Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “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.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

About the Author :
Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University and author of The Tyranny of Merit. His freely available online course “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world.

Review :
An important book about the meaning of liberty…By revealing the shallowness of liberal and conservative views of democracy, [Sandel] inspires us to reevaluate what American politics is really about. Sandel gives us one of the most powerful works of public philosophy to appear in recent years…A brilliant diagnosis. A profound contribution to our understanding of the present discontents. An elegant reading of constitutional controversies and political arguments, this book is bound to change the course of American historiography, political philosophy, and legal scholarship. Among liberalism’s critics, few have been more influential or insightful than Michael Sandel…This carefully argued, consistently thought-provoking book is grounded in a sophisticated understanding of past and present political debates. A detailed, coherent and marvelously illuminating narrative of American political and legal history. Recounting the debates over ratifying the Constitution, chartering a national bank, abolishing slavery, the spread of wage labor, Progressive Era reforms and the New Deal, Sandel skillfully highlights the presence (and, increasingly, absence) of republican ideology, the shift from a ‘political economy of citizenship’ to a political economy of growth. Sandel’s wonderful new book…will help produce what he desires — a quickened sense of the moral consequences of political practices and economic arrangements…[A] splendid explanation of our rich political tradition. A brilliant book…Sandel suggests that we won’t heal our fractured body politic unless we revive an American civic tradition that understands freedom not only as liberty from coercion but also as the freedom to govern ourselves together. It will challenge liberals and conservatives, moderates and radicals in ways they have not been challenged before. Democracy’s Discontent is a wonderful example of immanent social criticism, which is to say, of social criticism as it ought to be written. Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent is an inspired and deeply disturbing polemic about citizenship…The most compelling…account I have read of how citizens might draw on the energies of everyday life and the ties of civil society to reinvigorate the public realm. Beautifully argued…American history is, in Mr. Sandel’s telling, a story of the tragic loss of civic republicanism— the notion that liberty is not about freedom from government, but about the capacity for self- government, which alone makes the practice of freedom possible. A bold and compelling critique of American liberalism that challenges us to reassess some basic assumptions about our public life and its dilemmas. It is a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship. Americans have lost faith in the possibility of self-government, and they are frightened by the disintegration of community they see happening all around them. Twenty-six years since Democracy’s Discontent was first published, Sandel writes that this way of thinking has brought us to a political precipice—a moment when the combination of frayed social bonds and intense political polarization calls into question the very future of the American experiment. Few books are as relevant a quarter-century after their appearance as when published—but Michael Sandel has made his classic Democracy’s Discontent even more so. Rethinking how the political economy of the middle of the twentieth century has mutated to the detriment of American citizenship, substituting consumerism and globalization for community and self-rule, this is a touchstone study for our times. Michael Sandel’s deeply insightful analysis of the erosion of the political economy of citizenship has never been more timely than at the present moment. Essential—and ultimately hopeful—reading for all those who wonder if our democratic experiment will survive in the twenty-first century.