Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

by Michael J. Sandel

Those who practiced and championed the new political economy did not describe their project in exactly these terms. But in the course of explaining and justifying their views, they did articulate three themes of the Keynesian revolution that, taken together, reveal the contours of the new public philosophy that Keynesian economics brought to prominence. One was the shift from production to consumption as the primary basis of political identity and focus of economic policy. The second was the rejection of the formative project characteristic of earlier reform movements and the republican tradition generally. The third was the embrace of the voluntarist conception of freedom and the conception of persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their ends for themselves.