In 1996, the philosopher Michael Sandel observed a significant feature of American public life. Americans, he noted, tended to consider political philosophy a discipline with only a tenuous connection to the real world. In the preface to his book Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, published that year, he wrote of the common notion that “Principles are one thing, politics another,” that “philosophy may indulge our moral aspirations, but politics deals in recalcitrant facts.”
This separation of principles and politics, he argued, was in fact an illusion, since “our practices and institutions” cannot help but embody values.
Political institutions are not simply instruments that implement ideas independently conceived; they are themselves embodiments of ideas. For all we may resist such ultimate questions as the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, what we cannot escape is that we live some answer to these questions—we live some theory—all the time.
The aim of his book was to articulate “the theory implicit in our public life” with a view to “diagnose our political condition.” This undertaking, he proposed, might “reveal that the predicament of American democracy resides not only in the gap between our ideals and institutions, but also within the ideals themselves, and within the self-image our public life reflects.”
By the 1990s, the prevailing public philosophy was a form of liberalism that originated with John Locke and was developed further in the writings of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and, most recently, John Rawls. Sandel calls this line of thought “procedural liberalism”—not to be confused with “egalitarian liberalism,” which focuses on expanding equality of various kinds among the citizenry. Procedural liberalism places “the right” over “the good.” What does that mean? Since every person nurtures his or her own personal conception of the good life, the state should remain neutral with regard to the moral and religious convictions of its citizens. Any other approach would be coercive, and a violation of people’s rights to freedom of thought and expression.
Sandel, by contrast, is committed to civic republicanism, a creed extending all the way back to Aristotle, who taught that the higher purpose of a political order (the baser one being self-serving commerce) involved the search for the good life. This search is necessarily a collective endeavor; that is a principal reason, Aristotle thought, that individuals congregate together in a polis in the first place. As Sandel points out, “this idea is not by itself inconsistent with liberal freedom. Participating in politics can be one among the ways in which people choose to pursue their ends.” But, in republican theory, Sandel explains, liberty is defined not in terms of individual freedom and happiness but as sharing in the process of self-government with your fellow citizens and “helping to shape the destiny of the political community.” Such a process would be incompatible with procedural liberalism’s goal of keeping discussions of important issues outside the range of formal politics.