Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel (born 1953 in Minneapolis) is an American political philosopher and professor at Harvard University. He is associated with communitarianism, although he is uneasy with that label. His significance lies in having challenged liberal theories of justice and in bringing moral debate to a very wide audience.

Born into a Jewish family, he moved to Los Angeles at thirteen. He graduated from Brandeis University, a Phi Beta Kappa, and later earned his doctorate at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, studying under the philosopher Charles Taylor. He has taught at Harvard since the early 1980s, where his course Justice became one of the most heavily attended in the university's history.

His first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), criticized John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Sandel argues that Rawls's reasoning depends on a veil of ignorance that presupposes an "unencumbered self" detached from its ties. For him, we are born within bonds, such as family, that we do not choose and cannot easily separate from who we are. The criticism led Rawls himself to present his theory as political rather than metaphysical.

In later works, such as Democracy's Discontent (1996) and The Case against Perfection (2007), he widened his reflection to civic life and to the ethics of genetic engineering. In What Money Can't Buy (2012) he examined the moral limits of markets, and in The Tyranny of Merit (2020) he questioned meritocracy.

His Justice course, made available online and on television, has reached tens of millions of people worldwide. His influence extends to law, business ethics and political debate. In 2018 he received the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.