Michael Sandel

Michael J. Sandel

Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953 in Minneapolis ) is an American philosopher . He was best known as a co-founder of the communitarian trend.

He studied at Brandeis University and received his PhD from the University of Oxford with Charles Taylor . Since 1980 he has taught political philosophy at Harvard University , where he is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government . He is best known for his Justice with Michael Sandel course , which can now also be found on the Internet.

For 2018, Sandel was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences.

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With his work Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which appeared in 1982, he gave a critical answer to John Rawl's theory of justice .

In contrast to the libertarian criticism (for example by Robert Nozick ), however, he objects to the lack of particular and social values ​​within Rawls' theory. The so-called “unbound self” by Sandel, as liberalism defends, only exists at the expense of his loyalties and convictions; every person is socialized and shaped by groups, traditions, communities. Hence Rawls' thought experiment, the original state by which Rawls founded his theory, is utopian : a veil of ignorance is unreal.

The highest priority within society should therefore not have human freedom, but rather the virtues or the “good” of human beings and the community in which they live.

Alongside Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer , among others, Sandel is one of the pioneers of communitarian criticism of “philosophical liberalism”. In his lectures published in German in 1995, he deals with political culture in a democracy . Against a value-neutral liberalism, Sandel wants to prove that it is not possible to separate the anchoring of freedom rights from certain value orientations or ideas of the good. This diagnosis has consequences for the assessment of value-laden traditions today. For Sandel, republicanism , which played a major role in the early days of the US, continues to be a goal. Without active citizenship, it will not be possible to achieve a future free community , contrary to the moral decline of society and the current disaffection with politicians . In this context, he criticizes a primarily economic view of the world, in which people see themselves as consumers instead of as part of a civil society and e.g. B. strives to sit in the stadium in the VIP area ( sky box ). He calls the "skyboxification" the basic evil of contemporary US society.

Trivia

Sandel is variously named as a model for the outward appearance - but not the character - of the character Montgomery Burns in the television series The Simpsons : Sandel has a hairstyle similar to Burns and often uses the characteristic Burns gesture of bringing the fingertips of both hands together. It was also noted that several of the scriptwriters are Harvard graduates and have attended Professor Sandel's classes.

Fonts

• Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 1985; 2nd edition: Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-521-56741-1
• Liberalism or Republicanism. On the need for civic virtue. Passagen-Verlag, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-85165-159-6
• Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-674-19745-9
• Friendship & Justice. In: Klaus-Dieter Eichler (Hrsg.): Philosophy of friendship. Reclam, Leipzig 1999 ISBN 3-379-01669-1 , pp. 206-215
• Ethics of liberalism. In: Concordia. No. 47, Materialis, Biberach 2006, ISBN 3-88535-405-5
• Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics. Harvard University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-674-02365-9
• The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-674-03638-3
  • Plea against perfection. Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. With a foreword by Jürgen Habermas . Berlin University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-3-940432-14-8
• Justice: A Reader. Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-533512-5
• Justice. What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-374-53250-5
  • Justice - how we do the right thing , Berlin: Ullstein 2013, ISBN 978-3-550-08009-8
• What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, ISBN 978-0-374-20303-0
  • What money cannot buy - the moral limits of the market , Berlin: Ullstein, 2012, ISBN 978-3550080265
• Michael Sandel: "We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning" , Interview by Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian , May 27, 2012

Web links

• Literature by and about Michael Sandel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Michael Sandel on the Harvard University website
• Justice with Michael Sandel , coproduction by WGBH Boston and Harvard University
• Interview with Jonathan Bruno & Jason Swadley in The Art of Theory
• Interview on the morality of European refugee policy with Max Neufeind & Philip Faigle on ZEIT ONLINE
• Lecture and Q&A on "Populism, Trump and the Future of Democracy," in English at The American Academy in Berlin, April 2018

Footnotes

1. ↑ Harvard Law School: Michael J. Sandel | Harvard Law School. Accessed April 27, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Martin Spiewak : USA: Education from the stage . In: The time . No. 10, February 28, 2008
3. ↑ Anna Gielas: Learning Morals at Harvard. When can I betray my brother? In: Spiegel Online . January 5, 2010
4. ↑ Michael Fitzgerald: Everyone's Got a Price. In: Newsweek . April 23, 2012, p. 15 ( online ( memento of the original from June 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. In The Daily Beast ) 
5. ^ How Cameron's Big Society could have an unlikely savior: Aristotle