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Critical Review
America’s Contents and Discontents: Reflections on Michael Sandel’s America
by Rogers M. Smith
*
Abstract
Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent traces America’s woes to an erosion of community and a loss of a sense of collective self-governance. He recommends a more communitarian, republican public philosophy as the cure. His book illuminates many important historical and contemporary issues, particularly the link between systems of political economy and visions of citizenship. His methods are, however, too impressionistic to support his empirical claims. He particularly neglects the role of civic republicanism in America’s history of racial, gender, and religious discrimination. Hence his call for Americans to minimize liberal doctrines of individual rights in favor of communally minded republicanism is not fully persuasive.
In Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), Michael Sandel, the most widely cited political theorist of his generation, portrays contemporary Americans (more than the title’s “democracy”) as discontented. Sandel recognizes that this discontent may seem puzzling in light of the relative peace and prosperity that have prevailed in the United States in the 1990s. He traces it to two concerns: a sense of “loss of self-government” and a sense of “the erosion of community” in the United States. He believes that these discontents stem, in turn, from inadequacies in the nation’s dominant “public philosophy,” “the assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life” (3–4). His aim is to help Americans explore how to strengthen self-governing citizenship and community by analyzing the philosophical and political deficiencies in these assumptions and pointing out more promising alternatives. Philosophically, Sandel advises us to reject the conceptions of ourselves as the rational, atomistic individuals that pervade much neo-Kantian political and moral theory. Instead we should recognize that we are communally constituted moral agents who are likely to feel fully realized only through participation in the lives of the communities that have done so much to give us identity and meaning. Politically, Sandel urges us to reject the individualistic politics of competitive bargaining, rights asserting, and privatistic self-seeking. Instead we should embrace civic republicanism, a public philosophy that presents participation in democratic self-governance and public service as both obligatory and deeply fulfilling.
The questions that motivate Sandel’s book and his answers to them are tremendously important. Sandel pays particular attention to the ways American politics and American political thought have historically addressed certain issues of civil liberties and political economy, and he does so in a graceful, well informed, and thoughtful fashion. Though for years I have taught courses featuring most of the sources on which he relies (he has remarkably good taste), his interpretations have provided me, at least, with fresh, valuable insights; and many of his central arguments, particularly on issues of political economy, are compelling. Yet neither the book itself nor the range of responses it has prompted since its publication in 1996 dispel my concern that his perspective is in certain vital respects dangerously incomplete, in ways that leave it open to cooptation for political uses that should be deplored.
Consequently, here I will focus on criticizing Sandel, not so much for the positions that he takes, but primarily for his failure to push far enough along the lines he sets out, both in terms of his method and his substantive arguments about citizenship and community. In so doing, however, I do not mean to imply that his book is more failure than success, for that is not the case. A critical posture toward Sandel is necessary because the problems he discusses are so significant that the major shortcomings in his analysis cannot safely be neglected.
My critique will center on Sandel’s failure to attend adequately to the pervasive ways in which citizenship and community in America have been defined by traditions of racial inequality, patriarchy, nativism, and Protestant hegemony. I will maintain that greater attention to those traditions is made imperative by the very questions Sandel asks, not because of any once-fashionable “political correctness” in stressing these issues—and not (only!) because those traditions are among my own central concerns.
To see why, it is important to grasp four elements of Sandel’s argument. These are first, his philosophical critique of prevailing notions of freedom, personhood, and community, which builds on his seminal first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; second, his method of inquiry; third, his effort to connect his philosophic critique with an endorsement of civic republicanism as America’s best political tradition; and fourth, his contention that American political development should be interpreted as a transition from the dominance of various forms of civic republicanism to the dominance of modern liberalism after World War II, a shift that allegedly spawned current discontent. In discussing each of these elements in turn, I will indicate how Sandel’s treatment seriously neglects issues of race, gender, and nativist and religious bias. I then argue that those failings call for reconfiguring some (but by no means all) of his philosophical and political roadmap to a better public philosophy.
Sandel’s Philosophical Analysis
Sandel’s diagnosis of contemporary ills is built on his argument that the liberal conceptions of freedom and personhood embodied in modern American political institutions are badly flawed. His famous contention is that modern liberals, such as John Rawls, conceive of persons as “unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice” and “unencumbered by aims and attachments” they do not choose for themselves, so that freedom is seen as fundamentally the capacity to make such choices (12). Sandel argues that in reality personhood is inseparably constituted by membership in “this family or city or people” or “this republic,” each with a distinctive “morally relevant history” (14–15). These facts of our identity often provide us with “obligations of membership” that are “antecedent to choice” (15). Freedom should be understood, then, not fundamentally as the opportunity to choose our ends, but instead as the opportunity to pursue the obligations and senses of the common good defined by the particular memberships that constitute us as real, not merely abstract, moral agents.
As many have now argued, as a purely philosophic matter Sandel’s effort to contrast the notions of freedom in contemporary liberalism with his communitarian understanding of personhood is overdrawn. Few liberal theorists would deny that particular memberships largely provide the senses of moral values and obligations that persons reflect upon critically in deciding what to do. Liberals simply insist that, given the multiple, often conflicting affiliations and traditions that contribute to our identities, we can and should meaningfully engage in such critical reflection (e.g., Macedo 1990, 243–47; Kymlicka 1995, 90–93). For his part, Sandel does not deny that people find themselves “claimed . . . by a wide range of different communities”; that, often, “obligations conflict”; and that deciding what to do under such circumstances “is a matter of moral reflection and political deliberation” involving difficult matters of judgment (343–44). Indeed, when Sandel discusses Robert E. Lee’s dilemma, on the eve of the Civil War, as to whether he should remain a Union officer or join his home state of Virginia in defense of slavery, an institution he opposed, Sandel refers to “the choice” Lee made and “the choices” others make as a result of similar processes of “deliberation” (15–16). 1 It seems that, despite his many objections to identifying freedom purely with the capacity to choose, on Sandel’s own view, moral agency involves reflective critical deliberation and difficult judgments or choices, just as liberals insist.
Yet if Sandel’s critique of liberal conceptions of the self is not convincing at an abstract philosophic level, there is still much to his arguments about the baneful moral and political consequences that can result from embracing those conceptions without sufficient care. The liberal theories, judicial opinions, and policy positions that Sandel criticizes do indeed tend to stress people’s capacities to disavow inherited identities, affiliations, and obligations. Less attention is generally given to why people might decide they must adhere to some memberships and why these decisions might be morally appropriate for them.
Consequently, it is plausible for Sandel to argue that liberal doctrines and policies centered on valorizing and promoting choice often fail to give much recognition or support to the senses of community and the moral bonds that are probably necessary to motivate many kinds of civic engagement and concern for various sorts of common goods. As Sandel contends, liberal accounts trumpeting the rights of abstract individuals fail to provide reasons why a given individual might decide that being a member of this family, church, or republic is something of great moral significance. They therefore can foster an initially liberating but ultimately daunting “moral void” (323)—the impression that all courses of action are equally up for grabs and that there are no standards to decide among them. This impression may drive many people toward self-confidently didactic forms of “intolerance and other misguided moralisms,” such as national chauvinism, racial and ethnic prejudice, and religious bigotry (5–6, 323). Ironically, perhaps, Sandel’s critique of liberal conceptions of the self seems more compelling at the political than the metaphysical level.
Nor is it at all clear that Sandel’s metaphysical alternative better protects against these political dangers. If liberal conceptions of the self open the door to bigotry through their dismissiveness toward valued memberships, Sandel’s notion of “encumbered” selves opens that door in a more straightforward way. As his liberal critics have long argued, if people are morally bound by obligations to constitutive communities they did not choose, then we may have no ground for opposing their decision to side with, say, communities championing white supremacy and slavery, as Robert E. Lee did. By example more than argument, Sandel suggests that the complexities of our histories, traditions, and memberships usually provide resources for more appealing choices: he indicates that Germans may feel special obligations to Jews and “American whites to American blacks” (15). But he cannot assure us that these either will be or should be the outcome of the communitarian deliberations Germans and American whites undertake. Such assurance would require either a moral standard external to people’s constitutive traditions, which Sandel disavows; or a claim to know their deepest identities and allegiances better than they do themselves, which would be both disrespectful and implausible. Hence Sandel admits, honestly enough, that he is offering a “risky politics, a politics without guarantees” (321).
Sandel allows, however, that though we probably cannot know other persons’ encumbered identities sufficiently to decide for them just what their ultimate obligations are, we are entitled to try to persuade them that certain decisions are “misguided.” A Kentucky-born fellow like Abraham Lincoln, for example, might have had something persuasive to say to a Virginian like Lee about why Southern whites should be inspired by their revolutionary heritage to fight against slavery rather than on its behalf (though whether the scion of an aristocratic family would listen to the child of a poor frontiersman is debatable). But if such persuasion is to take place, it seems imperative that we have a rather full understanding of the communities, traditions, and senses of affiliation that have helped constitute the moral identities of the people we would persuade. That is one reason why, on his own terms, it is a serious deficiency that Sandel engages in no sustained examination of the intolerant traditions of racial, gender, ethnic, and religious identity that he wishes Americans to judge as “misguided.” If those traditions have played an important role in constituting modern Americans, as they undeniably have, they cannot be wished away. Ignoring constitutive traditions is, after all, precisely the error with which Sandel rightly charges many liberals. Yet he adopts a method of inquiry that makes it all too easy for him to do the same.
Sandel’s Historical Method
Though Sandel is a skilled analyst of philosophic texts, as his first book demonstrated, in Democracy’s Discontent his main objects of analysis are judicial opinions, political speeches, and government reports, policies, and practices. Contending that political “practices and institutions” are “embodiments of theory,” Sandel seeks “to identify the public philosophy implicit in our practices and institutions.” Once teased out and evaluated, Sandel suggests, the problems of these embodied “ideals” may clarify “the predicament of American democracy” (ix–x). As noted, he is particularly concerned to identify those elements of American public philosophy that might play a “formative” role in strengthening capacities for citizenship—i.e., participation in “self-government”—and in fostering a motivating “sense of community and civic engagement” (ibid., 6).
This enterprise seems to me eminently reasonable. There are, however, two methodological issues that must be confronted in pursuing it. The first is to decide what practices and institutions ought to be examined. The second is to decide what system of surveying or sampling them should be employed.
Perhaps because he is writing as much for a popular as a scholarly audience, Sandel says nothing about either of these issues. The answers implicit in his own practices, however, are unsatisfactory. He confines himself chiefly to examining the litigation and statutory law governing three civil-liberties topics (religious liberties, freedom of speech, and rights of privacy, especially in relation to family law), and to studying more extensively the visions of political economy that have been advanced by American political actors from the founding era to the present. His method of surveying these topics seems to be simply to read extensively about them in both primary and secondary sources, collecting quotations that illustrate the arguments he wishes to make.
In the hands of a talented scholar like Sandel, these methods bear some valuable fruit. Judicial opinions and legislative statutes concerning these civil-liberties issues certainly are useful for illuminating political thinking about the character of citizenship and freedom; and by stressing that, until roughly the New Deal, many American leaders evaluated economic arrangements heavily in terms of their role in forming citizens, Sandel is highlighting neglected concerns of the first importance. Sandel’s characterizations of the different views discernible in the sources he examines are also always plausible and often persuasive. There is little question that the themes he unearths have indeed been present and significant in American public life.
There is a question, however, whether Sandel presents an adequate picture of all the themes in American public life relevant to the issues he is addressing. If one is interested in how American institutions have treated the issue of forming citizens and a sense of community, an obvious place to look is surely the body of laws governing access to and exit from American citizenship and the American political community. Naturalization laws, immigration laws, expatriation laws, laws governing territorial inhabitants, the voting rights of different groups (since capacities for self-governance are at stake), and the relationship of state citizenship to national citizenship, all would seem relevant, among other matters. And though Sandel is right to suggest, with Herbert Croly, that civic education involves more than what occurs in schools (220), the explicit and implicit civic lessons taught in public schools also seem to warrant scrutiny.
My work on these very laws, institutions, and practices (Smith 1997) provides confirmation for many of Sandel’s characterizations of civic republican and modern liberal traditions in American history. But there is also overwhelming evidence of traditions that he barely mentions. These traditions long gave priority to visions of the American civic community less as a self-governing republic or a protector of rights of personhood than as a Christian nation, a white man’s nation, a patriarchal nation, and a nation to be governed by those native to it. The enormous formative roles of these laws for American citizenship and community is hinted at by the facts that for over 80 percent of U.S. history, the majority of the world’s population was legally denied access to full U.S. citizenship (including voting rights) explicitly on grounds of race, ethnicity, or gender; and that for roughly two-thirds of U.S. history, the majority of the domestic adult population was legally denied full citizenship on the same grounds. Though their power has faded, the distribution of power, resources, and status throughout most American institutions is still heavily marked by these traditions, and they do not lack for influential contemporary adherents. 2
Sandel does not analyze the citizenship laws just mentioned, and he makes only brief references to the features of American life they represent. He does so, moreover, chiefly to assure readers that though republicanism sometimes “provided the terms within which” exclusionary practices were “defended,” these sorts of exclusions are not in fact “intrinsic to republican political theory” (6, 318–19). Sandel offers no real argument for this controversial claim, although it is quite plausible. Yet if the claim is correct, we must look beyond republican theory to understand these exclusionary and subordinating practices and institutions that are so formative of the American civic community. Sandel, however, gives virtually no consideration to the nonrepublican arguments that were used to defend white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, efforts to restrict voting to the native born, race-based immigration restrictions, the explicitly Protestant curriculum of the nineteenth-century public schools, and the denial of suffrage to women. Similarly, in discussing the modern civil rights movement (314, 318–19) he pays little attention to earlier black political movements, religious movements, women’s-rights movements, and immigrants’-rights movements that warred against civic exclusion and oppression.
Though he leaves these topics largely unexamined (without offering any reason for doing so), Sandel is not reluctant to contend that republicanism as he defines it, devoted to the “common good of self-government,” predominated in American life up until roughly “the last forty or fifty years”; and that modern liberalism as he depicts it, devoted to personal freedom to choose and pursue one’s “own interests and ends,” has predominated since then (4–5, 26, 123–275). He seems confident that he knows what “most Americans” believed about such issues as wage labor in every period of U.S. history (ibid., 188). And though he recognizes that some Americans have valued republican self-government only instrumentally, as a means to other ends, he seems certain that those other ends can be dismissed as relatively unimportant for American civic identity in comparison to republican and liberal aims (26). He classifies each of the many figures of U.S. history whom he discusses as embracing chiefly either “civic republican” or “voluntarist,” liberal conceptions of freedom without attending to other notions of liberty, justice, and the human good they may have held. Thus, for instance, he suggests (albeit tentatively) that voluntaristic liberalism has come to prevail in recent decades because it holds out the promise that macroeconomic policy can enable each consumer to buy ever more of whatever he or she wants (262). Perhaps this is right. But since important aspects and traditions of citizenship and community go unexamined by Sandel, how can we be sure that the evidence he does present supports such sweeping claims about the dominant themes in American political life?
Indeed, even in the areas Sandel does consider, we may legitimately ask, How representative are the admittedly supportive quotations we are extensively provided? There are, after all, many cases in which even contemporary judges (admittedly often in dissent) express concern to honor the nation’s religious traditions; more cases in which they define the scope of free-speech rights in terms of the requirements of republican self-governance; and important cases in which they refuse to agree that rights of privacy shelter conduct traditionally branded immoral. 3 There is also extraordinary variety in the claims advanced in related legislative and policy debates. I do not dispute Sandel’s contention that religious practices, speech, and unconventional private conduct are now often said to be all equally respectable expressions of capacities of autonomous choice. But what is the prevailing mix of these and other claims? It is difficult to answer this question when Sandel does not identify what he takes to be the relevant body of evidence and does not employ any systematic method for either sampling or canvassing it.
Because Sandel looks at relevant but very partial evidence and appears simply to select examples that confirm his analysis, it is difficult to place great confidence in his claim to have discerned the predominant civic ideals and theories implicit in American institutions throughout U.S. history. To be sure, the method of “selecting for the dependent variable” is typical of historians of political ideas; but it is too casual and impressionistic to support the strong empirical claims about American beliefs made in this book. These claims are all the more suspect because Sandel marginalizes much that has been central to the formation of American citizens and the American political community.
Sandel’s Turn to Republicanism
Rather than address such disturbing traditions directly, Sandel chooses to highlight the political attractions of civic republican traditions in American life. That choice is understandable. Republicanism has indeed been a centrally constitutive American tradition. It was the dominant discourse through which the American revolutionary cause was articulated. Though republican themes have since waned, they have nonetheless always been important strains in American discourse on which a normative theorist such as Sandel can reasonably hope to build.
Virtually any variety of republicanism involves a commitment to civic virtue, understood as practices of citizenship that contribute to the common good of a self-governing community, in contrast to unbridled individualism or moral aimlessness. The theorist who may have exercised the greatest influence on modern democratic republicanism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, presented republican self-governance as appropriate in principle for all humanity, not as properly confined to any particular race, nation, culture, or sect (Rousseau 1968). Hence Sandel can contend that communal particularisms are “not intrinsic to republican political theory,” and he can hold out the hope that, as the idea that some people are not capable of civic virtue becomes discredited, “the tendency of republican politics to sanction” unjust exclusions can be eliminated (319).
Yet even within Sandel’s terms, there are several grave problems posed by a turn to republicanism, none of which he addresses very fully. The first is the flip side of the point just made. Precisely because Enlightenment-influenced, democratic varieties of republicanism present republican self-governance as suitable for all humanity, such republican theories do not provide any more argument than modern liberal theories do as to why people should be citizens of some particular republic rather than any other. Rousseau is as much a theorist of the social contract as John Rawls. As Sandel quite plausibly insists, any such “contractual vision of community alone” does not explain “why these persons, the ones who happen to live in my country, have a claim on my concern that others do not.” Republican theory does not really explain why one’s deepest identity is “bound” to that of the other parties to the social contract, or why a given republic is not “an arbitrarily defined community” (17). If an engaged politics really does require citizens who see their moral identities as inextricably linked to a particular community in ways antecedent to their choice, the sorts of inclusive, democratic republican theories with which Sandel sides do not seem to be the answer.
There are two possible replies to this objection, but they only lead into further difficulties. The first reply is that, although republican theory per se does not present any particular community identity as intrinsic to persons, in the United States that does not matter. Because republicanism does happen to be one of the nation’s key constitutive traditions, it is one that all Americans must give great weight when deciding upon their most obligatory affiliations and values. Republicanism is, in fact, part of what it means to be an American. But even if we grant this point, we still need an argument as to why Americans should decide that republicanism is their most centrally defining tradition and that the republican vision of the common good trumps other possible obligations of Americans.
That is a tall order. Sandel is well aware that many Americans are likely to find what he terms the “strong version of the republican ideal,” which defines human liberty and moral achievement strictly in terms of participation in “the public life of a free city or republic,” as too narrow and constraining. Like Oscar Wilde, most of us do not want political meetings to take up so many of our evenings, or even our prime-time viewing hours. Sandel responds by stressing that there are more “modest” versions of republicanism that “see civic virtue and public service as instrumental to liberty,” versions that include lots of “liberty to pursue our own ends,” not just freedom to participate in politics (26). Hence republicanism need not generate pressures to accept a single narrow vision of the common good. It can promote the “democratic” realization of a “higher pluralism of persons and communities who appreciate and affirm the distinctive goods their different lives express” (116, 319–21).
This latter claim implicitly makes an “overlapping consensus” case for republicanism, not so different from the case Rawls has come to make for liberalism. Yes, Sandel suggests, Americans probably will, on reflection, find varying senses of community and a range of notions of their own ends morally compelling. Still, most will be able to see republican civic virtues and the republican view of the American political community as contributing to the realization of their other important moral memberships and values.
To make this case credibly, however, Sandel would again have to do what he avoids. He would have to address the multiple senses of political community and identity that have been constitutive of American life, including not just liberal and republican but racial, religious, and patriarchal ones, among others. He would have to show that they can all “be redescribed without loss” as variants or allies of republicanism as he defines it, rather than as variants or allies of liberalism or some other perspective (65).
It is far from clear that he could reach that conclusion. Set aside the fact that historically, many Americans clearly opposed any republicanism that did not present America as a white- and male-governed republic. Even today, many Americans would surely be offended by Sandel’s contention that their religious beliefs are worthy of political respect only insofar as they have “a tendency to promote the habits and dispositions that make good citizens,” so that only “religious beliefs and practices” that have “sufficient moral or civic importance” from a republican perspective “warrant special constitutional protection” (66). The tendency to structure and regulate religion for the good of the republic is indeed deeply embedded in republican theory and practice (see, e.g., Rousseau 1968, 87, 176–87). However, many religious believers may well see it as cynical, even sinful to treat freedom of religion as a mere instrument of political goals, rather than as a suitably respectful recognition of their constitutive moral identities. And as with religion, so with many other nonrepublican conceptions of community and purpose that Americans hold: when its implications are clear, Sandel’s view may well repel rather than recruit those who do not think that what they value can or should be subordinated to republican conceptions of the common good.
That possibility is only increased by the second way republicanism can be connected with traditions presenting the American political community as a distinctively compelling membership for American citizens. Though republican theory does not provide grounds for saying that republicanism is intrinsically the most just and right political philosophy for any particular subset of humanity, the theory does counsel legislators to foster loyalty to their republic by building on the uniquely defining customs, histories, and religious and cultural traditions their citizens may share, so as to foster a sense of a unique and valuable national identity. Thus, in The Government of Poland Rousseau urged any lawmakers who might form an independent Polish republic to support “distinctive” institutions such as “religious ceremonies” that would be “in essence exclusive and national,” as well as “games” and “public spectacles” inspiring patriotism, which would be adaptations of already deeply entrenched and valued national practices, such as the tradition of Polish circuses (Rousseau 1972, 8, 11–16). Rousseau and other republicans also argued that the fellow-feeling required for civic virtue grows more naturally amidst considerable civic homogeneity. Hence adherents of customs and faiths too different from a nation’s predominant ones can properly be excluded from its citizenry (Smith 1997, 84–85).
Sandel does not deny this exclusivist aspect of republicanism. Indeed he calls attention to the way “the republican tradition emphasizes the need to cultivate citizenship through particular ties and attachments” (117). But this means that, although Sandel is right to say that republican theory does not intrinsically endorse any particular civic exclusions, republican theory does actively urge the state to ally ifself with senses of national identity that may well be harshly exclusionary. It does so precisely to support the stronger senses of community and civic attachment that Sandel is seeking.
As Sandel briefly concedes, in America alliances between republicanism and particularist traditions of national identity have often taken the form of arguments that blacks, women, Hispanics, Catholics, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and the foreign-born generally lack the capacity to be full republican citizens (Sandel 1996, 6; see generally Smith 1997). The historian Edmund S. Morgan (1975) went so far as to argue that, even if republicanism might not require such exclusions in theory, in America republicanism could not have originated without the institution of chattel slavery that provided leisure for political activity and prompted an obsession with freedom. Though Sandel wishes to reject any necessary connection between American republicanism and racial inequality, much less slavery, he nonetheless criticizes as “blind” the liberal view that “such differences between persons as race, religion, ethnicity, and gender” do not “really define our identity” (13). If we follow Sandel and see such categories as constitutive of the identities of many Americans, and if we ally ourselves with republican traditions that call for cultivation of particular ties and attachments, surely we face severe problems. How can we be confident that the Americans thus constituted can be persuaded to embrace their republican heritage while disentangling it from exclusionary and subordinating traditions? What in republicanism gives us compelling grounds to argue that they should do so?
At a minimum, these questions deserve more attention than Sandel gives them. Admittedly, it might be true that if we viewed American experience more fully, we would conclude that Sandel’s categories capture so much that his omissions are relatively unimportant. In the next section I will suggest, to the contrary, that his account of American history is substantially flawed by the ways in which he translates almost every position into a version of either civic republicanism or liberalism, and by his neglect of exclusionary civic commitments that overflow those categories. When these flaws are diminished, the case for many of the political lessons Sandel draws from American history diminishes as well.
Sandel’s Civic History
If our aim is to identify the traditions that have constituted the identities of American citizens, the ideas that were most powerful in the nation’s formative period may well be especially significant. Sandel’s categories of republicanism and liberalism, however, do not permit him even to note perhaps the most prevalent understanding of freedom and citizenship in the late colonial period. As Barry Shain (1994) and others have suggested, for most colonial Americans liberty meant, above all, conformity to the will of the Christian God, “whose service is perfect freedom.” Many rallied to the revolutionary cause not so much to create a republic as to escape from corrupt Britain and fulfill their providential mission as a “redeemer nation” (Tuveson 1968). It is true that in much Revolutionary rhetoric, this sense of religious mission incorporated republicanism, so that the new nation was to be a “Christian Sparta,” in Sam Adams’s words (Smith 1997, 74–75, 85). Later, as Sandel notes without criticism, this view issued in public schools that propagated republicanism as a political faith—alongside “nondenominational Protestantism” as the standard for “morals and religion” (166). Even if we see the longstanding association of republicanism with Protestantism as simply promoting social understandings conducive to republican self-governance, this history still suggests that disentangling American civic republicanism from religious intolerance may be a far more complicated task than Sandel suggests. In fact, many believers today think that it is the loss of this sense of America as a Christian nation—a loss that is entailed by embracing either Sandel’s democratic republicanism or liberalism—that is most responsible for the contemporary “moral void.” Hence they may well be dissatisfied with the subordination of religious goods to the cause of republicanism that Sandel advocates.
Similarly, in the Revolutionary era, the American champions of the rights of man defined gender roles by blending Biblical depictions of the place of women with a republican insistence that the political and military obligations of citizenship require manliness. The result was a pervasive and long-enduring endorsement of female disfranchisement, rendering women much less than equal participants in republican self-governance (Smith 1997, 76–77, 111–114, 146–48). Though their power, too, has diminished, arguments that a woman’s place is in the home have ever since remained significant in American political life. Sandel has virtually nothing to say directly about this exclusionary and subordinating civic tradition. He does not discuss how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century champions of female suffrage eventually succeeded by relying chiefly on a combination of nativist and republican themes that left many forms of gender inequality intact (Smith 1989, 273–75). He does give some account of the costs and benefits of liberal reforms that have eroded those surviving inegalitarian features of American law in the last quarter century (108–115). Sandel deems the recent changes “at best a mixed success,” out of legitimate concern for the condition of women who fulfill many traditional domestic duties without possessing either traditional protections or alternative resources (110). But this ambiguous normative assessment, along with Sandel’s advocacy of a republicanism that affirms various particular identities, leaves open the possibility that the earlier mix of more equal political rights, and the preservation of traditional gender roles in other respects, might be preferable from a modern civic republican perspective. In any case, the political status of half the population is far too central an issue for the constitution of American civic identity to receive the cursory treatment Sandel provides.
The native tribes, and the arguments used to justify their massive displacement and near-eradication, get even less attention from Sandel. One could read his book and never realize that the North American continent was not simply waiting for the taking by Europeans. He refers only to “foreign powers such as Spain that posed obstacles to western expansion” by early American citizens (137), and he describes the western North American territories (all of which were, in fact, claimed by native tribes) as “open land” (139). Later, Sandel discusses Jacksonian political economy without any reference to what Jackson proudly presented in his Farewell Address as his leading contribution to the shaping of America, his Indian removal campaign (cf. Smith 1997, 197, 235–37). Other scholars have seen the great conflict of Euro-American settlers and indigenous North American peoples as central to the constitution of America’s civic, racial, religious and even psychic self-conceptions (e.g., Rogin 1975). Perhaps that assessment is overstated, but surely this dimension of the making of “Americans” merits some comment.
Sandel does discuss the other great illiberal institution of antebellum political economy, chattel slavery. Yet he does so without analyzing America’s long history of officially constructed racial hierarchies. Sandel makes no reference at all to racial defenses of slavery. Only Southern criticisms of capitalism catch his eye (175–77). He also fails to mention how the champions of slavery’s expansion elaborated racist denigrations of Mexicans to spur support for the explicitly imperialist Mexican-American War, a war that radically reconfigured the geography, resources, and populations of both the United States and Mexico. Sandel merely notes that opponents of the war like Daniel Webster expressed reservations about making Mexicans into American citizens (163). Similarly, the first of his few mentions of “racist terms” in American political discourse comes when he calls attention to the antiblack attitudes of some “antislavery politicians”—in the course of criticizing their endorsement of the “voluntarist” liberal institution of wage labor (180–81).
Sandel surely does not really wish to associate racism more with the Northern opponents of slavery than with its champions. But his failure to analyze American racism, which briefly lurches into his account ex nihilo in the late 1840s and is little discussed thereafter, leaves us ill equipped to grasp the civic understandings that prevailed in either the antebellum North or the South, and that generated not only the Mexican-American War but also the Civil War. It is hard to see how an account of the civic conceptions that have constituted America can be adequate with those elements of the story omitted. It is also disturbing that, in a book advocating civic republicanism, Sandel seems to strain to link racism with advocates of liberal ideas while minimizing the liberalism, and exaggerating the republicanism, of those opposing racial inequality.
Sandel’s discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates best exemplifies this pattern. Sandel makes no mention of Stephen Douglas’s frequent contention that citizenship should not be extended to “inferior” races, since the United States was made “by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men” (Johannsen 1965, 33). Instead, Sandel criticizes Douglas’s advocacy of popular sovereignty, of permitting the white male electorate in every territory and state to decide the slavery question for itself, as an example of the “bracketing” of substantive moral questions that he associates with modern “minimalist liberalism” (21–22). This populism is, Sandel repeatedly suggests, similar to the suggestion that each state (or each woman) should decide on abortion for itself (or herself) (21, 102).
Sandel thus obscures the fact that Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty was preeminently an example of American republicanism, which appeals to the ideal of self-governing communities and to the notion that self-governance is often best done at subnational levels—a view that Sandel himself later endorses (345–48). Douglas’s desire to tolerate the states’ denials of self-governance to blacks, moreover, plainly stemmed not from “minimalist liberal” bracketing but from the racism that Sandel does not discuss. Nothing could be more distant from the concept of an “unencumbered self” than an outlook that contends, as Douglas did, that blacks or Chinese were not “men” within the meaning of the Declaration of Independence because of their racial identities. By connecting Douglas’s stance to modern liberalism instead of to racism and states’-rights republicanism, Sandel is not only wildly unhistorical. He hampers efforts to judge accurately the role republicanism has played and might play in defining American civic identity.
Sandel is more historically acute when he turns to Lincoln. Though he observes that Lincoln also opposed the suffrage for blacks (without mentioning that Lincoln eventually endorsed it, provoking John Wilkes Booth to assassinate him), Sandel allows that Lincoln insisted that slavery was morally wrong and that blacks were entitled to the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence (181). However, lest this make Lincoln a liberal, Sandel insists that he had an “artisan republican” conception of freedom because he did not think Americans would work for wages their whole lives (182–83). Yet he acknowledges that Lincoln never opposed wage labor, as many proponents of republicanism did (174, 185). And the very fact that Lincoln only slowly came to accept black suffrage demonstrates that his opposition to slavery was grounded not in a concern for republican self-governance so much as in his evolving understanding of the basic rights of human nature and of divine justice, though Lincoln certainly did believe slavery was an albatross for American republicanism. The reality is that neither “civic republicanism” or “minimalist liberalism” capture the thought of Lincoln or Douglas. Their debate is significantly distorted by reading it through such narrow lenses. And the issue that is most distorted is the issue that was most fundamental between them: whether or not blacks were entitled to basic human rights.
Sandel’s failures to encompass American racial conflicts within his framework only multiply as his account proceeds. Sandel rightly characterizes as “voluntarist” the rise of judicial activism in the service of contractual liberty during the antiregulatory Lochner era of the early twentieth century (42). He makes no mention, however, of the way the post-Civil War court invalidated and restrictively read Reconstruction laws designed to protect the civil rights of blacks, such as the 1875 Civil Rights Act. That statute was struck down in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 on the ground that it intruded on matters of self-governance that were reserved, in decentralized republican fashion, to the states. Republican appeals to states’ rights were ubiquitous in the judicial opposition to Reconstruction that prevailed in the late nineteenth century (Smith 1997, 330–37, 371–76).
Sandel is impressed by the concern for the formation of good citizens that characterized the Progressive era (208–21). But he says nothing about how this concern was expressed through support for Jim Crow laws, colonial rule over the nonwhite populations acquired in the Spanish-American War, and mounting race-based immigration restrictions—all policies justified, in part, by the claim that nonwhite races needed long-term tutelage under white Americans before they would be ready for republican self-governance (Smith 1997, 429–53). Similarly, Sandel applauds Woodrow Wilson’s worries about the civic consequences of large–scale capitalism and Theodore Roosevelt’s awareness of the need to foster a stronger sense of national citizenship (214–19). He does not, however, mention Wilson’s ardent and influential support of segregation, or Roosevelt’s advocacy of imperialism as an expression of the master status of America’s English-speaking, European-descended races (King 1995, 6–17).
Sandel’s minimization of these constitutive racial strains in American public life is astonishingly pervasive. He writes unblushingly that, once the Supreme Court struck down compulsory flag salutes in the West Virginia public schools in 1943, “the procedural republic had arrived” (54). At that time the race-based National Origins Quota system for immigration, Jim Crow laws (which included mandatory segregation, black disfranchisement, and laws against miscegenation), an explicitly Protestant public-school curriculum, and extensive restrictions on women’s economic rights all remained in effect in the United States. To suggest that at that point America had gone too far toward emphasizing the equal rights of persons abstracted from their racial, gender, and religious identities is to present a portrait of American civic identity that is historically invalid.
Yet it probably matters most that Sandel’s narrative retains these same deficiencies when it reaches contemporary America. At that point Sandel cannot wholly avoid a fact that is deeply problematic for his analysis. Though Sandel highlights Americans’ partial embrace of Keynesian economics as the source of modern liberalism (262, 273), in reality the kinds of civil-liberties decisions and interventionist economic policies that he associates with modern liberalism were more obviously connected to the transformations wrought by the civil-rights movement. As William Galston (1991, 268–69) has noted, the contemporary developments that preoccupy Sandel—the judicial decisions combating Protestant establishmentarianism, the expansion of freedom of expression, the enhancement of women’s autonomy, and the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society—all resulted, in part, from the civil rights movement and its inspiration of protest movements advocating women’s rights, welfare rights, and the rights of religious minorities. Correspondingly, a significant portion of the opposition to modern liberal policies stems from dissatisfaction with the erosion of traditional statuses those movements wrought.
Sandel cannot deny this last point: his whole analysis pushes him to worry about how recent decades have seen the “eroding” of those forms of community, including traditional “families and neighborhoods” and “ethnic and religious communities,” that he sees as having long provided Americans with “a source of identity and belonging” (294). But he does not wish to oppose the civil rights and other protest movements, at least not sharply. Hence he vaguely traces the erosion of traditional communities to unspecified “circumstances of modern life,” to Keynesianism, and to Americans’ otherwise unexplained choice to adopt a “voluntarist self-image” (203, 262, 294).
As he did with Lincoln, Sandel also tries to claim the civil rights movement for his cause by contending that, despite its apparent liberal concern for human rights and nondiscrimination, it was in fact “the finest expression of republican politics in our time” (348). Though Sandel concedes that the movement generated civil-rights and voting-rights laws that “served freedom in the voluntarist sense,” he maintains that it was forged from “particular identities and places,” especially “the black churches of the South” (348–49). It also, he contends, displayed the “higher, republican freedom” of collective self-governance, not just concern for individual rights (348).
Sandel is not wholly wrong. Vital religious and republican aspects of the civil rights movement are not captured in many versions of modern liberal theory espousing equal rights. Yet it is also hard to deny that the civil rights movement was importantly about the expansion of personal capacities to choose one’s way of life free from invidious discrimination, which Sandel portrays as the heart of modern liberalism. Which of these elements—republican, religious, or liberal—were most fundamental to the civil rights movement? Sandel really provides us no way to tell, though he writes as if it is clear that the republican strains were not only “higher” but deeper. However, he also repeatedly criticizes Thurgood Marshall’s judicial opinions as articulating precisely the voluntarist liberalism Sandel opposes (93, 106). One might be forgiven for viewing Marshall as being at least as authoritative an exponent of the philosophy of the civil rights movement as Sandel. But this would suggest that we should not see that movement as essentially “republican.”
Sandel cannot deny that at least some of the attacks on the transformations wrought in the 1960s stemmed from the deeply entrenched attachment to white supremacy that produced Jim Crow laws in the first place. But he maintains, without supporting argument, that “beyond the undeniable element of racism” in the increasingly successful electoral appeals of George Wallace and other conservatives from the late 1960s on, there lay “a broader protest against the powerlessness many Americans felt toward a distant federal government” (298). Sandel seems confident that racism is a minor part of the modern story, even though he no more addresses the question squarely here than elsewhere in the book.
Let us consider one last topic Sandel fails to discuss: the rise since the 1960s of advocates of public recognition of group rights, including special rights of access to and representation in public institutions for disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities, women, and some religious communities. These positions represent extensions of the agenda of at least some portions of the 1960s civil-rights and women’s movements, but they do not easily fit into Sandel’s account of modern American public life as dominated by a voluntaristic liberalism that has no place for conceptions of racial, ethnic, or gender identity. Instead, the advocates of affirmative action, majority-minority districts, anti-pornography laws, hate-speech codes, and “multicultural” educational programs are now often assailed as betraying colorblind and gender-neutral commitments to individual rights. In the last two decades, attacks on these measures have been at least as audible in the rhetoric of conservative politicians criticizing what they take to be modern liberalism as have assaults on Keynesian economics or liberal individualism.
What does Sandel have to say about these new calls for group rights (some of which draw inspiration from his 1982 book) and about conservative criticisms of them? Yet again, almost nothing. Many of the critics seem to be motivated not so much by their professed attachment to individual rights as by a desire to defend certain features of traditional racial and gender orders that group rights threaten to transform. Given the turn to the right over the past two decades, I cannot share Sandel’s undefended assurance that America’s traditional exclusionary and inegalitarian senses of community and citizenship need not be much feared today (321). Sandel gives so little attention to American conflicts over racial and gender issues, as well as related issues of immigration, religion, and civic education, and he generalizes so misleadingly from his scant evidence, that his analysis cannot be taken as an adequate account of the sources or problems of community and citizenship in America, past or present. He makes some important contributions to such an account, but not enough to sustain his main claims.
If these criticisms are at least broadly correct, what are the implications for the philosophical and political lessons Sandel offers at the end of Democracy’s Discontent?
On a philosophic level, I suggest it is well past time to end debate over conceptions of the self, encumbered or unencumbered. We must instead focus on the task to which Sandel rightly points but which he does not adequately undertake. Theorists must engage in explicit, substantive critical reflection about which notions of identity, obligation, and moral purpose might appropriately be embraced as authoritative by various sorts of people today, situated within the complex heritages, current conditions, and challenges that comprise their lives. Those reflections then should be offered not as unquestionable answers handed down from above but as aids to critical deliberation. American political theorists need to pay particular attention to nonliberal and nonrepublican traditions that have long been at the margins of political theory but that have been far more central to American political experience.
This approach does not rule out deciding on reflection that some of the understandings available to us represent apprehensions of universal moral truths. It rather means that our route to those truths, if we find them, must be one of ascent from a detailed appreciation of the ways our traditions have also been particular and historical, whatever transcendent insights we may deem them to contain. We should no longer begin inquiry by constructing highly abstract principles, scenarios, or hypothetical conditions and then seeking to derive from them through the use of logic alone what we take to be universal truths. Theory needs to come to grips with historical and empirical realities instead.
Politically, I draw three conclusions from my own efforts to grasp such realities as well as from Sandel’s account. First, I agree with Sandel that what he calls voluntarist liberal theories do not provide sufficient answers as to why Americans should feel obligated and motivated to join in collective endeavors of civic improvement. Because of the dangers of past doctrines that have valorized Americans as a divinely chosen or racially superior people, I also agree with him that we are well advised to define American purposes and duties in part by instead stressing the shared historical identity of Americans as members of a distinctive political community. Americans should seek to draw from reflections on their national history, evaluated in light of the best moral understandings that human minds can achieve, a sense of what worthwhile things they can hope to attain collectively that they cannot attain alone. I believe, however, that a fuller sense of that history than Sandel provides, one that attends especially to the problems of racial, gender, and class hierarchy that have been the source of Americans’ greatest historical failings, points toward giving efforts to solve those problems much higher priority than Sandel seems inclined to do.
Second, the need for such efforts makes me wary of Sandel’s celebration of decentralization and devolution (300, 345–49). Through most of U.S. history, the causes of localism and states’ rights have been closely associated with the preservation of local systems of racial, ethnic, economic, and gender subordination. Major transformations have come, insofar as they have come, only with the aid of substantial national action (Klinkner 1999). Perhaps we have reached the point where, as Sandel believes, calls for federalism no longer are coded calls to abandon egalitarian initiatives. But in light of his inattention to the American structures and ideologies of inequality that federalism long protected, it is hard to share his faith that this corner has indeed been turned in American life.
Third and correspondingly, although Sandel is quite right to urge us to seek ways of “dispersing” sovereignty amidst a “multiplicity of communities and political bodies,” there is more value than he allows in “the cosmopolitan vision” that urges us to reach for a greater sense of “the solidarity of humankind” (345). I cannot deny that cosmopolitan aspirations have a utopian quality about them, and that their too-ardent and premature pursuit can be horribly counterproductive. But as Sandel rightly observes, today the world is predominantly characterized by “resurgent aspirations of subnational groups for autonomy and self-rule,” groups that often define themselves in “ethnic, religious, and linguistic” terms (344). In that environment, even as we encourage Americans to think of themselves as a distinctive people with a special history in which they can take pride and find partial guidance, it is also wise not to denigrate too quickly the cosmopolitan moral traditions that have always pointed Americans beyond themselves and their own nation. Yes, if we are to combat intolerant national chauvinism, we probably need a richer sense of the meaningfulness of our political community than much modern liberal theorizing provides. But if that sense is in the end to be truly satisfying and worth defending, it must give prominence to the belief, shared by the greatest of American leaders from Washington to Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., that our commitment to achieve the blessings of liberty ultimately is aimed not only at serving ourselves but at improving the lot of all humanity. Neither intellectually nor morally is there any justification for treating American interests and aspirations as the only ones that finally matter; and even politically, I do not think a public philosophy of being “for ourselves only” can really serve to make civic membership seem truly meaningful in the long run. Only a suitably elevated content can provide the right road out of American democracy’s discontents.
References
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Johnnsen, Robert W., ed. 1965. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. New York: Oxford University Press.
King, Desmond. 1995. Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S. Federal Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klinkner, Philip A., with Rogers M. Smith. 1999. The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of America’s Commitment to Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Morgan, Edmund S. 1975. American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1972. The Government of Poland. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Sandel, Michael J. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sandel, Michael J. 1996. Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Shain, Barry A. 1994. The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, Rogers M. 1989. “One United People’: Second-Class Female Citizenship and the American Quest for Community.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 1(2): 229–93.
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Endnotes
*: Rogers M. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Government, Department of Political Science, Yale University, P.O. Box 208301, New Haven, CT 06520, telephone (203) 432-5246, e-mail rogers.smith@yale.edu, is the author of The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (with Philip A. Klinkner) (Chicago, 1999); Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale, 1997); Citizenship Without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity (with Peter H. Schuck) (Yale, 1985); and Liberalism and American Constitutional Law (Harvard, 1985). Back.
Note 1: See also Sandel 1996, 65–66: “To question the voluntarist justification of religious liberty is not necessarily to agree with Locke that people never choose their religious beliefs.” Back.
Note 2: See Smith 1997, 15. For a discussion of why and how these traditions have lost force in the modern era and evidence of their partial resurgence, see Klinkner 1999. Back.
Note 3: See, e.g., Antonin Scalia, joined by William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, dissenting in Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 114 S. Ct. 2481 (1994) (accommodations of religion represent “the best of our traditions”); Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986) (upholding school speech restrictions as instruments to promote “fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system”); Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) (private homosexual conduct is not protected, as it is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions”). Back.