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In the next five chapters (the remaining two-thirds of the text), Sandel shifts his focus from the Constitution to political economy. Here his concern is to point out how the shift from the rural, local economy of the young American nation to that of our present-day postindustrial, global corporate structure has sapped the vitality and resources of democratic self-government.

Taken together the two parts of the book set out his case for why "the public philosophy of contemporary liberalism fails to answer democracy's discontent." Throughout, Sandel's assumption is clear: Since public philosophy has in some way damaged the American soul, it also can (and should) be part of the cure.

Sandel tells a story that at one level resembles the conservative critique of liberalism. In his account, the birth of America witnessed the momentary cohabitation of what would ultimately emerge as rival traditions: liberalism, with its notion of liberty defined in terms of the individual's rights over and against the institutions of popular government; and republicanism, with its notion of liberty as a consequence of self-government, or the condition of being an active part of the decision-making structure of one's community. Liberalism possesses a juridical conception of the citizen, republicanism a political conception. The former concerns the self, the latter the citizen.

Like contemporary conservatives, Sandel reads American history in some ways as tragedy: "The loss of self-government and the erosion of community . . . together define the anxiety of the age." This condition has come to pass not due to any absence of public philosophy, but rather because the wrong form of public philosophy has gained historical ascendancy: "broadly speaking, republicanism predominated earlier in American history; liberalism later."

The particular cast of our contemporary public philosophy "is a recent arrival, a development of the last forty or fifty years." This version of liberalism he calls the "procedural republic." Readers familiar with Sandel will recognize this term from his earlier Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), wherein he critiqued Rawls's account of liberal justice. There, Sandel mounted a powerful philosophic argument, demonstrating how liberalism as articulated by Rawls possesses only a thin theory of the human self, one that does not sufficiently recognize the thickness of human personality and self-understandings. (Rawls has subsequently shifted his argument to include elements of this critique. But, for Sandel, he has not moved far enough.) In Democracy's Discontent, Sandel demonstrates historically how a complex, pluralistic human community under the thralldom of liberal proceduralism begins to unravel. Proceduralism cannot by itself secure public justice. And worse. As the possibility of public justice has become despaired of, additional social and political pathologies have been released, deepening the sense of anxiety.

When future historians chronicle the demise of liberalism, Sandel's critique will figure in the narrative. However, despite his analytical acuity, Sandel's historiography is somewhat suspect. For in discussing liberalism and republicanism as formative traditions upon the development of the American personality, he pointedly ignores another tradition that has been powerfully recovered in the recent work of American historians, that is, the tradition of Protestant Christianity. One wonders at such a glaring omission by such a thoughtful scholar.

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