. If so, the deterioration of the modern nation-state, the material ground for such talk, might be seen as an especially liberative moment for the church to recall and recover her primary loyalty and life. Modern Christians who speak of "public theology" too often are held captive by their theological constructs of natural law, common grace, sphere sovereignty, and the like. Consequently, their efforts wind up committed to ensuring that the modern project wheeze, gasp, and stumble along for a while longer.

Perhaps this is because most of modern Christian "public theology" is at its root more modern than Christian. By this I mean that too much of Christian thinking about political matters simply takes it for granted that political equals the issues confronting the nation-state, rather than the embodied life of the church. (This theme has long animated the work of Stanley Hauerwas, though he is certainly not alone in speaking of the "democratic policing of Christianity." The most powerful antidote for thinking about "public theology" in the modern way remains John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory.)

What if, rather than throwing our own life-support systems onto the withering trunk of modernity, we celebrated the present moment as a God-given opportunity to break the spell that modernity has had upon Christian imagination and practice? Modern public philosophy, even when sensitive to what Sandel repeatedly refers to in undefined terms as "morality and religion," can only speak of these matters functionally. Good Christians make good citizens. Christianity is to be tolerated, perhaps encouraged, but ultimately policed. To refer, as Sandel does, to mere "morality and religion" is but one indication of how the distinctiveness of the Christian narrative is undermined by the distorting rhetoric of public philosophy. With the advent of modernity, not only is the church publicly marginalized and silenced, but in its place is inserted the secular agenda of the liberal commercial republic that employs as its justificatory rhetoric the civil religion one sees so neatly laid out by Tocqueville. Public philosophy-talk (liberal or republican) ultimately is Tocquevillian insofar as it measures the advantage or liability of Christianity exclusively in terms of its impact on the success of American democratic institutions.

I will venture my own risky conclusion: While America needs a public philosophy for its project to succeed, the church does not. Now is not the time to wax nostalgic nor be anxious for the fate of America; rather, it is time to "lift our drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees, and make straight paths for our feet, so that the lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed" (Heb. 12:12-13). If you want a public philosophy, Sandel is about as good as it gets. But if you want a revolution, go to church.

-Ashley Woodiwiss is assistant professor of political science at Wheaton College.

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.