The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

Michael Sandel is an American political philosopher who teaches at Harvard University, having taken up a position there in 1981. He currently holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory chair at Harvard Law School. In 2002, he was elected to a position on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a regular fellow, and previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics during the Bush administration. Educated at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar—studying and writing under the famed Charles Taylor—Sandel has been writing and publishing since 1982, an output that contains several best-selling books alongside his normal academic teaching and writing.

Sandel is one of the few American academics who have transcended their niche academic position in order to speak, write, and exercise influence within the wider public sphere. His works have been translated into dozens of languages, gaining him a wide international following—including India, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan—and he has authored and recorded various online video courses that have reached millions of people.

Sandel’s publishing projects are a fitting complement to his academic career as a philosopher and professor of political theory, speaking to a wide audience and covering subject matter that is applicable to the American public on a large scale. His emphasis on justice and the common good are topics of political concern that have interested political theorists ever since the time of Plato and Aristotle, who also wrote much on the intersection of justice, politics, and the common social good. In this sense, Sandel’s work on merit and the implications of basing a political, economic, and educational system on such a concept is a natural trajectory for his body of work and career interests as a whole. His criticism also garners more respect thanks to his place within the very system that he is critiquing: Coming from outside, a critique would not necessarily carry the same weight, but coming from Sandel—someone who has arguably benefitted from the very same system he is criticizing—the project appears genuine and serious.

Sandel has been writing over the whole course of his academic career. His first book was titled Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, first published in 1982 (just a year after taking up his position at Harvard). Other notable works include Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (2007), and Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009), among others. What is clear about Sandel’s publishing history is that he has a wide and eclectic range of academic proficiencies that all revolve tangentially around the concepts of political justice, offering critiques of contemporary liberal politics as defined by classical liberalism in the post-enlightenment era.