EXHORTATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND POLITICS
AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY
EXHORTATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND POLITICS
Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit
Sanford Levinson*
More than most books, Michael J. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the
Common Good?1 presents special challenges for reviewers. The reason, frankly, is that he is
writing about “us” (d.h., the likely audience)—and even more certainly those invited to
offer systematic reviews. Das ist, we are, by any measure, “successes” in the American
academy (Und, vielleicht, even elsewhere), whether measured by the institutions in which
we teach, the salaries we make, or the more general recognition that we have been privileged
to receive at least from people or groups with which we specially identify. What accounts
for this success? One flattering response, Natürlich, is that we “deserve” it because of our
own inherent capacities and efforts—our own “merit”—however we choose to define that
often slippery term. This also entails, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, the prop-
osition that those “below” us in the pecking order have no real justification for any com-
plaints they might have. They are merely envious—and, recall, envy is one of the seven
deadly sins—of the success we have rightfully achieved by excelling them in a variety of rel-
evant capacities, ranging from raw intelligence to a willingness to work hard and defer mun-
dane gratifications. And, incidentally, that is true as well if “we” are tempted to demean
instead of honor those above us in the relevant pecking order. Not everyone can make (oder
deserves to make) the all-star team, and we should be grateful for the opportunity to play
in the major leagues.
Any other responses cast a shadow not only on our professional positions but also on
our own personae. Most of us, I suspect, Manchmal (often?) worry that we will be exposed
as the frauds we are, thoroughly undeserving of the symbols (and hard realities, wie zum Beispiel
Author: *Sanford Levinson holds a joint appointment at the University of Texas Law School and the Department of
Government, University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, with Jack Balkin, is Democracy and Dysfunction
(2019). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
1
MICHAEL J. SANDEL, THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? (2020).
© 2021 Sanford Levinson. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00006
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hefty salaries) attached to our success. And now Sandel, himself at the top of several
hierarchies—ranging from tenure at Harvard to being a certified “rock-star political theo-
rist” capable of filling arenas from Boston to Beijing—comes along to write about “the
tyranny of merit” and the falsities of the ideology underlying what Michael Young many
decades ago castigated as “meritocracy.”
Although Young coined the term only in the 1950s, the basic ideology underlying it
has obviously been around far longer. Some version of “meritocracy” is at the core of the
American version of liberalism, going back at least as far as Benjamin Franklin’s advice,
based on his own rise. Consider only David Blight’s description of Frederick Douglass’s
oft-delivered speech, following the Civil War, on “the self-made man.” To be sure,
Douglass castigated the discrimination visited upon African Americans and called for fair
treatment. But this is simply the notion of “equal opportunity” offered to all individuals to
rise (or fall) based on their own efforts. Blight tells us,
Douglass rejected . . . the idea of “genius,” abhorred the “accident or good luck the-
ory” of human achievement, and above all exalted hard work. -Winners and
achievers in the race of life could be comprehended by “one word, and that word
is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!” “Chance” could never explain greatness
or even professional accomplishment; only a sense of “order,” trained “habit,” and
“systematic endeavor” could lead to world-changing ideas.2
In Frederick Douglass’s idealized America, Blight writes, “men were not judged by
their ‘brilliant fathers,’ but merely on their own merits.”3 It is this aspect of Frederick
Douglass that has appealed to Justice Clarence Thomas in his bitter castigation of “affir-
mative action,” inasmuch as, he believes, it rejects meritocracy in favor of emphasizing
instead the importance of one’s race or other ultimately irrelevant factor. Ähnlich, viele
have quoted for similar purposes Martin Luther King’s famous wish that individuals be
judged on “the content of their character” rather than the color of their skin. If our “char-
acter” is, in important ways, the product of our own, freely willed, choices, then why
should we not take pride, as autonomous selves, in what we have done with ourselves?
Encomia to meritocracy abound in contemporary America (and elsewhere). Consider,
Zum Beispiel, a heartfelt appreciation by Carina Chocano of the extraordinarily popular
The Queen’s Gambit.4 She described the series as “a story of affirmation: a world in which
a girl can move freely, in control, and be respected for her strategy and skill.” The lead
2
3
4
DAVID BLIGHT, FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM 565 (2018).
Id. bei 567.
Carina Chocano, I Want to Live in the Reality of “The Queen’s Gambit,” N.Y. TIMES MAG., Dec. 2, 2020, https://
www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/magazine/queens-gambit-netflix.html.
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character was allowed to “succeed[] in a man’s world without being harassed, assaulted,
missbraucht, ignored, dismissed, sidelined, robbed or forgotten.”5 Chocano describes it as “uto-
pian,” a “fantasy . . . we rarely see depicted—the fantasy of a functioning meritocracy for
Frauen, in which they are free to do what they want.”6
And, Natürlich, the notion of meritocracy is scarcely restricted to America, even if, für
reasons suggested by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America,7 it has taken espe-
cially deep roots here. Also, consider also the takeaway in a recent story on the purchase of a
fifty percent stake in the Jerusalem soccer team Betar by an Arab sheikh. Betar (and its
fans) are notorious for being virulently anti-Arab; it is the “only Israeli team,” we are in-
formed by the reporters for the New York Times, “that has never fielded an Arab player.”8
That presumably would change as a result of the new ownership. “Sheikh Hamad . . .
suggested that Betar could soon have an Arab member on its squad. ‘The door’s open
to anyone, for any talented player, no matter where he is from or what his religion is,'
er sagte. ‘It should be based on merit.’”9 I suspect that most readers found the story—
and its vision of meritocracy—inspiring,10 Und, daher, I was disappointed when the sale
was withdrawn.
“Merit,” of course, is subject to multiple definitions. It is easier to define it by what it is
not—e.g., as Douglass suggested, birthright aristocracies where fathers, “brilliant” or not,
pass down their multiple advantages—than by exactly what it is. In my own case—and I’m
certain that I’m not unique—part of my “merit” was the ability to do well on the Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT) In 1957, when I was a senior at Hendersonville High School in a
North Carolina town of about 6,000 Menschen. No doubt that contributed to my winning
a scholarship to Duke University (which overlooked the fact that I had been denied mem-
bership in the National Honor Society because I was a disciplinary problem). Ähnlich, Mein
grades at Duke and my performance on the Graduate Record Examination contributed to
my winning a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that made it possible for me to go to Harvard
for graduate school. But my grades at Duke were, in fact, a function of the fact that tran-
scripts registered only As, Bs, and other letters; the pluses and minuses that professors in
fact gave were irrelevant so far as the registrar was concerned. Also, it was not apparent that,
in my four years at Duke, I received ten grades of A− and only one B+. And, when I
5
6
7
8
9
10
Id.
Id.
LOUIS HARTZ, THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA (1955).
David Halbfinger & Adam Rasgon, Sheikh Buys 50 Percent Stake of Israeli Soccer Club with Arab-Hating Fan Base,
N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 8, 2020, at B7.
Id.
Itsik Itzhaki, Beitar Jerusalem FC Withdraws Sale to UAE Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 11, 2021,
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/beitar-jerusalem-fc-sale-to-uae-sheik-hamad-bin-khalifa-placed-on-hold
-658655.
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became disillusioned with academic political science and the American academy in the
late 1960s, a stellar performance on the Law School Aptitude Test helped pave the way
for me to be admitted to Stanford; Natürlich, that Ph.D. from Harvard contributed to my
receiving a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation that made admission to and at-
tendance at Stanford unproblematic.
As it happens, I define myself as a secular Jew with an almost Calvinist view of the world
(save predestination). Das ist, I do not, in fact, believe that I particularly “deserve” my suc-
Prozess; were I religious, I would probably assign it to divine grace. Stattdessen, I am inclined to
emphasize the element that Douglass rejected (d.h., sheer luck or, vielleicht, emanations of
gracious love from my family or, übrigens, the support of a number of deans and
colleagues who have given me opportunities that cannot plausibly be explained by refer-
ence to “merit” alone if at all). I am fully cognizant of the presence of many “mute, inglo-
rious Miltons,”11 who could well inhabit my positions and enjoy my good fortune had they
been as lucky as I have been throughout my life.
But does awareness of the vagaries of fate necessarily prove “the tyranny of merit”?
After all, one might unpack the notion of “merit” and “meritocracy” into two quite differ-
ent threads. The first simply suggests that positions should be allocated on the basis of
what one might call “best fit” with their overall purposes. Whether we are talking about
brain surgeons, airline pilots, or professional athletes, we want those with the highest set
of relevant skills, and we often use a variety of tests to measure the degree of those skills.
Even if one supports, as I would be tempted to do, more or less random admissions to
“selective” undergraduate schools, I would scarcely be so cavalier with regard to admit-
ting people to medical school or, übrigens, building a sports team. And, if truth be
known, I’d probably reject randomized admissions to graduate programs in government
or law, although the latter is a closer case. Nor do I detect in Sandel a desire to move to
generalized random selection. He seems to fully acknowledge the proposition that some
people are better suited to perform certain tasks than others; most obviously, when we
are sick, we seek out the “best” doctors instead of simply throwing a dart at a list of all
certified MDs in the area.
Stattdessen, what Sandel most vigorously objects to is what might be termed the sin of
pride, in which we indeed see our own success as “merited” and, concomitantly, expect
those who do not enjoy our success in essence to blame themselves and to accept “our”
positions of superiority without complaint. It is our own sin, in effect, that leads us to
condemn as sinners those described as expressing “envy” or, should one prefer a less theo-
logical vocabulary, “ressentiment.” Sandel sympathetically quotes from Michael Young’s
seminal critique of “meritocracy”: “One of our characteristic modern problems” is the
11
Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).
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EXHORTATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND POLITICS
propensity of “some members of the meritocracy” to “become so impressed with their own
importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern” or otherwise relate to
from a position of structural superiority.12 Sandel is particularly critical of his fellow elite
academics, who confuse possession of degrees with entitlement. He writes that
[T]he tyranny of merit consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, genommen
together, have made meritocracy toxic.
. . . [ICH]nsisting that a college degree [oder,
In der Tat, a post-graduate degree] is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent
life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans
those who have not been to college.13
Wenn, as it sometimes suggested, lawyers are people who cannot stand the sight of blood (Und,
daher, reject their parents’ desire that they become doctors), one might suggest even
that academics and professionals more generally are people who have no desire to expose
their bodies to the demands of hard physical labor or even to have to stand up all day
serving others, whether as store clerks or waiters. Even if we can express abstract
appreciation for the work they do—perhaps even describing them, during a pandemic, als
performing “essential” tasks in stocking and delivering groceries—that may still not
translate into a genuine respect and fellow feeling for them, especially with regard to
making fundamental decisions about governing the polity or dividing the economic pie or,
as we are discovering, even giving them priority for access to vaccines. Sandel thus goes on
to attack the insistence “that social and political problems are best solved by highly
gebildet, value-neutral experts,” a “technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and
disempowers ordinary citizens.”14
Bis zu einem gewissen Grad, Sandel pulls his punches by refusing to name names and assess argu-
ments presented by those one might assume are his targets. After all, Harvard has as one of
its major divisions the John F. Kennedy School of Government, not to mention the Harvard
Law and Business Schools, all of which can be viewed as the belly of the beast of contem-
porary American credentialism and technocracy. Interestingly enough, obwohl, Sandel
does engage in a variety of critical remarks directed at the Harvard Law School’s probably
most-famous alumnus, former President Barack Obama. Sandel treats him, probably accu-
rately, as ultimately far more of a technocrat than the more populist “community organizer”
that he presented himself as being when running for the presidency in 2008.
Perhaps reflecting the influence of his wife, Kiku Adatto, an academic who studies
mass communications, Sandel very effectively examines certain political memes and tropes
12
13
14
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 118.
Id. bei 73.
Id.
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that constitute our working ideology. One of them is the definition of the American dream
as the ability of people to rise “as far as their talents and hard work will take them.” Noting
that Ronald Reagan was “the first U.S. president to make it a mainstay of his political rhet-
oric,” Sandel goes on to note that it was Obama “who used it more than all previous
presidents combined. Tatsächlich, it was arguably the central theme of his presidency.”15 This
is not meant as a compliment. Stattdessen, Obama is almost castigated for being “glad that
everybody wants to go to college.”16 What this translates into, Sandel fears, perhaps rightly,
is that anyone who does not want to go to college is in some sense inferior, deserving the
disdain that elites often direct at the “uneducated.” Perhaps Obama was referring only to
highly vocational programs at community colleges, but that is certainly not clear. And,
incidentally, we are entitled to wonder exactly what is thought to be the central benefit
of college attendance. Is it the increased access to good jobs, however defined, Weil
of certain skills taught at colleges? Even if that is the case, I suspect that many of “us”
are critical of the strong embrace by even elite universities of a STEM orientation that
leaves traditional humanities gasping for support (Und, even more certainly, losing
majors). Perhaps even more relevant is the extent to which civic education is also a victim
of the move toward STEM. Daher, a recent article in the Washington Post focused on a
report by a national citizens’ group stating that “[M]ajorities are functionally illiterate
on our constitutional principles and forms. The relative neglect of civic education in
the past half-century—a period of wrenching change—is one important cause of our civic
and political dysfunction.”17 So even devotees of increased educational opportunity must per-
haps address more specifically the kinds of education that are most needed, not only by striv-
ing individuals seeking to get ahead but also by a liberal democratic society desperately
seeking to maintain itself.
Donald Trump was rightly ridiculed for his expression of “love” for the “poorly edu-
cated,” but Sandel can be read as suggesting that this profession, however insincere, helps
to account for his victory over the tone-deaf Hillary Clinton (another target of Sandel’s
Kritik) and her expressed disdain for the “deplorables” who constituted much of
Trump’s vaunted “base.” To be fair to Clinton, she did not offer this as a blanket descrip-
tion of all of Trump’s supporters, and she offered a variety of policies that were designed
to appeal to the “non-deplorable” part of Trump’s base; but the damage was done by the
phrase itself and the way it fit into a general view that it was precisely the way that elite-
educated folks like Clinton (oder, previously, Obama) viewed those we are quick to describe
15
16
17
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 67.
Id. bei 68.
Joe Heim, Massive Investment in Social Studies and Civics Education Proposed to Address Eroding Trust in
Democratic Institutions, WASH. POST, Mar. 1, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/civics-social
-studies-education-plan/2021/03/01/e245e34a-747f-11eb-9537-496158cc5fd9_story.html.
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EXHORTATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND POLITICS
as “uneducated,” deserving, and perhaps to be pitied but not really to be viewed as
equals.
Although Sandel certainly identifies the ever-spreading income inequality in America—
and worldwide—as deep problems, he is more concerned with what might be described as
“dignitary inequality,” by which those who view their own success as “merited” look down,
in all sorts of ways, at those beneath them in the relevant hierarchies. What I discern as the
essence of critical “Sandelianism” was remarkably well expressed in a December 2020 col-
umn on Brexit by the British comedian Russell Brand, who has also emerged as an incisive
analyst of contemporary politics. Brand wrote that
Perhaps even before the virus, before Brexit, we had all been quarantined in our own
naked individualism — an isolation far more toxic. There we were, incarcerated and
alone inside the penitentiary of our temporal identities with no faith or care for any-
thing other than the fleeting fulfillment of our wayward wants. This is the divide that
British people have to reach across for there ever to be any real sense of unity among us.
Letzten Endes, it is the island of self that we must either leave or remain trapped within.18
Es ist, Ich finde, “naked individualism” that is really the target of Sandel’s critique, as was
true, Natürlich, in his famous first book,19 a critique of John Rawls and his allegedly hyper-
individualist notion of political identity behind a veil of ignorance. It is worth noting, Wie-
immer, some profound similarities between Rawls and Sandel. Sandel’s Harvard colleague
Eric Nelson, in his recent The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice
von Gott,20 demonstrates that Rawls himself was an extremely harsh critic of theories of
“desert” that underlie much of the ideology of meritocracy. For Nelson, the roots of
Rawls’s concern lie in the conservative Christianity of his relative youth and the rejection
of Pelagianism and its theory of free will (and concomitant dismissal of original sin).
Whatever differences there may be between Rawls and Sandel, one should be aware of
their deep similarity with regard to whether those at the top of hierarchies “deserve” their
positions because of their own talents and hard work. Consider only the passage from A
Theory of Justice,21 where Rawls described as one “of our considered judgments that no one
deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves
one’s initial starting place in society.”22 To be sure, one can limit “native endowments” to
certain physical characteristics—think, for example of perfect pitch in recognizing musical
18
Russell Brand, Brexit: What Were We Thinking?!, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07
/opinion/brexit-britain-covid-labour.html.
19 MICHAEL SANDEL, LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE (1982).
20
21
22
ERIC NELSON, THE THEOLOGY OF LIBERALISM: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE JUSTICE OF GOD (2019).
JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971).
Id. bei 103.
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tones, or of whatever component of “raw intelligence” might be ascribable to genetic
inheritance—let alone the fact that one might be born into riches rather than squalor.
But Rawls immediately goes on to write that “The assertion that a man deserves the
superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally
problematic: for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social
circumstances for which he can claim no credit.”23 It is a notorious truth about most
selective elite colleges, including Harvard, that most of the small minority of applying stu-
dents who are actually accepted and attend come from the top echelons of the class struc-
tur. Sandel spends several pages assessing James Bryant Conant’s transformation of
Harvard into a “meritocracy.” As with Obama, Sandel is more critical than celebratory
of Conant’s legacy, insofar as it rewards ambitious strivers who often benefit from a variety
of class privileges.
Jedoch, as already suggested, one can accept at least some of the emphasis on
“merit” with regard to allocating certain roles or positions, without necessarily accepting
the view that one’s “merit” is the result only, or even mainly, of one’s own virtues or agreeing
that tests like the SAT should play the role they do in identifying purported merit.24 And,
even more to the point, one can view one’s privileged positions as requiring a genuine
concern for what Sandel calls “the common good,” instead of providing a launching plat-
form for attainment of one’s most selfish desires. One might be suspicious of those who
appoint themselves “stewards” over the welfare of others but, at the very least, an ethic of
stewardship and service is altogether different from embracing the message of Gordon
Gecko and his real-life counterparts that “greed is good,” and that one is entitled to a syb-
aritic life as a reward for one’s cleverness in applying quantitative analysis to the move-
ment of financial markets. Um sicher zu sein, in the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville
notably argued that “private vices” could, through the glories of what Adam Smith would
label the “invisible hand” of market choices, create “public benefits,” so that everything
would work out splendidly in the end. But I take it that unrestrained free-market capital-
ism, or the more general philosophy of “libertarianism,” has come on hard times over the
past two decades. Margaret Thatcher might (In)famously have declared that “there is no
such thing as society,”25 that there was only what Brand describes as the “penitentiary” of a
23
24
25
NELSON, supra note 19, bei 62 (quoting RAWLS, supra note 20, at 103–04).
It might be worth noting that COVID-19 has generated a “natural experiment,” inasmuch as Harvard has
apparently suspended any requirement that applicants take standardized tests. That might help to account for
the fact that the applications to Harvard have skyrocketed. Sehen, z.B., Janet Lorin, Harvard Applications Surge as
Students Flock to Top Names, BLOOMBERG ( Jan. 25, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25
/harvard-applications-surge-as-students-flock-to-biggest-names.
Douglas Keay, AIDS, Education, and the Year 2000: An Interview with Margaret Thatcher, WOMANʼS OWN, Oct. 31,
1987, bei 8.
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“naked individualism” that corrodes any notion of membership in a common venture,
with duties toward one another. But Sandel rightly argues otherwise.
I think it’s fair to say that, for Sandel, society includes (almost) all roles, Berufe,
and offices, each making their own contributions and, daher, entitling their inhabitants
to be viewed and treated with dignity. Whether one is working exclusively with one’s
brain or with one’s hands is irrelevant. And the brain work attached to understanding
and selling insurance is worthy of recognition and respect from those of us who wish
to contemplate the great works of philosophy or literature. All are contributing. We should
be disdainful of (almost) no one. The parenthetical does suggest the possibility that Sandel
is less than respectful of those who, Zum Beispiel, construct casinos in order basically to
prey on unsophisticates hoping to “hit the jackpot” or simply to amass even greater wealth
than they already enjoy in order to purchase ever more luxury goods. The late Sheldon
Adelson is selected out for specific mention by Sandel; it is clear that Sandel doubts that
his status as a billionaire, derived largely from the profits generated by casinos, reflects his
level of actual contribution to society. But is the complaint only that Adelson has been able
to reap such unduly lavish rewards, as have, sagen, hedge-fund managers or rapacious
entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg? Stattdessen, one might argue that a well-organized
society would not have within them casinos, hedge funds, or Facebook, even if those
behind them received much more modest rewards. A critique of inequality is far different
from a substantive critique directed at how people in fact choose to live their lives.
Most of the book is a quite effective critique of the moral egotism generated by a
culture of meritocracy and credentialism. Only toward the end does Sandel really begin
addressing what might be meant by a politics of “the common good.” However, his com-
ments are at most suggestive rather than genuinely worked out. He offers, Zum Beispiel, Die
notion of what he calls “contributive justice,” in which we allocate “honor and recogni-
tion” (and salaries?) on the basis of “what counts as a contribution to the public good.”26
He describes as his “broader point” that renewal of “the dignity of work requires that we
contend with the moral questions underlying our economic arrangements, questions that
the technocratic politics of recent decades,” including those of the Obama Administration,
“have obscured.”27 He goes on to say that
only insofar as we depend on others, and recognize our dependence, do we have rea-
son to appreciate their contributions to our collective well-being. This requires a
sense of community sufficiently robust to enable citizens to say, and to believe, Das
“we are all in this together”—not as ritual incantation in times of crisis, but as a plau-
sible description of our everyday lives.28
26
27
28
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 221.
Id.
Id. at 221–22.
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One is reminded of Elizabeth Warren’s famous speech in which she reminded successful
entrepreneurs of all of the ways they benefitted from various social policies and institutions.
Without demeaning their often impressive accomplishments, she denied their own favored
description as “self-made” successes who deserved to hoard their gains against demands for,
sagen, taxes to pay for redistributive policies. Mitt Romney’s (In)famous distinction between
the “makers” and the “takers” rested on a fundamental inability to understand the actualities
of the debts owed to nameless people whose toil made the success of the self-described
“makers” possible.
Sandel literally concludes the book only pages later as follows:
But if the common good can be arrived at only by deliberating with our fellow citizens
about the purposes and ends worthy of our political community, then democracy
cannot be indifferent to the character of the common life. [What is required is that
men and women] from different walks of life encounter one another in common
spaces and public places. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differ-
zen. And this is how we come to care for the common good.
The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market be-
stows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project. [We must recog-
nize] Das, for all of our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding
ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our due. [H]umility
is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart.
It points beyond the tyranny of merit towards a less rancorous, more generous public
life.29
This is eloquent, perhaps even inspiring. But frankly, it does not really count as a
serious “treatment plan” for the disease that Sandel has diagnosed, even assuming, welche
is not itself uncontroversial, that everyone will agree that Sandel has diagnosed a genuine
pathology needing treatment. To put it mildly, political theorists and ordinary politicos
have been arguing about what counts as “the public good” for centuries. Going back to
Thrasymachus, there have always been “realists” (or cynics) willing to dismiss such lan-
guage as simply the self-serving ideology of any given ruling elite. In our own times, pro-
haps the most thoroughgoing critique of notions of “common good” has been offered by
economists, who emphasize the incommensurability of various preferences that may be
held by discrete individuals. And many economists go on to look at “revealed preferences”
indicated by the willingness of ostensibly “sovereign consumers” to spend their own money
for A (perhaps gambling in one of Sheldon Adelson’s casinos) rather than B (attending a
29
Id. bei 227 (emphasis added).
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morally edifying production of King Lear). Bentham (In)famously suggested that there is no
real way to distinguish “on the merits” between “pushpin” and “poetry,” and many (most?)
economists would agree. Lest this be read as yet one more attack on obtuse economists, es ist
worth noting that a political theorist like Isaiah Berlin emphasized the plurality of ends that
reasonable individuals could seek as well as the concomitant dangers presented by those
who would ignore this plurality in the name of an ostensibly common or universal good.
Rawls himself was acutely aware of the reality of pluralism, as manifested in his desire to
discover an “overlapping consensus” that might join “comprehensive views” that were, In
fact, very different and even antagonistic to one another.
At the least, one would like to see a more fleshed-out argument as to how we identify
what is truly “the common good.” I am put in mind of the famous conclusion of Philip
Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint,30 when the psychiatrist to whom Portnoy has offered his
many complaints suggests that “[N]ow, we may begin” the serious work of analysis and,
who knows, even cure for the neuroses that have been revealed. Sandel offers exhortation
when really hard analysis is called for. After all, what we are really talking about, at the end
of the day, is under what conditions it is legitimate for society or, even more to the point,
the organized state, to use its coercive power, whether of taxation or criminal punishment,
to require behavior that given individuals, left to their own choice, would reject. If we
define “common good” as something like Rousseau’s “general will” (d.h., something that
would be embraced by all rational individuals untainted by their own individual selfish-
ness, their amour propre), then there might be relatively little problem. We could simply
dismiss holdouts as irrational or narcissistic. But I daresay that relatively few of us are
willing to accept such a view. Most of us, I suspect, accept the reality of a social and
political world that includes quite different “comprehensive” views of how best to live
one’s life. Even if we join Rawls in seeking an “overlapping consensus,” there is ever
greater worry that no such consensus might, in fact, be achievable—that we increasingly
look at one another across what Matthew Arnold many decades ago called “a darkling plain/
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”31
The “ignorant armies” are often described today in terms of “polarization,” “identity
Politik,” or “tribal loyalties,” but it is difficult to identify a path away from the “plain.”
Joe Biden ran, in his own way, in imitation of his predecessor a century ago, Warren
Harding, promising to restore a sense of “normalcy” following the convulsions of the prior
Jahrzehnt. He promises to be president of “all Americans”; Er, zu, is devoted to “making
America great again” through an evocation of common purpose coupled with the reality
of a diverse mosaic that he, unlike Donald Trump, embraces. Aber, for a variety of reasons,
even those most elated by Biden’s victory—not least because he freed us of the sociopathic
PHILIP ROTH, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT (1969).
30
31 Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (ca. 1848).
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governance of Donald J. Trump—may doubt that such rhetoric will prove availing. Barack
Obama, schließlich, burst onto the national scene with his vision not of technocracy but, In-
stead, of an America that was not divided between red states and blue states or, In der Tat,
fundamentally divided in any other way. E pluribus unum might have been Obama’s own
motto for his successful run for the White House. But we all know that winning is not the
same thing as being able to govern effectively or, more fundamentally, to achieve the kind
of national unity—and commitment to a politics of the common good—that Obama at his
best might have instantiated. After all, technocrats are fully committed to achieving the
common good; it is simply that they are suspicious that the rough-and-tumble of political
conflict will be as effective as decisions imposed by what David Halberstam so unforget-
tably labeled “the best and the brightest.”
I earlier quoted Frederick Douglass and his own flirtation with the psychodrama of the
“self-made” person. But it was Douglass who also reminded us that “[P]ower concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”32 And “demand” may be too
anodyne a word, for Douglass, once he broke with William Lloyd Garrison, was willing to
accept violence as one way of achieving one’s demands. Although he refused to join John
Brown in what we may well regard as his crazed attempt to spark a slave rebellion in 1859,
Douglass scarcely dismissed Brown as a moral exemplar. Douglass, the most prominent
orator of the nineteenth century, did not believe that exhortation alone could bring about
needed changes.
The “original meaning,” as it were, of “slavery” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
political discourse was illegitimate domination. This is why presumably serious Bostonians
could object that the British were trying to “enslave” them by the imposition of illegitimate
taxes. What ensued, Natürlich, was the violent secession of the American colonies from the
British Empire in the name of government by “consent of the governed” and, one might
have hoped, the recognition of the equal dignity of all members of a nonaristocratic liberal
society. As we all know, it didn’t quite turn out that way, given the “original sin” of “chat-
tel slavery,” the protection of which was the price willingly paid to get a constitution and a
ruling elite of self-styled “natural aristocrats,” where skin color and nothing else was often
enough to distinguish the “aristocracy” from the underlings. It took 750,000 deaths to
eradicate chattel slavery, Aber, Natürlich, that was not enough to eradicate the ideology
of white supremacy—the assignment of special “merit” to racial identity—as an informing
ideal of American politics. And Sandel is not truly heartened by the substitution of
“meritocracy,” even if it softens the ravages of racial discrimination.
I do not think it is a complete stretch to submit that Sandel suggests that “meritocracy”
produces its own form of slavery, at least if we return to a now forgotten use of that term
32
Frederick Douglass, Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?, FREDERICK DOUGLASSʼ PAPER (Rochester, N.Y.), Juni
2, 1854, reprinted in THE ESSENTIAL DOUGLASS: SELECTED WRITINGS AND SPEECHES 76 (Nicholas Buccola ed., 2016).
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to identify all systems of unjustified domination. All systems feature elites, secure in the
propriety of their own prerogatives, who feel entitled to lord it over those they view as
their inferiors. And this is true even if technocrats within the elites are genuinely motivated
by a desire to dispense certain goods to the lower orders. In its own way, The Tyranny of
Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? is like a tract written by an abolitionist, setting
out the reality of an indefensible social order and calling for its replacement by a radically
different one. There is nothing innocent in the use of the word “tyranny.” The Declaration
of Independence, schließlich, justifies what became a five-year-long violent struggle by claiming
that King George III was indeed presiding over a “tyranny.” Tyrannicide is a (justified)
practice going back to ancient times; we might recall that John Wilkes Booth shouted
“Sic semper tyrannis” immediately after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. I presume that
all of us disagree with Booth’s assessment of Lincoln, but what if we did not? Would we
then reprove him for resorting to extreme measures? Would we not have rejoiced if the
White Rose conspiracy had in fact killed Hitler?
But Sandel denounces “tyranny” without naming any particular “tyrants,” even if, as in
his critique of former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, he lays some particular
blame for the rise of the American meritocracy. It is telling, I believe, that in a presentation
of his argument at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he stated that “merit
becomes a tyrant.”33 But this is obvious reification. Merit is a concept, nothing more, Nichts
weniger. Its use can become an agent of tyranny if, and only if, powerful individuals are able to
create an ideology that justifies, both to themselves and to subordinate others, their place
in hierarchies of status, power, and the economy. Also, one wants to know more precisely
who are the principal tyrants and what DESERVED fate awaits them if they do not give up
their powers voluntarily.
No doubt Sandel’s book would have received much less notice had it been titled more
modestly “The Problems of Meritocracy.” But that is part of the point: is “tyranny” being
used basically for marketing purposes, or does Sandel genuinely believe that meritocracy
is in the same league as other widely recognized “tyrannies,” with whatever implications
are attached to identifying an ideology or the concrete individuals who instantiate it as
“tyrants”?
It is telling that Sandel approvingly quotes R.H. Tawney’s Equality,34 written in 1931,
that warns us that the “opportunities to rise are not a substitute for a large amount of
practical equality, nor do they make immaterial the existence of sharp disparities of
income and social conditions.”35 Instead, Tawney writes, and Sandel apparently agrees,
“Social well-being . . . depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence,
33
34
35
Does Meritocracy Destroy the Common Good?, BULL. BIN. ACAD. ARTS & SCIS. 50 ( Winter 2021).
R.H. TAWNEY, EQUALITY (1931).
Id. at 224–25.
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not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong
sense of common interests.”36 Ironically or not, a major point of the earlier quoted column
written by Russell Brand is the betrayal by the British Labour Party of the vision articu-
lated by Tawney. “New Labour” turned out to be Thatcherism with a human face, precisely
the neoliberalism that Sandel spends much of his book attacking.
But a call for “solidarity” raises important issues of its own. With whom are we ex-
pected to express fellowship and embrace as being within a “commons” whose good we
seek? Note Sandel’s own telling use of the term “citizens” when describing those whose
welfare we ought to be particularly concerned with and with whom we should take care to
consult and deliberate. A distinct subdivision of the Rawls industry involves a critique of
the degree to which he devised his famous “original position” and “veil of ignorance”
within a given society (much like the United States) and not the world more broadly.
Should we be indifferent, when defining the “common good,” to implications of any such
definitions for the lives of those defined as outsiders? To return to Brand once more, Er
suggests that one impetus behind Brexit is a nostalgic, perhaps thoroughly reactionary,
desire to return to a stable sense of British (or even English) identity unfettered by any
felt commitments to the welfare of millions of outsiders in the European Union, let alone
those residing in yet more distant climes and places. In der Tat, many of these “outsiders”
have been able, because of the practical demise of political borders within the Union, Zu
emigrate from Poland and elsewhere to become important—and for some, disturbing—
members of British society.
Early on in the book, Sandel notes that many members of Donald Trump’s base share
an “animus” against immigrants. They are viewed not only as competitors for scarce jobs
Aber, at least as importantly, as threats to older and well-established social hierarchies pred-
icated on ascribed characteristics of race, ethnische Zugehörigkeit, and religion. One might join Sandel in
denouncing this as exhibiting “nativism, misogyny, and racism,”37 but that is only to beg
the question of the degree to which many of “us” can be described, pejoratively or not, als
embracing far more an ideal of “rootless cosmopolitanism” than its opposite, which “we”
fear will inevitably become a form of nationalistic solidarity. It is not irrelevant that a
number of books have recently been written defending nationalism, including Why
Nationalism?,38 by the distinguished Israeli political philosopher Yael Tamir. At a far more
mundane level, one should wrestle with the fact that Bernie Sanders’s political vision,
whatever one thinks of it—Sandel describes him as a “social democratic populist”—was
far more of a distinctly national socialism than a call for the American working class to
identify with its counterparts around the world and to accept, sagen, the proposition that
36
37
38
Id.
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 18.
YAEL TAMIR, WHY NATIONALISM? (2019).
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there might be a need for significant redistribution of resources from the wealthy (Und
imperialistic) United States to the downtrodden around the world.
Michael Sandel is, to be sure, one of the major political theorists of our time. Aber was
is ultimately missing from this important book is a genuine sense of politics. Are we
expected to believe that the answer to the problems he identifies is a kind of mass moral
catharsis, perhaps led by visionary political leaders? Or will it involve the possibility, als
significant social change so often does, of social disorder and the kinds of Machiavellian
“tumults” that directly challenge the hope for “domestic tranquility” expressed by the elite
drafters of the U.S. Constitution who feared democracy and the kinds of mass political
movements typified by Shaysʼ Rebellion? Should we expect an uprising from the victims
of meritocratic “tyranny”? And, if so, who might lead it, to whom would they direct their
wrath, and what will their proposed remedies look like? I would be shocked if they stopped
with a call for randomized admission to Harvard College. In any event, perhaps these will
be the topics of his next book.
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