Liberalism, Justice and Pluralism on Sandel’s republicanism view
Isadora Coan
When we are talking about the possible dialogues between the political
liberalism and the republicanism, one of the aspects that we must confront is
the question of the characterization of the republicanism as a social-political
organization that is irrevocably archaic, presumably unable to overcome
liberalism (or some version of liberalism) as a public philosophy best suited to
the current cultural, political and economic configuration of the liberaldemocratic governments and the concomitant strengthening of individual rights
that governs our institutions.
If the matter of the democratization of political institutions has been (and
still is) connected to the rejection of restrictive and coercive organizations;
nowadays (since at least the civil rights movements of the 1960’s) the
democratic quality also relates to the pluralism which distinguishes
contemporary Western societies.
In this context, the theory of justice of John Rawls and, later, his
proposal for a political liberalism, are paradigmatic of the circumstances related
to the development of democratic societies. They deal with how institutions
should treat conceptions of right and justice as prior, rather than to bring moral
issues to the political sphere. The state and all its apparatus undergo a process
of neutralization, stripping any assumptions that may involve the imposition of a
particular conception of good to an individual or minority. Only then, leaving the
different visions of the good life to each rightful individual to chose, we could get
to achieve political institutions and practices that suit the complex and plural
world in which we live.
Thus, I aim to outline some points of the debate between the supposedly
undisputed hegemony of liberalism and Michael Sandel’s republican alternative.
The research on which is based this text has as its core three books: Liberalism
and the limits of justice (1982) (henceforth LLJ), in which Sandel dissects
Rawls’ theory of justice, exposing the contradictory aspects of his arguments;
Democracy’s discontent: America in search of a public philosophy (1996)
(henceforth DD), a historical recovery of what Sandel describes as the process
by which liberalism supplanted republicanism as the dominant public
philosophy in the U.S.; and Debating democracy’s discontent (1998)
(henceforth DDD) a collection of articles by critics and supporters of Sandel’s
proposal.
With the thoroughness and depth with which Sandel retrieves the
Rawlsian arguments (in LLJ) and the legal and political-economic debates in
American history (in DD), this text has no ambition to account for all points of
his position, but to allude to a theme that runs through both the critique of
Rawlsian liberal system and the proposed revitalization of the Republican trend
in American political life. This theme is the one of pluralism and its tensions with
what some critics (e.g., PANGLE, GALSTON, CONNOLLY) characterize as the
latent nostalgia of the republican proposal.
To do this, I will at first do a brief recovery of Sandel’s attack on the
conception of the primacy of justice in the work of Rawls (and the notion of the
person behind this proposal) regarding its failure to ensure the liberal premise
of respect for individuals as ends in themselves, in their distinctiveness and
plurality. Secondly, I want to map some arguments that could make us glimpse
an immanent theory of the person in the republicanism proposed by Sandel to,
finally, confront both Sandel’s texts with the appreciation of his critics.
But before discussing these issues properly, I think some brief remarks
about the subtleties of the theoretical identifications mobilized in the text will be
useful. To classify Sandel as a Republican is not an arbitrary act, the author
characterizes himself as such (Sandel, 1996), or at least shows discomfort with
the communitarian characterization made by some commentators of his work
(KUKATHAS, PETTIT (1990); FORST (2010)).
Sandel asserts in the preface to the second edition of LLJ that “there are
two versions of the claim that justice is relative to good [and not independent of
it, as stated by liberalism], and only one of them is ‘communitarian’ in the usual
sense”. One of the versions relates to how the “principles of justice derive their
moral force from values commonly espoused or widely shared in a particular
community or tradition”. Only this version is really communitarian (LLJ, p. x).
The second way to connect justice with conceptions of good holds that
the “principles of justice depend for their justification on the moral worth or
intrinsic good of the ends they serve. On this view, the case for recognizing a
right depends on showing that it honors or advances some important human
good”. The latter would not be proper communitarian and it is the position with
which Sandel would identify himself, because as he sees it, the first way to
connect justice with conceptions of the good is insufficient. “To make justice the
creature of convention is to deprive it of its critical character, even if allowance
is made for competing interpretations of what the relevant tradition requires”
(LLJ, p. xi).
The liberal conception of rights neutral in relation to substantive moral
and religious doctrines would then be very similar to the communitarian
proposal, as both try to avoid dealing with the judgment of the contents of
certain rights. “A third possibility, more plausible in my view, is that rights
depend for their justification on the moral importance of the ends they serve”
(LLJ, p. xi).
Pettit (1998) suggests an interesting taxonomy to get out of this impasse,
stating that Sandel’s design does not cease to be Republican, but there are two
currents of political theory which use both the Republican qualifier: one near the
Greek-Aristotelian tradition of thinking the political and communitarian
engagement, the neo-Athenian, and the other close to the republicanism as
outlined in the writings of Cicero, the neo-Roman. Both have points that group
them together as opposing liberalism, notwithstanding leaving considerable
room for differences.
I do not intend going into the merits of the issue and defend this or that
classification for Sandel’s critical proposal (neither to incur the mistake that
would be to conceive all the liberal side as being equivalent to the postulations
made by Rawls). Categorizations are important, they help us to access more
rapidly the traditions of thought and to understand the arguments contextually
(see if a Republican proposal, for example, has an Aristotelian, Ciceronian or
Hegelian foundation enables us to understand more deeply their approaches
and goals); but they are in perpetual dispute. And in any case, the mere
classification itself does not end the debate.
*
The central claim of Sandel’s criticism of the liberal conception of John
Rawls is the notion of the person (self) that underlies his theory of justice.
Sandel says that in order that justice be prior to conceptions of good it is
necessary that the subject precede its ends (objectives, affections, etc.) and be
independent of them. Only then individuals might be able to compose a plural
society with fair policy, since they would be rational and reasonable with
respect to the demands of other individuals, as well as with the deliberative and
decision-making process in general, not being blinded by their own conceptions
of good.
However, Sandel says that to appeal to rationality along the extreme
lines in which Rawls does it, it’s just asking the wrong questions, because it
fails to consider that moral principles (and the ones of justice) can only be
understood as practices in the context of societies. But Sandel does not merely
identify the unrealistic assumptions of this conception of the individual, in the
course of LLJ he establishes a narrative that exposes some internal
philosophical inconsistencies to Rawls' argument (which supposedly result in
the undermining of his proposal).
Rawls says that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, but for this
to be true, we must be creatures of some sort, related to human conditions in a
certain way (LLJ, p.175), that is, as capable of choice and not determined by
the circumstances in which they live, people able to choose their goals and
objectives and, therefore, independent and prior to these choices.
There are two senses in which the self is prior to the ends: a moral
sense (which focuses on the dignity and autonomy inherent in people as such),
and an epistemological sense (in which the self is antecedent because it can be
independently identified) (LLJ, p. 20). The self must be epistemologically
distinct of its purposes because if it were no more than an aggregation of
desires and needs, there would be no distinction between subject and object of
possession and any change in my circumstances would change the person I
am. Such instability and arbitrariness of desire characteristic of a radically
situated subject could never be reconciled with the rational choice of principles
of justice.
Yet, Sandel argues that the Rawlsian conception turns out to go to the
other extreme, conceiving a subject completely detached from empirical
situations. A disembodied being, equally incapable of rational choice, extirpated
from experience without the motivation or capacity for deliberation. In fact,
Rawls appeals to the original position (OP) in an attempt to give this subject
prior to its ends (of Kantian inspiration) a more familiarly empirical and realistic
tone. However, Sandel argues that Rawls does not find its Archimedean point.
The self implicit in the theory of the OP ends up as a radically disembodied
subject. Why?
Any consideration about the self and its goals should specify how this
self is distinguishable and how it is connected to these purposes. In Rawls’
theory this occurs in the characterization of the self as subject of possession. It
is distinguishable by the distance that the idea of possession implies (what I
have is not what I am), without being completely separate, because through
choice the self is still connected to the ends (LLJ, p. 54).
Nevertheless, this design cannot be sustained. First, because ultimately
the person as Rawls’ theory outlines is unable to choose in any meaningful way
and, second, because the self ends up not being prior to its ends and
independently identifiable, and Rawls has to mobilize an intersubjective notion
of the self in his argument.
To the persons or assemblies in the original position it is asked to
choose principles of justice and Rawls argues that whatever is chosen will be
the right principles. But still they do not choose principles because this situation
is designed in a way that it is guaranteed that they will choose only some
principles1, and in this case there is little willingness on their actions. Besides,
despite being thought of as parties to a contract, they cannot reach an
agreement because, after all, they are not separated parts. Once they are
undifferentiated under the veil of ignorance, they are identically situated; there
is only one person in the OP2. So the agreement is not done between people
who choose to accept principles of conduct, but at best, an agreement which I
myself do, metaphorically, with a proposition. In this manner, the original
position does not exemplify the principles of voluntarism in the choice, but the
cognitivism involved in discovering and understanding which ones are the right
principles, and this undermines Rawls’ pluralistic claim.
Moreover, the Rawlsian individual is incapable of choice because it is
also incapable of deliberation and reflection. For Rawls, the faculty of reflection
is conceived as the ability to weigh the relative intensity of the desires and wills
available to an individual (once the self maintains a certain distance of its ends
and values, precisely because it is ​ ​ not consisted by them). This deliberation
never comes to affect the identity of the agent, just his feelings or sensations.
But so, the desires – with no relation to the subject of choice – would only be
the product of the circumstances, and the choice would involve nothing more
than the identification of these desires and the decision on the appropriateness
of the available ways to satisfy them3. So, instead of choosing the individual
would simply be determined by the situation.
It might be suggested two ways to escape from this impasse. The first
one would be to affirm that people are able to reflect not only on the intensity of
their desires, but also on its desirability, i.e., forming desires about desires (but
1
“Rawls claims that once the situation is appropriately characterized, then the principles
chosen, whatever they turn out to be, are acceptable from a moral point of view; once the
original position is properly defined, then any agreements reached in it are fair; once a fair
procedure is established, then any principles agreed to will be just”. However, given the
OP, “the parties are guaranteed to choose the right principles. […] While it may be true that,
strictly speaking, they can choose any principles they wish, their situation is designed in such
a way that they are guaranteed to ‘wish’ to choose only certain principles. On this view, ‘any
agreements reached’ in the original position are fair, not because the procedure sanctifies just
any outcome, but because the situation guarantees a particular outcome” (LLJ, p.127)
2 “[…] since the veil of ignorance has the effect of depriving the parties, qua parties to the
original position, of all the distinguishing characteristics, it becomes difficult to see what their
plurality could possibly consist in” (LLJ, p.131)
3 “According to Rawls, we ‘choose for ourselves in the sense that the choice often rests on our
direct self-knowledge’ of what we want and how much we want it. But […] assuming with Rawls
that the wants and desires on which my choice ‘rests’ are not themselves chosen but are the
products of circumstance (‘We do not choose now what to desire now’), such a ‘choice’ would
involve less a voluntary act than a factual accounting of what these wants and desires really
are. And once I succeed in ascertaining, by ‘direct self-knowledge’, this piece of psychological
information, there would seem nothing less for me to choose. I would have still to match my
wants and desires, thus ascertained, to the best available means of satisfying them, but this is a
prudential question which involves no volition or exercise of will” (LLJ, p.162)
this, after all, would not restore their agency4). The second option would be to
imagine a case of radical free choice, where “the agent would have no
alternative but to plump, just arbitrarily, one way or the other, without relying on
any preference or desire at all” (LLJ, p.164). Rawls reject both possibilities, for
in his account the first one confuses choice with necessity and the second one,
with mere caprice.
But Rawls’ theory of agency not only characterizes the individuals in a
way that makes the ability to choose impossible. It ends up taking him to a
conception of the self inconsistent with his own proposal. This is the second
point. Sandel retrieves in the discussion between Rawls and Nozick an
example of how the Rawlsian conception the person cannot prove itself
consistent with other aspects of his argument (LLJ, Cap.2).
Rawls states that the meritocratic position fails to take into account the
arbitrariness of the social and economic conditions in which an individual is
inserted, but also the fact that the things on which the merit is usually based
(my intelligence, my talents, my inner dispositions) are equally arbitrary from a
moral point of view. Given the issue of the arbitrary distribution of these gifts,
the conception of justice such as Rawls outlines it treats them as common
assets, a representative definition of how we share our destiny as humans5.
Nozick says, and Sandel agrees that this assumption turns out to
disrespect the liberal premise according to which individuals are ends in
themselves, and should not be used as means to the happiness of others6,
even though this other is society in general (precisely the point that Rawls
criticizes in the utilitarian approach). Nozick's view is that “I do not have to
deserve to be deserving, or deserve to deserve to be deserving” (KUKATHAS;
PETTIT, 1998, p.103), that is, that the foundations of merit do not need to be
themselves deserved all the way down. And even if we accept that this
arbitrariness undermines the individual possession and merit, we are not
obliged to prefer the difference principle instead of the entitlement theory
(according to which individuals may not be worthy, but are still a kind of
guardians of their attributes). After all Rawls provides no argument in favor of
society as the ultimate possessor of the attributes allocated in the individuals
(neither demonstrate how this would adjust with the concept of individual
choice7). What Rawls does is to increase the distance between the self, subject
of possession, and the attributes it possesses by stating that people are not
used as means to the happiness of others, only their attributes are used –
4
“He would still have only the psychological fact of his (now, second-order) preference to
appeal to and only its relative intensity to assess. […]The affirmation or rejection of desires
suggested by the formation of second-order desires would on Rawls’ assumptions introduce no
further element of reflection or volition, for such an assessment could only reflect a slightly more
complicated estimate of the relative intensity of pre-existing desires, first- and second-order
desires included” (LLJ, p.163-164)
5 “By regarding the distribution of talents and attributes as a common asset rather than as
individual possessions, Rawls obviates the need to ‘even out’ endowments in order to remedy
the arbitrariness of social and natural contingencies. When ‘men agree to share one another’s
fate’, it matters less that their fates, individually, may vary.” (LLJ, p.70)
6 After all we are “self-originating sources of valid claims” (RAWLS apud LLJ, p.177).
7 But if Rawls does not establish any justification of why we should think of the society as the
ultimate subject of possession, neither Nozick establishes propositions to defend the theory of
entitlement.
which is not the same thing8.
Nevertheless, Sandel suggests yet another possible solution to this
impasse, namely, the one that says that those with whom I share my assets are
not adequately described as others. As an alternative to an increasingly
disembodied self that ends up having so little of human that is difficult to
recognize it as such, we could simply admit that this whole theory of justice
presupposes the existence of a community, a common subject of possession
that makes room for an intersubjective notion of the self. The lack of a
deserving individual does not necessarily lead to the favoring of the difference
principle within a (self-contradictory) system guided by the notion of a self
independent of moral bonds. It also may lead to the implicit trust in social
worthiness and therefore the valorization of these same moral and
communitarian ties that in Rawls’ theoretical design would allow a justification
of the difference principle, but that are incompatible with the notion of the
unencumbered self.
In general, what is under Sandel’s attack is the liberal conception of the
community as the product of an association of independent individuals, and the
fact that the value of this community is estimated by the fairness of the terms by
which these individuals associate, and not by the community or by its values in
themselves. Sandel argues that the ability to reach an agreement to form
associations already depends on the existence of a community (without which
the aptitude for deliberation, reflection and choice becomes incoherent,
following his line of reasoning to expose the inconsistencies in the design of the
OP). If the objects of reflection were not mediated by a sense of community, as
in Rawlsian theory, they would be arbitrarily given, undifferentiated as to value,
resulting in an thoughtless examination (whose possibility, let us not forget, is
not yet guaranteed) of the various types of life, whose product could only be
impoverished visions of the good9.
If we are to understand our agency as something more than the efficient
administration of our desires and the available means to their satisfaction, then
we must abandon Rawlsian liberalism’s theory of the person. We must
understand ourselves as individuals constituted in part by our central
aspirations and affections, always open to growth and transformation in the light
of revised self-understandings (LLJ, p.172) processed not only in private, but
starting from our condition as members of a community that provide us with a
common vocabulary of discourse and practice. “[…] the deontological vision is
flawed, both within its own terms and more generally as an account of our
moral experience. Within its own terms, the deontological self, stripped of all
possible constitutive attachments, is less liberated than disempowered” (LLJ,
p.177-178).
However, the design of a liberal self does not appear, in the work of
Rawls, exclusively through the construction of a philosophical system (as in A
8
Nonetheless, “why we, thick with particular traits, should be cheered that (only) the thus
purified men within us are not regarded as means is also unclear” (NOZICK apud KUKATHAS;
PETTIT, 1998, p.102)
9 “What goes on behind the veil of ignorance is not a contract or an agreement but if anything
a kind of discovery; and what goes on in ‘purely preferential choice’ is less a choosing of ends
than a matching of pre-existing desires, undifferentiated as to worth, with the best available
means of satisfying them. For the parties to the original position, as for the parties to ordinary
deliberative rationality, the liberating moment fades before it arrives; the sovereign subject is left
at sea in the circumstances it was thought it command” (LLJ, p.178)
Theory of Justice). In Political liberalism, the author moves away from abstract
propositions and deals with the supremacy of justice over particular
conceptions of good through empirical considerations about how western
democracies present themselves nowadays. The rights should not depend for
their justification on any conception of good not because the subject is prior to
its ends, philosophically speaking, but because this is the only way to establish
principles of justice in a pluralistic political society.
The minimalist or pragmatist liberals argue that in traditional societies,
people could shape their political life around their religious and moral ideals.
But to separate “our identity as citizens from our identity as persons honors an
important fact about modern democratic life”, which is that “modern democratic
societies are marked by a plurality of moral and religious ideals” (DD, p.18-19).
Moreover, this pluralism is reasonable; it reflects the fact that, even
after reasoned reflection, decent, intelligent people will come to
different conceptions about the nature of the good. Given the fact of
reasonable pluralism, we should try do decide questions about justice
and rights without affirming one conception of the good over others.
Only in this way we affirm the political value of social cooperation
based on mutual respect (DD, p.18-19)
So, “however encumbered we may be in private, however claimed by
moral or religious convictions, we should bracket our encumbrances in public
and regard ourselves, qua public selves, as independent of any particular
loyalties or conceptions of the good” (DD, p.18)
Sandel, notwithstanding, asserts that the minimalist case depends on the
plausibility of the separation between politics and philosophy, of the suspension
of judgment on moral and religious issues where politics is involved, a position
that goes against the premise of DD since
if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in
another. This is the sense in which philosophy inhabits the world from
the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory.
[…] For all we may resist such ultimate questions as the meaning of
justice and the nature of the good life, what we cannot escape is that
we live in some answers to these questions – we live some theory –
all the time (DD, p. IX).
Besides, the deontological conception of the self as an epistemological
requirement cannot allow an individual who establishes relations differently in
private and public spheres10. This would place the formation of the self beyond
the reach of politics, making of “human agency an article of faith rather than an
object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its
precarious achievement” (LLJ, p.183).
Political issues often are based on moral issues (or can only be decided
by moral choices) and Sandel's position is that we should revive the moral
aspect of political debates. Such a practice would cultivate specific qualities of
character, equipping citizens for self-government while implying a different
approach to moral philosophy as well as another public philosophy to America.
DD's thesis is that American policy (read, the policy in the U.S.), had a
republican beginning but in the course of its history passed through a process
10
“The independence of the self does not mean that I can, as a psychological matter, summon
in this or that circumstance the detachment required to stand outside my values and ends,
rather that I must regard myself as the bearer of a self distinct from my values and ends,
whatever they may be.” (LLJ, p.182)
of liberalization that culminated in the procedural republic the way it has been
established since the mid-1950s. This liberalization involved the neutralization
of the state apparatus (from courts to different ways of understanding the
political economy and public policies of social welfare), replacing the old
republican notion of freedom as self-government by the guarantee of individual
rights.
Nonetheless, instead of liberating the individual, such gradual change in
the American public philosophy resulted in the disempowerment of its citizens,
the moral emptiness of the public sphere and the democratic crisis that comes
from it, expressed by the feeling of loss of control of the forces that govern our
lives and the erosion of communities that would be the basis of the social life.
The neutralization process of state apparatus would bring so many
harmful consequences that any possible progress of individual rights could
never compensate. And the moral vacuum of the public sphere is not enough to
ensure the promise of respect for individuals as ends in themselves, it only
provides a superficial pluralism since tolerance does not equal respect. Besides
that, this space often ends up being filled by moral fundamentalisms, drifting
further and further the commitment to impartiality.
“If American politics is to revitalize the civic strand of freedom”, that is
Sandel’s suggestion, “it must find a way to ask what economic arrangements
are hospitable to self-government, and how the public life of a pluralist society
might cultivate in citizens the expansive self-understandings that civic
engagement requires” (DD, p.203).
But this revival of an atmosphere conducive to self-government does not
come without costs. Sandel is aware that the republican freedom and his
proposal in general are a risk policy. Among other criticisms, the republicanism
has always been accused of being exclusive and coercive. Sandel can escape
from the first critique responding with the formative project: republicanism is not
elitist because we can create good citizens through education. But this solution
does not come out unscathed when confronted with the coercive and
paternalistic dimension of republicanism. For this dimension to be mitigated,
Sandel rejects the formative project à la Rousseau in exchange of a
Tocquevillian inspiration (focusing on the formative character of public
institutions - schools, neighborhood associations, etc.). And also proposes a
specific type of federalism, that in addition to being a theory of governmental
structures
also stands for a political vision that offers an alternative to the
sovereign state and the univocal political identities such states
require. It suggests that self-government works best when sovereignty
is dispersed and citizenship formed across multiple sites of civic
engagement. This aspect of federalism informs the pluralist version
of republican politics. It supplies the differentiation that separates
Tocqueville’s republicanism from Rousseau’s, that saves the
formative project from slipping into coercion (DD, p.347)
If freedom could be separated from the capacity for self-government,
then the liberals would be right and the political risk related to the
encouragement of republicanism’s formative project would not be necessary.
But this is precisely the problem, as we saw in Sandel’s critique of Rawlsian
theory of justice: citizens are not simply free to choose as the liberal self would
impute, because this conception does not account for the wide range of moral
obligations which we recognize as representatives of what we are. And the
attempt to separate our identity as citizens of our broader identity only helps
the disempowerment of individuals and communities and the weakening of the
political sphere as a whole. “A politics that brackets morality and religion too
completely soon generates its own disenchantment” (DD, p.322).
Sandel’s attention to institutions such as community organizations,
cooperatives of community development, movements such as sprawlbusters
and new urbanism, allows us to glimpse some answer to these questions.
Revitalize the political debates with moral discussion does not mean fighting for
a more consensual politic, quite the contrary. The liberal assumption according
to which we agree to disagree is still included in this picture.
As the reigning political agenda invites disagreement about the
meaning of neutrality, rights, and truly voluntary choice, a political
agenda informed by civic concerns would invite disagreement about
the meaning of virtue and the forms of self-government that are
possible in our time (DD, p.338).
The empowerment of individuals in the face of global structures of
economy and politics would give itself through civic and communitarian
institutions and the identities that support them. This is the greatest antipathy
that Sandel has with cosmopolitanism, the fact that it states that the identity
consistent with a globalized world is one that takes into account the humanity
we all shared. Sandel argues that this design is too similar to liberalism to find
any compatible parallel in the political, cultural reality in which we live. There is
a limit to the ties of moral sympathy among beings that see themselves as
belonging to a human community. “The cosmopolitan ethic is wrong, not for
asserting that we have certain obligations to humanity as a whole but rather for
insisting that the more universal communities we inhabit must always take
precedence over more particular ones” (DD, p.343).
At the same time, it's something at least challenging to think about how
to overcome the political frailty of cosmopolitanism, once the demand for
universal identities takes place practically simultaneously to the demand for the
revival of political recognition of ethnic minorities. Sandel argues that it is not
possible to restore self-government just pushing the sovereignty and citizenship
to increasingly wide (and abstract) levels of action. The solution is not to
relocate the sovereignty, but to disperse it. “The most promising alternative to
the sovereign state is not a one-world community based on solidarity of
humankind, but a multiplicity of communities and political bodies […] among
which sovereignty is diffused” (DD, p.345).
Instead of encouraging an emptied design of humanity, like the
cosmopolitanism, Sandel highlights the process of our identities’ constitution by
different communities, “some overlapping, others contending” (DD, p.343).
Self-government today, however, requires a politics that plays itself
out in a multiplicity of settings, from neighborhood to nations to the
world as a whole. Such a politics requires citizens who can think and
act as multiply-situated selves. The civic virtue distinctive to our time is
the capacity to negotiate our way among the sometimes overlapping,
sometimes conflicting obligations that claim us, and to live with the
tension to which multiple loyalties give rise (DD, p.350)
And to ensure the development of this civic skill characteristic to the
conception of the multiply-situated self is to ensure the necessary balance not
to fall into moral and religious fundamentalisms (in their anachronistic and
antiplural content) neither to lose oneself in a fragmentary identity (in line with
the present plurality, but unable to promote a consistent civic engagement).
Sandel’s attack on liberalism caused very different reactions. First, there
are those who contest his examination of Rawlsian theory. Kukathas e Pettit
(1980, p.106-110), for example, list at least five problems with Sandel’s
analysis. If Rawls’ theory leaves implicit a notion of community,for instance, this
is something that he himself concedes in the Dewey Lectures. “Rawls explicitly
acknowledges that his concern is not to supply a universal standard of justice
but to discover those moral principles which might best serve his own society,
with all its particular concerns11” (KUKATHAS; PETTIT, 1990, p.107). So,
Sandel’s objection does not make sense.
Secondly, it is an exaggeration to say that the social context in which
I live constitutes my identity (as sometimes Sandel affirms). At best, our
identity is only partially constituted by the context and by our objectives, and
even so we are beings capable of participating in the determination of both
and, so, we are subjects empowered in the constitution of our identities (LLJ,
p.152). That way it’s difficult to realize the real differences between Rawls’ and
Sandel’s selves, since both seem to accept that the person, if not the self, is
antecedent to its ends. In third place, and connected to the precedent remark,
Sandel affirms that the self, constituted in a certain way by its ends, can be
reconstituted. This brings again the question of precedence of the person
In fourth place, Sandel doesn’t indicate why he believes that the self
should be politically created. He can be right that the identity of the self is
the product of experience, but this does not necessarily involve the political
experience. In fact, family, neighborhood, community, the institutions that he
mentions are in general the ones with non-political bonds; they may be the
source of our political compromises, but they do not necessarily lead to a
political debate and to defend this vision does not require an implausible thesis
about personal identity (as Sandel classifies Rawls’ theory).
At last there is Sandel’s characterization of moral reasoning as a
question of self-discovery instead of the mere judgment of actions and desires.
If the Rawlsian subject asks “What actions should I take? What would I
supposed to be?”, the Sandelian subject asks “Who am I?”. But to Kukathas
and Pettit, self-reflection doesn’t replace the judgment about how to live our
lives. If that would be so, the possibility of reconstituting the self through political
debates, present in Sandel, would be compromised.
This only to briefly review the specific analysis of LLJ. The critics who
agree with the necessity (delineated in the last part of LLJ’s second edition and
along DD) of bringing moral questions of belonging and of the weight of social
representations in the formation of individual identities and beliefs to the
political sphere, still reproach in Sandel’s proposal its form of social criticism
that lacks a more well-defined and pragmatic program (BEINER, 1998). He
doesn’t outline, for example, which are exactly the civic virtues required to
promote the strengthening of self-government (PANGLE; GALSTON;
TUSHNET; WALZER; KYMLICKA; CONNOLLY), his characterization of the
political economy of citizenship is too vague and the elucidation of the causal
and empirical aspects of its cultivation is absent (GALSTON, 1998). That way
11
“The starting point of this philosophical inquiry is not the OP but the prevailing moral beliefs
and institutions of the modern liberal democratic societies. Rawls proposes that we view
that moral landscape through the OP, but makes it quite plain that the structure of the OP is
designed to enable us to see more clearly what is presumed to be already there” (KUKATHAS;
PETTIT, 1990, p.107)
we do not have the means of knowing to which extent the strengthening of
communities, by way of self-government, could empower the citizens in the
context of transnational economy and politics in which we live (TUSHNET,
1998)12.
Sandel doesn’t respond directly to all these questions. His suggestions
are more the reinforcement of the necessity of the revitalization of ancient
mediating institutions of citizenship, as the ones common in Tocqueville’s
America, than an ambitious normative project. All the same, these brief
passages along the historical recuperation of the procedural liberalism’s rise as
the hegemonic public philosophy of the U.S. that cherish the potentiality of
republican institutions in the recuperation of public sphere’s vivacity and
plurality, leave important issues unanswered, for example, the considerations
about the phenomenon of immigration, to which the institutions so praised by
Tocqueville end up succumbing.
This is Walzer’s claim. He says that the Tocquevillian inspiration of the
revitalization of mediating institutions in Sandel’s Republican proposal does not
take into account the fact that political and civic institutions in Tocqueville's time
were still based on a very homogeneous pluralism, before the phenomenon of
immigration. This phenomenon is key to understand the formation of a self
bound to its context while still free to choose its own determinations. Why?
Because it focuses on the agents in their decision to abandon the old
community ties and on the way they reconstitute these ties at a new place, but
at the same time takes into account that such choices are not made arbitrarily
from a moral point of view: the subjects as capable of having reasons (of
individual consciousness, family or community bonds) that limit the choices in
this process of reallocation.
According to Walzer, any attempt to explain the growing dominance of
liberal individualism must deal with the effects of immigration on agents’
obligations, loyalty and solidarity with which, as reported by Sandel, liberalism
cannot handle. In immigration societies there are still communities that can be a
relevant focus of analysis, but the old attachments are never reconstituted with
the same purport as before. Identities are still tied in a certain way with the
group, yet there are several ways in which this can happen. An identity offers
several possible ways of identification, and the communities, as well as the
citizenship cultivated within them, are more scattered.
In Sandel’s propositions, Walzer affirms, there are two combined notions
of communitarianism (or republicanism). The civic republicanism (to which a
country is as a community) and the pluralism (which deals with the country as a
community of communities). The republics are stronger when established in
homogeneous communities, that is, with the civic conception of republicanism,
for pluralism offers only weaker bonds. “Does it make any sense to accept this
12
“A complex cosmopolitanism, it seems to me, is necessary to eliminate what otherwise
seems to be a dramatic mismatch between Sandel's desire to diffuse sovereignty and
his acknowledgment of transnational economic power. (…) It remains unclear to me,
however, how people are connected to transnational institutions except through aspects
of the cosmopolitanism that Sandel thinks inadequate. Perhaps the experience of politics
in a neighborhood will help shape political character in a way that will make people better
participants in the politics of supranational institutions that have become both more democratic
and more powerful. But to exercise effective control over transnational corporate power, I would
think, people must participate in such institutions as democrats, not as Kurds or Quebecois—
and to that extent, as cosmopolitans” (TUSHNET, 1998, p.97-98).
heterogeneity, as Sandel seems to do, and then demand civic virtue and
republican citizenship?” (WALZER, 1998, p.179).
Hence, it appears that Sandel’s great opponent is no longer procedural
liberalism, but the civic republicanism and its irrevocably archaic contents
(CONNOLLY; WALZER; KYMLICKA). Moreover, according to Orwin,
procedural liberalism admits individuals with community, family ties, it admits
encumbered selves. Only this demand does not seem to proclaim a revival of
republicanism and, often, rather than empowerment, it brings merely a culture
of victimization (ORWIN, 1998, p.89-90).
Sandel's criticism is justified when it proposes itself to probe the decline
of political participation, the distrust of political leadership, the growing
inequality. But the liberal understanding of political activity (as one of the
possible choices of the individual, but not a necessary one) is still plausible.
Furthermore, a new political philosophy is not the only thing required to the
revitalization of politics, a concrete political program concerned with the political
culture of these ethnic, religious groups is also needed (and that is, without a
doubt, a real Tocquevillian concern).
Maybe the liberalism that Sandel criticizes, when it is given a
genuinely pluralist turn, can serve the republican ends he advocates.
Maybe. And that possibility might suggest a public philosophy more
adequate to the conditions of an immigrant society than any version of
civic republicanism focused on an earlier America. (…) Sandel worries
too much, it seems to me, about the primary fact of American life
today: that these selves are free to choose what they will be (or how
they will be what they are). But he is right to argue that we all have an
interest in helping them choose well. (WALZER, 1998, p.182)
Nevertheless, the observation that individuals are involved with multiple
communities and the renewed call for a dense pluralism accompanied by the
rejection of cosmopolitanism are only briefly exposed in the last pages of DD.
Possibly it would be the consistent development of his arguments in these
matters that would better elucidate the concrete proposals of how Sandel thinks
a revival of a republicanism appropriate to the contemporary world.
This is a remark made by many of Sandel’s critics (ORWIN; TUSHNET;
SIEGEL; FROHNEN; KYMLICKA; CONNOLLY), and not just because there are
gaps in his definition of multiply-situated selves and in its relation to pluralism.
But also because, first, his conception of pluralism would be too close to the
liberal subject to make a republican revival something compelling and second,
because there are some problems in Sandel’s historical narrative.
I begin by the second objection. Sandel, for example, apparently forgets
that the U.S. has always been a republic of individuals. “So yes, Americans
have always aspired to constitute a community, but one of free self-reliant
individuals. While cherishing their country, their families, their churches, their
associations of every sort, they have not viewed themselves as submerged by
them.” (ORWIN, 1998, p. 90). The sandelian rejection of individualism in favor
of a communitarian republicanism is not only implausible, affirms Orwin, it also
does not do justice to the resources available to Americans.
We have all been raised as members of a community of liberals (…).
Only a liberal could regard this liberalism as something that we have
chosen and that we are therefore free to reject. Paradoxically, to
disown the individualistic strain of our tradition would itself amount to a
declaration of unencumberedness (ORWIN, 1998, p. 90)
It is also interesting to note the fact that the largest movements for the
advancement in the sphere of individual rights in the 1960s are considered
primarily as a demand for the return of a republican way of life13, once Sandel
highlights the underlying questions of gender roles and of belonging to ethnic,
religious groups that were mobilized by the movements. But this seems only a
partial account of the facts though.
What brings us to consider the similarities between Sandel’s proposal
and the liberal project. Frohnen, for example, asserts that a proper reading of
Locke and his concern for the individual flourishing through education (familial,
civic) is greatly related to the design of civic education of citizens through
political debates of which talks Sandel. Thus,
republicanism, according to Sandel, is the belief that true freedom
resides in communal self-rule. But it is the self that is to be made free;
free to make autonomous choices and flourish through participation in
politics. Sandel's politics, like his psychological view of the self, does
not promote some amorphous alternative to liberalism; it promotes a
more robust and activist form of liberalism. (FROHNEN, 1998, p.166)
In fact, according to critics like Galston, civic and procedural strands
have always coexisted in American political thought, which makes it difficult to
understand if the republicanism as proposed by Sandel is a real alternative to
the voluntary legalism or just a new circuit that leads to conclusions already
familiar to procedural liberalism (GALSTON, 1998, p.83).
Moreover, such approximations also bring the question of a gap in
Sandel’s criticism of the liberal tradition. At the beginning of DD, he says “each
tradition highlights a potencial deficiency in the other” (p.27). While liberalism
sees with displeasure the republican emphasis on self-government, which could
lead to tyranny of the majority and oppression through the formative project,
republicanism considers that to conceive individuals as the locus of policy,
though fair, generates a sense of disempowerment and loss of agency. Such
presentation of the dichotomy between liberal and republican freedom entails
ambiguities in Sandel’s exposition: sometimes foreshadowing the need for a
balance between the two, sometimes confronting them in an almost Manichean
duel (republican freedom: good, liberal freedom: bad) (GALSTON, 1998).
Rorty, in his turn, asserts that Sandel is mistaken in his diagnosis of what
emerges from Rawlsian search of a political commitment beyond religious and
moral convictions. Sandel finds the absence of morality and religion, but what
emerges is simply a new way of dealing with morality and religion (as well as
new morals and religions). The policy will always be linked to questions outside
the political sphere, but these questions are subject to historical change the
same way policy is. Rorty sees in Rawls the establishment of a democratic,
political framework within which to discuss morality and religion (reinforcing the
liberal conception of tolerance), a reversal of an old model, in which Sandel is
based: the use of our moral and religious notions to discuss politics (RORTY,
1998, p125).
13
“Taken together, these two fears – for the loss of self-government and the erosion of
community – defined the anxiety of the age. It was an anxiety that the reigning political agenda,
with its attenuated civic resources, was unable to answer or even address. This failure fueled
the discontent that has beset American democracy from the late 1960s to the present day.
Those political figures who managed to tap the mood of discontent did so by reaching beyond
the terms of contemporary liberalism; some sought a response in a recovery of republican
themes” (DD, p.294)
Therefore, to suspend the judgement on issues related to morality or
religion is not a sterile attempt to consolidate a liberal disembodied self, but a
way of ensuring the right of certain practices without going into the merits of
their veracity or moral relevance. Minimalist liberals do not want to enter into
metaphysical controversies about the status of truth because they assume that
we should never deny that any intelligible statement may be true. The important
thing is to make people value democratic consensus more than anything else
and to open room for so little moral and religious polemics as possible to
administer, or replace so many of these issues as possible for political
questions, which shows the commitment to tolerance (RORTY, 1998, p.119121).
Finally, there are authors like Siegel, ensuring that Sandel can not
demonstrate allegation of the need for morality in politics, and the consequent
failure of political liberalism. First, because some moral arguments can cause
both good and evil (strengthening our defenses of certain rights or undermining
them). If liberalism shows no appreciation to the practices it condones at least it
gives shelter to individual rights. Thus, it would be the lesser evil, the lowest
price to pay. Secondly, it is not so obvious that it is necessary to have moral
arguments in constitutional law or politics to cultivate an appreciation for
different lifestyles. Sandel's suggestion has not causal support, Siegel claims:
while establishing that those liberal notions of self and the state are present in
law and in society, Sandel does not show that the liberal ideas embedded in the
social sphere originate in constitutional discourse, could actually be the other
way around. Finally, the faith that moral argumentation in law can help us
achieve a higher pluralism seems blind to the depth of the divisions that mark
the pluralistic society in which we live. These divisions are so deep that
Sandel's call for a higher form of respect than the one provided by liberalism is
self-defeating. The bareness of respect that political liberalism allows is an
inevitable product of the source that maintains a rich diversity of beliefs and
practices.
And even if Sandel would have responded to these considerations, it is
not clear how he expects to respect the individual choices regarding moral and
religion by their intrinsic goods (and not just because they are free choices of
an individual), since they are, in his work, dimensions of spiritual life “seen
simply or mainly as valuable for self-government when, in reality, we cherish
these dimensions of spiritual life because of their transpolitical and inherent
value (cultural, artistic, scientific, philosophical, religious, etc.)” (PANGLE, 1998,
p.30)14. Themes with this degree of transcendence, according to Pangle, should
occupy a more central place in the analysis of political philosophy for their
quality of transcendent goods (PANGLE, 1998, p.31).
*
It was not my goal to exhaust all nuances of such a rich and complex
debate as this one, established between the (not homogeneous) currents of
liberalism and republicanism. Taking as focus Sandel’s critical analysis of
Rawlsian liberalism and of the project of the procedural republic as it is set out
in contemporary western societies aimed to highlight some points of this huge
14
Cf. also Williams (1998).
debate that has been going on since the publication of the great work of
contemporary political philosophy’s revival: A theory of Justice.
Thus, the intent was to mobilize the category of plurality as a transversal
theme in an attempt to better organize the various arguments retrieved from
this tortuous debate. From LLJ's criticism of the Rawlsian conception of person
(of which all his theoretical system depends, but that cannot be coherent,
philosophically or morally), and from the reading of the consolidation of
procedural liberalism as dominant public philosophy and principal source of the
undermining of the communities and the sense of loss of agency that make up
the current democracy’s crisis (DD), Sandel concludes that liberalism’s formal
proposal is unable to deal with the question of plurality, even though it is
placed, along side the respect for the distinctiveness of individual subjects, as
one of liberalism’s great justificatory base. So, finding solutions to the pluralist
demand is an inescapable task for any attempt to supplant liberalism as
dominant public philosophy.
However, Sandel would fail, according to some critics, because he does
not shape consistently and profoundly enough his own alternative to the weak
plurality that arises within a liberal society and, according to others, because he
does not discuss this category of multiply-situated self in a way that distances it
from the liberal content that it is seen within it (leaving his republican position
without distinctiveness).
The question of pluralism is essential to safeguard Sandel’s republican
proposal from the dangers characteristic of ancient republican and
communitarian conceptions and withdraw any anachronistic character (the
coercivity of the formative project, the exclusivity of citizenship, etc.) with which
liberals have been describing republicanism. This is ultimately an effort to think
of another definition for freedom (as self-government) and to seek solutions on
how to equip this non liberal theory against the political practice of a democratic
world already marked by liberal colors, from which it is wanted to appease the
mischiefs without abandoning the advantages.
Thereby, to the supporters of the Sandelian proposal of a revitalization of
the public sphere with moral and religions matters and with communitarian
institutions (cultivators of the virtues of critical reflection and political
engagement), remains only to highlight the need of more pragmatic paths by
which to accomplish Sandel’s republican project. Whether his propositions are
qualified as a mere concern for the regeneration of liberal principles or as a
really distinctive republicanism, it is noteworthy that only one of the critics
consulted (Rorty) questions the facticity of the democratic crisis diagnosed by
Sandel. This expresses, at least, the urgency of a profound reflection on the
issue of pluralism and its treatment as a key question to the contemporary
political philosophy’s debate.
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