The Harvard professor who foresaw our age of anger – and what happens next
The pessimist who became a prophet
Martin Sandbu FEB 7 2026
Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming
I. Recollection
One Friday last autumn, a message dropped into my inbox announcing that Michael Sandel, a Harvard University political thinker, would be awarded the Berggruen Prize, a sort of Nobel for public philosophers.
My first thought was that Sandel, a lifetime critic of the kind of philosophical liberalism that has influenced western politics for half a century, was a deserving winner. The 72-year-old has taught at Harvard since 1980, but has reached far beyond the ivory tower with his hugely popular Socratic style of moral questioning, calling for a less market-dominated and more civic-minded public philosophy.
He has the ear of national leaders. His public lectures have drawn packed crowds to open-air stadiums, the Sydney Opera House and St Paul’s Cathedral. His undergraduate course, “Justice”, is one of Harvard’s most popular, drawing many hundreds of students a year. The online version, which is free to watch, has been visited by many millions of viewers including, notably, in China. Over the decades, Sandel has shaped the minds of tens of thousands of young people who have gone on to occupy privileged places in the global elite.
I was one of them. As a PhD student in political economy and government, I took Sandel’s graduate seminar and worked as a teaching fellow for “Justice”. So the news of Sandel’s prize, coming as the world is spiralling into aggressive illiberal nationalism and social unrest, gave me a tingle of nostalgia for that more optimistic period. When I came to Harvard in 1998, it seemed that history had ended and liberal democratic capitalism had triumphed. My generation was ready to be masters of all we surveyed.
With hindsight, the themes Sandel has developed since the 1980s feel like a metronome beat to the changes that brought that era to an end. He was among those who warned early that the prevailing liberal thinking did not pay sufficient attention to the role of communities in letting us live as self-governing citizens. He warned that relying on markets to organise every area of human life would undermine the social practices that imbue our lives with meaning. And he questioned much-vaunted notions of meritocracy. Sandel has a lot to say, then, about our rageful era of political polarisation.
The strange reflection of his influence is how the Maga movement in the US and its ideological allies abroad have used arguments that look like perverted versions of Sandel’s warnings. Vice-president JD Vance, Maga godfather Steve Bannon and tech oligarch Peter Thiel can come across as so many “Bizarro Sandels” with their complaints about where the liberal establishment has taken the country, though in the defence of quite different positions from his.
If anything, the rise of populism, which Sandel foresaw, has only intensified the problems he argued against: the erosion of public spirit, polarised societies, the commodification of everything, the false promises of meritocracy — in short, the corruption of the public sphere. Watching these developments unfold, I started to think again about Sandel’s decades of work. I wondered if I, and the rest of my cohort, had missed or ignored a key to preparing for this political moment. Even, perhaps, a blueprint for something better.
So last November, I got back in touch with my old professor, and over the course of the winter we had several long conversations about where things might have gone wrong, both in the realm of ideas and in the world at large.
II. Confession
These are particularly poignant questions for my generation, those of us now in or hitting our fifties. We are old enough to have experienced the cold war and the revolutions of 1989 and young enough that the new societies they produced were ours to shape. Especially for those with a privileged background or education, what Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history” was supposed to put prosperity, freedom and ever-increasing tolerance within reach. The loss of that dream is our generation’s loss. It may also be our fault.
If you were a student of political philosophy in the mid-90s, you would be expected to take sides in what was known as the “liberalism vs communitarianism” debate. This contest of ideas, which I first encountered as an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-1990s, had caught fire after the giant of postwar liberal philosophy, John Rawls, redefined the field with his 1974 magnum opus, A Theory of Justice. Here he laid out his view of “justice as fairness”: that a just society is one with the political and economic arrangements which a person would choose if they did not know what their economic, cultural or social positions in it would be. In such a position, Rawls claimed, people would adopt a system with the mix of market freedoms and redistributions that maximised the material wellbeing of those worst off, with equal opportunities for all, while being neutral with respect to any religious, moral and cultural ideas of how to live.
This theory of “liberal egalitarianism” was extraordinarily influential. With it, Rawls redefined political philosophy to a point where almost everything that followed was either a commentary or a critique on his work, challenging his conclusions but from within his framework. Only a minority of thinkers rejected it more fundamentally. Sandel was firmly in that minority.
By the time I arrived at Harvard, Sandel had long since established himself as a critic of the dominant liberalism, first with his 1982 book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, then, in 1996, with Democracy’s Discontent, which proposed a more “civic” alternative conception of politics. Sandel’s philosophical rejection of Rawls’ reasoning was that it requires an impossibly “unencumbered self”, so stripped of attachments to family, community, country, faith or vocation that it could not bear the substantive conclusions he built on it. This was summarised as “prioritising the right over the good”, elevating abstract neutrality rather than culturally informed beliefs about what makes a good life. He was not alone. Thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer raised related objections, which were grouped, at times dismissively, as the “communitarian” critique of liberal theory.
But Sandel’s critique of Rawls was also a political one. “I worried,” he told me this winter, “that, politically, the claim to arrange the basic structure of society in a way that was ‘neutral’ towards the competing moral, and even spiritual, conceptions of citizens would be seen as disingenuous . . . and disempowering. If people were asked to leave their moral and political convictions outside when they entered the public square, then, in effect, the fundamental questions are decided by markets and by technocrats, rather than by democratic citizens deliberating.”
This was just the sort of thinking I had reconnected with Sandel to explore. I sensed that the ideas that exercised political philosophers in that pivotal era around the collapse of communism had shaped the way politics was practised in a way that had left too many citizens disempowered.
When I contacted him, Sandel responded with alacrity. He seemed particularly interested in helping me map his ideas on to the trajectory of my generation. It was more than a decade since I had last seen him, but apart from ageing — he welcomed his first grandchild between our online meetings — he had not changed much. He was as interested in other people’s views, and friendly in his disagreement with them, as I remembered from his seminars a quarter-century ago.
In preparation for our conversations, Sandel directed me to a passage in Democracy’s Discontent: “To the extent that contemporary politics puts sovereign states and sovereign selves in question, it is likely to provoke reactions from those who would banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country’, to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.”
Today this sounds more than a little prophetic. It also, as I put it to Sandel, casts him in the role of Cassandra, the Trojan seer in Greek mythology cursed with a foresight that those she shared it with declined to heed, with tragic results. If so, it has an uncomfortable implication for those of us who were in a position to listen. I, for one, was primed to be impressed by Sandel’s critiques. One reason why I chose to pursue a PhD was a hope of finding a way out of the blithe fatalism that prevailed in those days in American and British politics. The 1990s were the heyday of globalisation, a time when trust in markets dominated the thinking of people in power. As far as anyone could tell, we were heading towards a free-market future, an ever more integrated and “flat” world in which man-made barriers and natural transaction costs would disappear. “There was no alternative” to state retrenchment or economic globalisation, as politicians from Margaret Thatcher to Angela Merkel would argue over the decades. Not only that, it was implied that our lack of choice in the matter was fine because this would be the best outcome for all.
In my short academic career, and in journalism later, I hunted for the cracks in conventional economic policy arguments to show there were more alternatives than often assumed. The questions Sandel had taught me to ask contributed to that desire. Even so, back then I thought Sandel protested too much. His arguments felt too anti-liberal; his demotion of individual preference in favour of wider, cultural sources of meaning felt old-fashioned, even a little reactionary. Or perhaps they felt too much like parenting to someone ready to enter a newly opening world.
Re-reading Sandel’s work now, one idea stands out that I hadn’t paid enough attention to: the insistence that we should care about “the civic consequences of economic power”. This was a richer view of how to think about economic policy than the one held by most centrist politicians after 1989. And the failure to appreciate it goes a long way to explain what went wrong in the west.
III. Regret
Sandel always resisted the “communitarian” label. His preoccupation was, and remains, to advance a different view of freedom from that he identified with Rawls. In liberal theory, he argued, freedom means “getting what I want, satisfying my desires — provided I don’t violate the rights of others to pursue theirs”. But this “consumerist” conception of freedom crowds out a “civic” version, in which individuals are only free insofar as they can have a “meaningful voice in shaping the forces that govern the collective project”.
That distinction has a long pedigree; philosophers have argued for centuries about what real freedom means. I hadn’t thought of this dispute for a long time when Sandel’s name popped up in my inbox. But I was wrong to forget about it. Ideas shape politics, and a consumerist conception of freedom suited the political entrepreneurs of the 1990s perfectly. Yet it is clear now that a sense of disempowerment has been building up in western societies over time.
I suggested to Sandel that Rawlsian liberalism had laid the ground for the “Third Way”, the predominantly centrist political position adopted by social democratic parties in the 1990s, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and quickly followed by the Nordic and German labour parties. Once justice became seen as primarily a matter of securing a fair distribution of material rewards and political freedoms, the way to a technocratic embrace of market mechanisms and economic globalisation was a short one for the new centre-left.
Sandel agreed. While a more traditionally social democratic interpretation of Rawls had also been possible, he said, it was the market-friendly liberalism that won the day. Centre-left parties began to use market incentives as the governance tool of first resort. They often embraced privatisation, and designed welfare reforms to make it less rewarding to stay out of work. The much-quoted Peter Mandelson line about New Labour being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes” was the quintessential expression of this version of Rawlsian liberalism.
It would be wrong to blame Rawls outright for these political outcomes. One academic friend I consulted bristled at the suggestion, emphasising “the part of Theory of Justice that nobody reads”, where Rawls says society must provide “the social bases of self-respect”. It was the rise of economics that led politics astray, this friend said. Yet there was an undeniable congeniality between Rawlsian liberalism and a certain kind of economist’s thinking. After all, if justice simply requires the arrangements where the poorest get as much as possible, then it’s a matter for economists to find out which arrangements those are. Back then, most economists believed the answer was lightly regulated markets and globalisation, coupled with solid redistribution.
Meanwhile, communitarianism fuelled its own kind of political momentum. Its deep respect for group rights and identity expression informed the debate on multiculturalism through the 1990s and 2000s, often encouraging a benign neglect of value clashes between cultures, and rolling the pitch for the identity politics that would eventually convulse parts of the left and inflame parts of the right. Sandel and I agreed that, in a strange way, both the liberal and the communitarian strand of politics ended up abdicating from serious engagement with democratic pluralism.
Sandel’s focus was mostly on what he calls liberalism’s “toleration of avoidance”. Here he made an important claim, that the appeal of markets to post-1989 centrists was not just that “markets deliver the goods” in the sense that growth would pay for redistribution. “There was a deeper source of the appeal,” he said, which was that turning to the market “seemed to spare politicians and parties from engaging in messy, controversial debates about how to value goods — what contributions to the economy contribute the greatest value, where to allocate capital among competing public purposes”. In short, technocratic management was preferred to raw political disagreement.
Sandel’s j’accuse is that this kind of liberalism took what should have been the most political questions out of politics, leaving them to be settled by market mechanisms. I proposed that this was similar to the appeal of “effective altruism”, the neo-utilitarian moral theory popular among students and tech bros, which reduces moral questions to basic calculations of effectiveness. “Exactly,” he said.
In an updated edition of Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel gives the example of Barack Obama’s approach to the 2008 financial crisis. “By standing between the bankers and ‘the pitchforks’,” as the public demanded legal limits on bonuses and no bailouts for banks, “Obama sought to mollify the public outrage, rather than give it voice. [He] treated the financial crisis as a technical problem for experts to solve, not a civic question about the role of finance in democratic life.”
Meanwhile, communitarianism often heightened a sense of separateness. As its political expression in identity politics became more inward-looking, it tended to encourage society’s fragmentation into group-based identities. Sandel agreed that in both camps there was “a kind of avoidance [of] moral contestation”, rather than a “pluralism of engagement with moral disagreement” over how to value social practices, or the contribution of different jobs to the economy, or cultural identities.
If this is right, it is clear to see why both views would struggle as globalisation intensified. Since globalisation lowers barriers to all kinds of human contact, it is natural to expect pluralism to increase in economically open societies. But the causality runs the other way too. If markets are the solution to pluralism, then more pluralism calls for more markets. And if identity politics separates communities based on identity markers, it also encourages tighter cross-border links as these identities criss-cross national divisions.
By now, Sandel and I were almost egging each other on in our respective pessimisms. I came to think this “tolerance of moral avoidance” had put us on a path to conflict. In the communitarian version, groups are set up against one another in a zero-sum game: if there is no common political project, success for one group must end up being seen as a defeat for others. Think of the affirmative action debate. In the market-liberal version, a group to whom the market denies what they think they are due will reject it as a justification for their plight. Think of America’s white working class. Either way, some group will eventually knock over the table.
“Could I add an elaboration of that point?” Sandel said. “One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”
IV. Guilt
It is proof of Sandel’s generosity that he presumes his opponents have principled grounds for their arguments. I can be less generous about my own cohort, whose working life began just as the rewards for those at the top took off. We may have internalised arguments for the success of the system we graduated into, but that does not change one fact: those arguments are self-serving.
One derivation of market-friendly liberalism Sandel has long questioned is meritocracy, the idea that society should be organised to give the most able the advancement they deserve. I remember how he would warn us teaching fellows that in the classes debating distributive justice, undergraduates would all preach meritocracy. They were adamant they had earned their Harvard places through hard work alone. In the lecture hall, Sandel would then ask the 800 or so assembled undergraduates to raise their hand if they were their parents’ first (or only) child. He still does this today, and when he does, “75 to 80 per cent of the students raise their hands and there’s an audible gasp when they look around and notice that”. The over-representation (more than half of US children are second born or later), combined with plausible reasons why birth order matters for parental attention and other advantages, is a powerful prompt for Sandel’s students to rethink whether they can really claim meritocratic achievement.
The actual distribution of elite college places and other gateways to success is, of course, far from meritocratic. But Sandel’s criticism applies to meritocracy even when it succeeds, perhaps especially then. In what Sandel terms “the rhetoric of rising”, the moral goal is simply that everyone should go as high as their talents and hard work will carry them. But when we ask whether people have deserved their positions in an unequal society we tend not to ask whether a good society is compatible with inequality. The value that different jobs contribute to a society is left for the supposedly “neutral” labour markets to discover. Sandel would say this is exactly the type of question that cannot be outsourced from a political economy that is “hospitable to self-government”. In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel points out that meritocracy adds insult to injury by suggesting that society’s losers deserve their positions.
That is not the only self-serving position for elites to hold. The Third Way preached globalisation as a “post-ideological” or “post-partisan” stance, Sandel told me. “But of course it barely concealed a contestable moral and political claim.” It cast those who protested against economic openness as atavistic “defenders of the narrow, parochial, and intolerant”. The implication, Sandel thought, was that contesting globalisation was “on a par with bigotry”.
Then there was what Sandel calls “the skyboxification of public life”, a reference to corporate boxes in sports stadiums. Sports events were once a class-mixing experience. Ticket price differences were modest. “Everyone had to stand in the same long queues to use the bathroom, everybody had to drink the same stale beer and eat the same hot dogs. When it rained, everyone got wet. But with the advent of luxury skyboxes, that no longer was the case.” It’s a specific example of what he calls one of the most corrosive effects of growing inequality: that winners and losers increasingly “live separate lives”. This is not just a matter of distributive justice, of unequal incomes, but that we lose the “chance encounters” [that] remind us of our common citizenship, “of what it is we share”. How many of us at the winning end of these developments have given much thought to what we have collectively lost in the process?
V. Redemption?
One question I was eager to discuss with Sandel was about the road not taken. What if voters and politicians had made choices more in line with his recommendations? That’s a reflection on what could have been, whether we might have been spared some of today’s turmoil. But the more urgent question is what we are to do now, if it is not too late.
Many of Sandel’s arguments are today wielded by the articulate face of the Maga movement. Trump’s radical actions are justified as necessary to revalorise American communities, elevate the dignity of work over the value of consumption, restore traditional values, or end the false justifications for elevating a privileged, credentialled class. His administration’s attack on universities, including Harvard, advances arguments that sound very similar to how Sandel talks about meritocracy.
Sandel is lucid about what’s going on here, seeing nothing principled about Trump’s attack, which is an attempt “to exert power over the main independent institutions of civil society that would otherwise offer a check on the kind of power he’s seeking”. But he also worries that elite universities “have allowed ourselves to become conscripted as sorting machines for a market-driven meritocratic society”. This state of affairs is “crowding out the intrinsic educational mission that makes higher education higher”, he argues. Straying from that mission creates an opening for Trump’s attacks.
So I asked Sandel what he thought an economy hospitable to civic flourishing might look like. I did not expect a worked-out policy programme; that is not what a political philosopher’s work entails. But he offered a series of examples which illustrate how today’s politicians could think seriously about the civic consequences of economic power.
For a start he would combat “skyboxification”, removing tax deductibility for such corporate hospitality. This might seem a trivial detail but it isn’t just about fairness, he said. It is also about “honouring what it is we share when we go to root for the local football team”. This is vintage Sandel, recalling his seminars debating whether the moral meaning of goods can survive being allocated (only) by free markets. He would also tighten corporate tax loopholes, but on the basis of “economic patriotism”, arguing that the companies using them are turning their backs on the country that made their profits possible.
He wants measures against “financialisation”, by which I take him to mean both the role of private finance in allocating capital and the political status and influence of financiers. His objection is that finance misvalues contributions to society and pre-empts political deliberation about how to value different kinds of work. This leads him to support a financial transaction tax on speculative or extractive capital, and cutting taxes on work. He would also ban phones in schools, and have a debate on Australian-style social media restrictions or a ban on targeted digital ads, asking whether “this is damaging to the kind of human flourishing and character formation we want for our kids”.
What about Joe Biden’s term in office, which had seemed a significant departure from the previous consensus? Sandel praised Biden’s revival of antitrust, his step back from “neoliberal globalisation”, his subsidies for industrial construction and his focus on the dignity of work over a “rhetoric of rising”. And yet, he judged, “it didn’t add up to a new political economy of citizenship” because Biden, unlike his inspiration Franklin Roosevelt, “was not able to articulate a new politics of the common good”.
As the new year arrived and our conversations reached their conclusion, one fault line remained: the “open versus closed economies” debate. I think Sandel is correct that it was wrong to disdain those on the “closed” side of the divide. Yet, all these years later, I still will not give up the view that there is something precious about deepening economic exchange between nations. I suggested to Sandel that he and his fellow critics have a tendency to run together “globalisation”, “neoliberalism”, “financialisation”, “market faith” and “value neutrality” as so many names for a single flawed system. In my 2020 book, Economics of Belonging, I tried to identify economic policies governments could use to make all their citizens feel empowered again. I argued that you can combine much better policies for social cohesion at home while keeping your economy integrated with the rest of the world, as has been shown in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. If Sandel has overlooked the possibility, is this because he leans too exclusively on the US experience?
Sandel did not push back too hard, beyond pointing to the existence of populist insurgencies in Europe. But this disagreement is, of course, the sort of contest between moral views that he welcomes. His priority is to have political and policy practices that don’t exclude from deliberation competing views about how we ought to live our lives. From that, he invites us to believe that better policies — and a more cohesive polity — could emerge.
We agreed that the current populist backlash will not fulfil the desires or answer the grievances that called it into being. So what then? Sandel sees two possibilities. In one future, the disappointment creates an opening for renewal, for creating “a morally more robust civic life”. But that depends on the “moral and political imagination of those who would offer an alternative to Maga and Trump”. Then there is a darker scenario, where the authoritarian alternatives consolidate their hold on the angry and disillusioned. Which way we go, he says, “is the open question, the most important question of our time”.
Martin Sandbu is the FT’s European economics commentator
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