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Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
By Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press
417 pp.; $24.95

Worry over the state of the American soul is as old as Massachusetts Bay Colony. Are we, as Judge Robert Bork has it, Slouching Towards Gomorrah? Maybe, maybe not--but we can reliably place Bork's book and others like it in a long tradition, what Sacvan Bercovitch has called "the American Jeremiad." We hear such public outcries whenever America seems to be failing its promise as "a city set on a hill."

In their earliest form, among the Puritans, such jeremiads were expressed in theological terms. Over time, however, as America developed into a pluralistic culture, philosophy replaced theology as the authoritative lingua franca wherein America's ills were to be diagnosed and prescriptions proffered. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a distinctive genre, public philosophy, emerged as an effort to address the ills besetting the modern America polity. A direct line of descent can be drawn from John Dewey to Walter Lippman to Robert Bellah and Bill Bennett.

Anxiety and public philosophy go hand in hand. Whenever the national mood grows tense, we should expect to see the public philosopher arise, ready to offer his cure. Indeed, as we lurch toward the century's end, the field is crowded with contenders, among whom Michael Sandel is one of the most worthy of our attention. His book Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy is one part litany of woe, one part naming of evil, but also with a promised deliverance at hand.

This past spring the Atlantic Monthly ran an excerpt from Democracy's Discontent as a cover story. The editors chose wisely. Sandel is no stranger to the central networks of intellectual and political discourse of our day. Professor of government at Harvard University (where he has taught since 1980), a distinguished scholar, a popular lecturer, an articulate speaker who appears regularly on public television and radio, Sandel knows and is known in the public places where the informed and sophisticated voice is heard. At a recent national conference for political scientists, a plenary session on this book's thesis was attended by hundreds of fellow academics, with the single respondent being America's best-known philosopher, Richard Rorty.

In the academic world, Sandel is best known as the philosopher who launched the most cogent critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, that epic work of liberal theory that defined a generation's justification for the welfare state. Sandel is credited with pinpointing the key chink in liberalism's armor, hastening the overthrow of the kind of liberal philosophy developed by Rawls, Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin (and a host of lesser champions), which holds that the modern liberal state must remain neutral on the issues pertaining to the Good Life. Given his accomplishments, when Sandel speaks, many listen.

Sandel's is a big book, a full 350 pages of carefully written prose followed by an additional 50 pages of notes. Aficionados of American history, politics, and constitutional law will find here a rich banquet of favorites as well as some interesting tidbits that may have previously eluded their cognizance.

The book is divided into two unequal sections. The first four chapters (about a third of the text) survey the constitutional basis for our current political regime. In a discussion deeply steeped in the interpretive work of the Supreme Court, Sandel argues that this judicial body has been central to the creation of "the procedural republic," a term that for him signals the practical thrust of a deleterious contemporary public philosophy. Public philosophy he defines as "the political theory implicit in our practice, the assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life." It is thus not surprising that the Court, the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, has such a central place in his account.

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