Debating Democracy's Discontent: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy

by Anita L. Allen (Editor)

Here, a distinguished cast of some the world's finest political and legal theorists offer criticisms of Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent , a recent, popular, and influential call for a more moralistic democracy. In this collection, Sandel's liberal and feminist critics square off with his communitarian and civic republican sympathizers in a lively and wide-ranging discussion that spans constitutional law, culture, and political economy. Such practical, topical issues as immigration, gay marriage, federalism, adoption, abortion, corporate speech, militias, and economic disparity are debated alongside theories of civic virtue, citizenship, identity, and community. Not only does Debating Democracy's Discontent afford the most comprehensive and insightful critique to date of Sandel's volume, it also makes a significant, substantive contribution to contemporary political and legal philosophy in its own right. This book will prove essential to all who are interested in the future
of American politics, law, and public philosophy.

408 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1998

About the author

Anita L. Allen is an expert on privacy law, bioethics, and contemporary values, and is recognized for her scholarship about legal philosophy, women’s rights, and race relations. In 2010 she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Her books include Everyday Ethics: Opinion-Writing about the Things that Matter Most (2010); Unpopular Privacies (forthcoming Oxford); Privacy Law and Society (Thomson/West, 2007); The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape (Miramax/Hyperion, 2004); Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988). She co-edited (with Milton Regan) Debating Democracy’s Discontent (Oxford, 1998). Allen writes for popular magazines and blogs, and has frequently appeared on nationally broadcast television and radio programs.

Reviews

[Brett Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a compendium of 23 political philosophers responding to Michael J. Sandel’s 1998 bombshell, Democracy’s Discontent, including Richard Rorty, Bruce Frohnen, and Charles Taylor, with a final response from Sandel himself. All are trying to unravel what’s gone wrong with Western civilization and why Enlightenment liberalism appears to be failing—or not. While the dangers of postmodernism’s assault on the West is noted by a few, perhaps dismissing it like Marxism’s destiny to fail, these authors view the greatest danger as Enlightenment itself—that is, the human psyche’s response to its liberating ideas. As the old saying goes, “All great ideas commit suicide through excess.” There’s some tremendous history, psychology, and philosophy here. And, as is common with this subject, subtleties so intricate, speculative, and hard to pin down that one can come away with an answer to why the West ails as, “Nobody knows.” Despite findings of the Hubble and Webb, quantum mechanics, and the Large Hadron Collider, humans, it turns out, are the most peculiar thing in the cosmos. We still don’t understand ourselves. In October of 2022, Sandel penned a second try with Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times.

Proving this debate could have been published yesterday, University of Maryland’s (now Brooking’s Institute) William A. Galston elaborates our symptoms as economic anxiety, social disintegration, and political dysfunction. “Problems common to all Western democracies,” writes Galston, with “centrifugal tugs of identity groups… escalating mistrust of government and institutions, and weakness of voluntary associations.” In the midst of a great transformation from an economy based on industry to one based on knowledge, information, and technological innovation, “every bit as sweeping as the shift a century ago from agriculture to industry, from rural to urban life…” Among Galston’s details and in the weeds are corporate downsizing, employers “reducing health care and pensions… resorting to temporary contractual relations that free them from these responsibilities altogether… Today, insecurity is the watchword.” Sound familiar? Problems at the heart of Sandel’s book remain. Dire enough that half of America would allow itself to be conned by a carnival barker, as Turkey, India, Hungary, possibly Poland, France, Italy, and Israel are now turning against Enlightenment liberalism for authoritarianism instead.

Some of the writing is spectacular, almost poetic, making the tricky complexities of political philosophy sing. A few are so awful one wants a black marker never out of reach so as to blot out 50% of the pedantical bloatage. Still, if you care about this subject, it’s a great workout.