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

by Michael J. Sandel

Arnold’s revival of antitrust thus marked a shift in the aim of antitrust and in the political theory underlying it. For Brandeis, antitrust was an expression of the political economy of citizenship, concerned with preserving an economy of small, independent producers. For Arnold, antitrust had nothing to do with the producer ethic of the republican tradition; its purpose was to serve the welfare of consumers.

The republican tradition had attributed to economics a broader moral and political purpose, and the early advocates of antitrust, true to this tradition, had assessed economic arrangements for their tendency to form citizens capable of self-government. Arnold dismissed this “old religion” as a sentimental notion out of place in an age of mass production. He was the first major antitrust advocate to reject altogether the civic argument for antitrust and to insist exclusively on the consumerist one:

by the 1970s conservatives and liberals, despite their differences, shared the premise that the main purpose of antitrust policy was to promote the welfare of consumers.

As the case of antitrust suggests, the late 1930s brought the beginning of a shift in the terms of economic debate, from considerations of self-government to considerations of consumer welfare. At about the same time, national economic policy as a whole underwent a similar transformation. Beginning in the late New Deal and culminating in the early 1960s, the political economy of growth and distributive justice displaced the political economy of citizenship.

Although the tax battles of 1935 and 1936 represented a new commitment to oppose bigness in the name of small competitive enterprise, they did little if anything to decentralize the economy.

Although those who practiced Keynesian economics did not defend it in precisely these terms, the new political economy displayed two features of the liberalism that defines the procedural republic. First, it offered policymakers and elected officials a way to “bracket,” or set aside, controversial conceptions of the good life, and so promised a consensus that programs for structural reform could not offer. Second, by abandoning the ambition of inculcating certain habits and dispositions, it denied government a stake in the moral character of its citizens and affirmed the notion of persons as free and independent selves, capable of choice.

For those postwar liberals who called themselves New Dealers, it was this procedural liberalism of the late 1930s and the 1940s, not the reform ideologies of the early New Deal, that they appropriated and affirmed. “They largely ignored the New Deal’s abortive experiments in economic planning, its failed efforts to create harmonious associational arrangements, its vigorous if short-lived antimonopoly and regulatory crusades, its open skepticism toward capitalism and its captains, its overt celebration of the state.” Instead, “postwar liberals celebrated the New Deal for having discovered solutions to the problems of capitalism that required no alteration in the structure of capitalism; for having defined a role for the state that did not intrude it too far into the economy.”32 The late New Deal sought to avoid rather than embrace controversial conceptions of political and economic reform, and it was this strategy of avoidance that came to define the procedural republic.

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.

Keynes’s claim that consumption is the sole end of all economic activity, obvious though it seems, runs counter to one of the main assumptions of republican political thought. According to the republican tradition, one of the ends of economic activity is the cultivation of conditions hospitable to self-government.

The theory of consumer demand “divorce[s] economics from any judgment on the goods with which it [is] concerned.”42 The resolutely nonjudgmental character of Keynesian demand management is the first theme of the new economics that intimates the liberalism of the procedural republic.

From the standpoint of contemporary liberalism, the rejection of the formative project is not the deflation but rather the revision of American ideals, a revision in favor of the liberal conception of freedom. According to the republican tradition, freedom depends on self-government, which requires in turn certain qualities of character, certain moral and civic virtues. Liberals object that according government a role in molding the character of its citizens opens the way to coercion and fails to respect persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their ends for themselves. Implicit in the liberals’ rejection of the formative project, then, is a rival conception of freedom, what might be called the voluntarist conception.

The ideals and self-images implicit in a way of life often escape the notice of those who live by them.

AS KEYNESIAN FISCAL POLICY rose to prominence after World War II, the civic strand of economic argument faded from American political discourse. Economic policy attended more to the size and distribution of the national product and less to the conditions of self-government. Americans increasingly viewed economic arrangements as instruments of consumption, not as schools for citizenship.

From the standpoint of the republican tradition, the demise of the political economy of citizenship constituted a concession, a deflation of American ideals, a loss of liberty.

Republican political theory teaches that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. Cultivating in citizens the virtue, independence, and shared understandings such civic engagement requires is a central aim of republican politics. To abandon the formative ambition is thus to abandon the project of liberty as the republican tradition conceives it.

with the demise of the political economy of citizenship came a shift from the civic to the voluntarist conception of freedom.

Confronted with an economy too vast to admit republican hopes of mastery, and tempted by the prospect of prosperity, Americans of the postwar years found their way to a new understanding of freedom. According to this conception, our liberty depends not on our capacity as citizens to shape the forces that govern our collective destiny but rather on our capacity as persons to choose our values and ends for ourselves.

More than a matter of material prosperity, the buoyant economy of the postwar years, together with America’s power in the world, accustomed a generation of Americans to see themselves as masters of their circumstance. Although events would soon confound their heady confidence, this was a generation “brought up to believe, at home or abroad, that whatever Americans wished to make happen would happen.”

Through much of the nineteenth century, Americans had argued about how to instill in citizens the virtues that would equip them for self-government. By the second half of the twentieth century, Americans argued instead about what rights would enable persons to choose their own values and ends. In time, the political agenda defined by the voluntarist conception of freedom proved unable to address the aspiration to self-government and so lost its capacity to inspire. At

The advocates of the American welfare state, by contrast, did not rely on an ethic of civic or communal obligation; they appealed instead to the voluntarist conception of freedom. Their case for expanding social and economic rights did not depend on cultivating a deeper sense of shared citizenship but rather on respecting each person’s capacity to choose his or her own values and ends.

The notion that government should respect people’s rights to choose their own values and ends was not unique to defenders of the welfare state. It was also invoked by laissez-faire critics of the welfare state such as the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater and the economist Milton Friedman.

According to Rawls, a just society does not try to cultivate virtue or impose on its citizens any particular ends. Rather, it provides a framework of rights, neutral among ends, within which persons can pursue their own conceptions of the good, consistent with a similar liberty for others. This is the claim that the right is prior to the good, and it is this claim that defines the liberalism of the procedural republic.

According to the political theory of contemporary liberalism, government should neither shape nor judge the character of its citizens.

these two fears—for the loss of self-government and the erosion of community—defined the anxiety of the age. It was an anxiety that the reigning political agenda, with its attenuated civic resources, was unable to answer or even address. This failure fueled the discontent that has beset American democracy from the late 1960s to the present day.

The mood of discontent and disillusion that descended upon American politics in 1968 had been building for several years. The inner-city riots, campus protests, and antiwar demonstrations of the mid-1960s intimated the unraveling of faith in existing arrangements. These protests and disorders, and the fears they aroused, fostered a growing sense that events were spinning out of control and that government lacked the moral or political authority to respond.

The civic and communal strand of Reagan’s rhetoric enabled him to succeed, where Democrats failed, to tap the mood of discontent. But in the end Reagan’s presidency did little to alter the conditions underlying the discontent. He governed more as market conservative than as civic conservative. The less fettered capitalism he favored did nothing to repair the moral fabric of families, neighborhoods, or communities.

Any attempt to revitalize the civic strand of freedom must confront two sobering objections. The first doubts it is possible to revive republican ideals; the second doubts it is desirable.

we live in a highly mobile continental society, teeming with diversity. Moreover, even this vast society is not self-sufficient but is situated in a global economy whose frenzied flow of money and goods, information and images, pays little heed to nations, much less neighborhoods. How, under conditions such as these, could the civic strand of freedom possibly take hold?

republican ideals found their expression at the last moment, too late to offer feasible alternatives, just in time to offer an elegy for a lost cause. If the republican tradition is irredeemably nostalgic, then whatever its capacity to illuminate the defects of liberal politics, it offers little that could lead us to a richer civic life.

For given the demands of republican citizenship, the more expansive the bounds of membership, the more demanding the task of cultivating virtue. In Aristotle’s polis, the formative task was to cultivate virtue among a small group of people who shared a common life and a natural bent for citizenship. When republican thought turns democratic, however, and when the natural bent of persons to be citizens can no longer be assumed, the formative project becomes more daunting. The task of forging a common citizenship among a vast and disparate people invites more strenuous forms of soulcraft. This raises the stakes for republican politics and heightens the risk of coercion.

It is this assumption—that the common good is unitary and uncontestable—not the formative ambition as such, that inclines Rousseau’s politics to coercion. It is, moreover, an assumption that republican politics can do without. As America’s experience with the political economy of citizenship suggests, the civic conception of freedom does not render disagreement unnecessary. It offers a way of conducting political argument, not transcending it.

the liberal worry does contain an insight that cannot be dismissed: 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. This is the truth in the liberal’s complaint about republican politics.

On the voluntarist conception of freedom, statecraft no longer needs soulcraft, except in a limited domain. Tying freedom to respect for the rights of freely choosing selves would dampen old disputes about how to form the habits of self-rule. It would spare politics the ancient quarrels about the nature of the good life.

The philosophical difficulty lies in the liberal conception of citizens as freely choosing, independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties antecedent to choice. This vision cannot account for a wide range of moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, such as obligations of loyalty or solidarity. By insisting that we are bound only by ends and roles we choose for themselves, it denies that we can ever be claimed by ends we have not chosen—ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.

A politics that brackets morality and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment. Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meaning finds undesirable expression.

Absent a political agenda that addresses the moral dimension of public questions, attention becomes riveted on the private vices of public officials. Political discourse becomes increasingly preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensational, and the confessional as purveyed by tabloids, talk shows, and eventually the mainstream media as well. In cannot be said that the public philosophy of contemporary liberalism is wholly responsible for these tendencies. But its vision of political discourse is too spare to contain the moral energies of democratic life. It creates a moral void that opens the way for intolerance and other misguided moralisms.

A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic. Another is the loss of mastery. The triumph of the voluntarist conception of freedom has coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment.

The liberal self-image and the actual organization of modern social and economic life are sharply at odds. Even as we think and act as freely choosing, independent selves, we confront a world governed by impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control. The voluntarist conception of freedom leaves us ill equipped to contend with this condition. Liberated though we may be from the burden of identities we have not chosen, entitled though we may be to the range of rights assured by the welfare state, we find ourselves overwhelmed as we turn to face the world on our own resources.

The procedural republic, it turns out, cannot secure the liberty it promises because it cannot inspire the moral and civic engagement self-government requires.

Reich’s account of the communal consequences of inequality highlights a defect in American life that also bears on the prospect of self-government. The secession of the affluent from the public sphere not only weakens the social fabric that supports the welfare state; it also erodes civic virtue more broadly conceived. The republican tradition long viewed the public realm not only as a place of common provision but also as a setting for civic education.

As affluent Americans increasingly buy their way out of reliance on public services, the formative, civic resources of American life diminish.

Even a politics that engaged rather than avoided substantive moral discourse, that attended to the civic consequences of economic inequality, and that strengthened the mediating institutions of civil society would confront a daunting obstacle. This obstacle consists in the formidable scale on which modern economic life is organized and the difficulty of constituting the democratic political authority necessary to govern it. This difficulty actually involves two related challenges. One is to devise political institutions capable of governing the global economy. The other is to cultivate the civic identities necessary to sustain those institutions, to supply them with the moral authority they require. It is not obvious that both these challenges can be met.

Nation-states, traditionally the vehicles of self-government, will find themselves increasingly unable to bring their citizens’ judgments and values to bear on the economic forces that govern their destinies. The disempowering of the nation-state in relation to the global economy may be one source of the discontent that afflicts not only American politics but other democracies around the world.

In certain ways, the challenge to self-government in the global economy resembles the predicament American politics faced in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then as now, there was a gap, or lack of fit, between the scale of economic life and the terms in which people conceived their identities, a gap that many experienced as disorienting and disempowering.

new forms of commerce and communication spilled across familiar political boundaries and created networks of interdependence among people in distant places. But the new interdependence did not carry with it a new sense of community.

What railroads, telegraph wires, and national markets were to her time, satellite hookups, CNN, cyberspace, and global markets are to ours—instruments that link people in distant places without necessarily making them neighbors or fellow citizens or participants in a common venture. Converting networks of communication and interdependence into a public life worth affirming is a moral and political matter, not a technological one.

Confronted with an economy that threatened to defy democratic control, Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly and their New Deal successors sought to increase the powers of the national government. If democracy were to survive, they concluded, the concentration of economic power would have to be met by a similar concentration of political power. But this task involved more than the centralization of government; it also required the nationalization of politics. The primary form of political community had to be recast on a national scale. Only in this way could they hope to ease the gap between the scale of social and economic life and the terms in which people conceived their identities.

The cosmopolitan ethic is wrong, not for asserting that we have certain obligations to humanity as a whole but rather for insisting that the more universal communities we inhabit must always take precedence over more particular ones.

the cosmopolitan vision is wrong to suggest that we can restore self-government simply by pushing sovereignty and citizenship upward.

The hope for self-government lies not in relocating sovereignty but in dispersing it. The most promising alternative to the sovereign state is not a one-world community based on the solidarity of humankind, but a multiplicity of communities and political bodies—some more, some less extensive than nations—among which sovereignty is diffused. The nation-state need not fade away, only cede its claim as sole repository of sovereign power and object of political allegiance.