Michael Sandel b. 1953

Michael Sandel is an American political philosopher, professor at Harvard University, and one of the most widely read public philosophers of our time. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice mounted a celebrated communitarian critique of John Rawls's theory of the unencumbered self, arguing that we are constitutively shaped by attachments and ends that we do not choose. What Money Can't Buy and The Tyranny of Merit have extended his work into the moral limits of markets and the corrosive effects of meritocratic hubris on contemporary democratic life.

Michael Joseph Sandel was born at Minneapolis in March 1953. He took his bachelor's at Brandeis in 1975 summa cum laude and his DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1981 under Charles Taylor, with a thesis that became the book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. He has taught at Harvard since 1980, where he has been Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government since 2004; his Harvard course 'Justice', regularly drawing audiences of a thousand undergraduates, has been broadcast as a public-television series and as one of the first global free MOOCs.

His books include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Democracy's Discontent (1996), Public Philosophy (2005), The Case Against Perfection (2007), Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009), What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012), and The Tyranny of Merit (2020).

Sandel mounted one of the founding communitarian critiques of John Rawls, arguing that the 'unencumbered self' of liberal theory cannot account for the constitutive attachments through which human beings actually deliberate, and has since extended that critique into a civic republican defence of the common good against market encroachment, genetic enhancement, and meritocratic hubris. He is one of the most widely read living political philosophers and a frequent public lecturer in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.