Booknotes

Professor MICHAEL SANDEL, AUTHOR, "DEMOCRACY'S DISCONTENT": `Storylessness,' `the drift to storylessness,' the tendency in our culture and in our public life for everything to be fragmented: for political discourse, political argument to be fragmented; for people to be dislocated; for communities that give people a sense of place in the world to be eroded, from families to neighborhoods, schools, congregations, nations. People aren't anchored in a way that they once were anchored in the world, and they can't tell convincing stories about who they are, where they are, where we are as a people, and that's a makes for an unstable politics.

Prof. SANDEL: The fare of an ordinary day's television programming, for example. I think one of the reasons that our public discourse and our political discourse are so impoverished and so bound up with the confessional and the scandalous and the sensational and the titillating is that, at the core of our political discourse, our political debate, there's a kind of emptiness, a void of substantive moral argument. People want public life to be a place where they can argue about serious moral and political questions. And when politics doesn't address that yearning, that aspiration, these aspirations, I think, become distorted in the forms of the fare of confessional talk shows and the rest. And so I think it's a symptom of our of a certain emptiness in our political debate.

Prof. SANDEL: I hear about them. No, occasionally I've taken a look, but mostly I just watch C SPAN.

Prof. SANDEL: That's refuge.

Prof. SANDEL: Only I don't read the whole story, but I notice what is in the headlines. I notice what the National Enquirer, when I check out in the grocery store, is writing about. And I think it's a sign that there's a certain something missing from the state of our public life.

Prof. SANDEL: The O.J. trial, for example, that kind of thing. Some of them do, and it becomes a kind of soap opera that's played out before a kind of national audience, but I think there's I think there's something else that we should be doing with our time, and that my students should be doing, and that my kids should be doing, and that all of us should be engaged with as citizens.

Prof. SANDEL: Two two boys.

Prof. SANDEL: They're 10 and almost eight.

Prof. SANDEL: Mostly we try to keep the television off, except for nature shows and sports and things like that, as far as the children are concerned. I think it's a pernicious force if allowed just to run, and for kids to sit dazed before it.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, for a while we did all right. Recently we've had a few struggles, but life should be full of other things, and if the only thing on television were PBS and C SPAN, I would worry less.

Prof. SANDEL: In Brookline, Massachusetts.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University in the government I teach in the government department. Political philosophy is what I teach.

Prof. SANDEL: All levels, beginning with first year students all the way up through PhD students.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, students want to have their moral and political convictions challenged. They want an opportunity to reflect critically and systematically on their political opinions. The classes I teach, which are in political philosophy one of the courses I teach is called justice. It's about different theories of justice by philosophers from Aristotle up through John Stuart Mill and contemporary political philosophers. What the students like to do is to see that the views they have on the opinions of the day, on political controversies and the like, implicate them, commit them to positions and principles that the great philosophers of the past wrote about, debated, argued about and that's what we do.

Prof. SANDEL: I've been doing this now for 15 years.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, not a big change. Students are motivated today as they ever were before. They want to try to sort out what their moral and political convictions are. I think if there's a change, I notice it's that the level of patience may be a bit lower. I think that students today have been conditioned by the fast pace of contemporary culture, and there is a kind of pressure to adapt teaching to a more limited attention span, but that's not a major difficulty, because the sense of engagement and interest I think is still there.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, this is the sec...

Prof. SANDEL: The second book. Well, the firs...

Prof. SANDEL: The first book was a book called "Liberalism & the Limits of Justice," which was about the philosophy, the moral philosophy, of contemporary liberal political theory. It was a very abstract book in philosophy, and this book tries to bring some of the abstract philosophical debates down to earth, to relate them to contemporary politics, to contemporary dilemmas of democratic society, and really to the history of the American political tradition.

Prof. SANDEL: Walter Lippmann was the pre eminent political commentator of his day, which is to say the early to mid 20th century.

Prof. SANDEL: I think you could write that today.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I picked that quote because what Walter Lippmann was noticing about the anxiety and the frustration and the discontent and the sense of dislocation that Americans confronted early in the 20th century has really unfolded in our time again. The causes are different, but the predicament is similar. Back at the early 20th century, when Lippmann wrote, there was a sense of location because the scale of economic life had suddenly become national, with the advent of industrial capitalism, national markets and national economy, but the scale of political community, the places where people took their bearings and derived their identities, were still local, in small cities and towns and farms, as they had been from the beginnings of the republic. And people didn't people felt disempowered. They felt that the sources of moral authority were unraveling, and that's also the case today.

We struggled in those 80 years to build up a national government and political system to rival a national economy, but now we have a parallel problem. The economy is global, and it has overpowered and really outrun the scale of political community and government, even at the national level, and so again politics is beset by a set of frustrations, worries, discontents. I think too, really, which are also figured in Lippmann's day: One is the sense that we're less and less in control of the forces that govern our lives, a sense of disempowerment; and also a second aspect of the discontent is that the moral fabric of community, from families to neighborhoods to the nation, is unraveling around us. These two fears, for the loss of self-government, and for the erosion of community and moral authority, define, it seems to me, the anxiety of our age, but they were also anxieties that figured at the time that Walter Lippmann wrote in the early 20th century.

Prof. SANDEL: What happened back then in the early 20th century, there was a debate. The major parties, the major candidates for office, took the frustrations of the day as the major political question, `How can we restore democratic self-government in the face of large-scale economic power, the big trusts, and the monopolies?' Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in the election of 1912 debated this question, and there were two answers in that the two solutions that were proposed. There were those who said we should decentralize the economy so that local democratic units can control it. That was the answer of Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis, who, before Wilson appointed him to the court, was a reformer and a decentralizer, an advocate of antitrust. Then there was another solution. Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, who was a commentator and journalist who agreed with him, who said, `No, the big economy is here to stay we have to invent, so to speak, big government, large, centralized political authority to regulate the big economy, the national economy. And more than that, we have to cultivate a sense of national citizenship so people think of themselves as Americans first, not just as members of small towns or cities or states.' And that was it was really the nationalizing project that was played out. From the Progressive Era through the New Deal through the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, the question was how to build America as a national community to inspire a sense of national citizenship.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I would say there would be two sections to that library that we could look to. If we're trying to look for philosophers of the American political tradition, Jefferson would be there, Lincoln, Brandeis, who I mentioned. We think of him as a jurist, but he really was onto this question of political community and self government and citizenship and how it could be made meaningful. So Brandeis would be there, Franklin Roosevelt, and in contemporary times, though we don't think of him really as a philosopher, he was a politician, but he was alive to these themes about the character of civic life, Robert F. Kennedy.

Now the other section of the library, about philosophers going back at the time of the Greeks, would include well, Aristotle would, I think, be prominent among them because Aristotle was really the philosopher of citizenship. He was the philosopher who invented a long tradition that says citizenship is more than just voting your own self interest, it's more than just going to the polls every four years; to be a citizen is really to have a say in shaping the forces that govern the destiny of the political community, and that requires citizens who have certain habits and dispositions, certain civic virtues, and we can't take those for granted. We have to worry about the way our public life as a whole including the schools, but also what's on television, what's in the movies, what's the character of our political debate we have to worry about how public life as a whole shapes the character, the moral and civic character, of citizens. Unless we cultivate citizenship, form civic virtue, we can't expect very good results when people cast their votes at the ballot box.

Prof. SANDEL: On the other shelf? Well, maybe a surprising answer, because he's not very often invoked in connection with American politics. Hegel would be because Hegel came of course, Aristotle was writing in the days of the Greek city state, and one might ask, `How could that possibly inform our present politics?' We live in a global society with enormous nations, not face to face communities, not direct democracy.

And in the enlightenment, in the 18th century, many philosophers said, `We can't hope we shouldn't even try to really cultivate through politics virtues in citizens because there's always the risk of coercion. Better that we should encourage people to think of themselves as individuals capable of choosing their own values. Government should be neutral.' And then Hegel came along and said, `Well, Aristotle had a point. Can we connect the idea of citizenship, belonging, civic identity with an appreciation of respect for human rights and individual rights?'

Prof. SANDEL: Well, it depends. There's always the risk and of the eyes glazing over, and the best way I've found to prevent the eyes glazing over is, before launching into Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or, for that matter, even Jefferson, to start with some contemporary issue where students have opinions and convictions, whether it's about income distribution or affirmative action or military conscription, whether it's just, or whether to teach creationism alongside evolution in the public schools some contemporary controversy that raises philosophical questions, and then that takes them back to show there's something at stake in what those philosophers wrote.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Right.

Prof. SANDEL: Yeah.

Prof. SANDEL: That's right. And I...

Prof. SANDEL: ...I should say, I'm a graduate of Brandeis University.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes. About Brandeis, you mean?

Prof. SANDEL: Well, the school was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community as a non sectarian liberal arts school, and it was the idea was to find a figure, an American, an American Jew who embodied the universalistic values, values associated with education, and also who retained a strong sense of this identity as a Jew, and who was also very strongly identified with American democracy and the democratic tradition.

Prof. SANDEL: No. It's open to all students from all backgrounds, and it's been a great success.

Prof. SANDEL: What would Brandeis think of Wal Mart? He would be he would be sharply critical of Wal Mart. He would see Wal Mart as antithetical to democracy.

Prof. SANDEL: Brandeis thought and I think there's a lot in this that democracy requires an economy of a certain kind. It requires an economy within which citizens can learn to be active citizens, to be effective participants in political deliberation about the common good, and but how do you have such an economy or such a public life? You need it has to be on a scale where people can argue, can bump into people, where the classes mix.

Take what happens now, shifting to the Wal Mart case, to small downtown areas in cities across America where there is a mixture of retail outlets, a local hardware store, maybe a grocery store, a post office, a library, the city hall, maybe a playground. Traditionally, these are places, gathering places, where people in the normal course of life bump into each other, people who are rich and poor and in between, people from different races and classes, ideally, though often the image of the small town is idealized. When Wal Mart comes along, the downtown stores can't compete. They're shuttered. They close down. Downtowns die. People have to get in their cars to drive, because you can't walk to most Wal Marts. They're off some feeder from the highway, the interchange. You have to get in your car. It's a kind of privatized consumer experience. You drive to an enormous place, and you for the sake of lower consumer prices. Brandeis thought that the that in the rush to get lower consumer prices, Americans were selling out citizenship and democracy.

Prof. SANDEL: He was I should know. How long was he on?

Prof. SANDEL: I'll have to check it.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, let's see. He went on the court in 1916, and I don't know. I'll have to check.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes, yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, Frankfurter was influenced by Brandeis' emphasis on decentralizing democracy. Brandeis emphasized antitrust and anti monopoly policy, not it's interesting. These days there's still an antitrust division of the Justice Department that takes on tremendously important cases, but the rationale has changed. In Brandeis' day, the whole purpose of antitrust law was not to get lower consumer prices. It was not because you worried that monopolies would push up the price, given their monopoly position, to consumers. Brandeis wasn't concerned about consumers as such. He worried that monopolies were sources of big economic power that would suffocate democracy, that would overpower democratic institutions and buy politicians. Nowadays we have antitrust policy, but it has nothing to do with really decentralizing the economy to make it amenable to democratic participation or industrial democracy. It has all to do with preventing monopolists from pushing up prices. So the shift from the citizenship reason for antitrust Brandeis to the consumerist reason for antitrust reflects a shift in our politics in the 20th century that's at the heart of what I take to be democracy's discontent: The shift from thinking of ourselves as citizens first to, nowadays, thinking of ourselves as consumers first and citizens second. So that's why Brandeis wouldn't like Wal Mart.

Prof. SANDEL: Just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Midwest.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I lived there till I was 13 years old, and then my family moved to Los Angeles. So it was is quite a shift, but the I liked growing up in the Midwest. It was a wholesome place. It was also a place that had a long tradition of civic concern, both in the local businesses there and also the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which had a strong progressive tradition, produced a lot of progressive democratic politicians, also with a tradition of a kind of civic minded politics.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, my father was in he distributed records, phonograph records, in the record business.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, it was he had his own kind of distributing company.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, she was she did some teaching for a while of languages, Spanish and French, and then but for the most part, she was a homemaker.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes, three, a sister and two brothers.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, it was when I was 13, which would have been 1966.

Prof. SANDEL: I went to Palisades High School in Palisades, California. It overlooks you can see the Pacific Ocean, the beach from the front quad.

Prof. SANDEL: In no, Los Angeles. Pali High, it's called.

Prof. SANDEL: Yeah. It was a public high school, and very in my it was very sort of competitive academically, but also, you know, the beach tempted surfers who wanted to go out and cut class, but it was a great place to go to school. And then I went to Brandeis University, as I mentioned, for college.

Prof. SANDEL: And then I went for my PhD, I went to Oxford in England.

Prof. SANDEL: Balliol College.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, let me think. There are a couple of people from my class who made it to Congress and the Senate, though I was after the days of Bill Clinton. He was before my day.

Prof. SANDEL: It was in political philosophy, politics and philosophy.

Prof. SANDEL: At Oxford.

Prof. SANDEL: Yeah.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I in all those years that we've just rehearsed, growing up as a kid and through college years, I was always interested in politics and elections and political parties and debates. And then...

Prof. SANDEL: I don't know why. It just always interested me.

Prof. SANDEL: They were, as many educated, informed people are interested, but not with the kind of passion that somehow I acquired. And then by the time I finished college, I didn't know what I wanted to do, whether to be a lawyer or a politician or a journalist or an academic. Those were the contending possibilities. And then an opportunity came along to go to Oxford to read and study for a while, and so I did. I thought I would spend a term or two studying political philosophy, going back from Plato and Aristotle up through Hobbes and Locke and Kant and John Stuart Mill, and have that as part of my background. Well, I instead of a term or two, I became hooked on it. I realized that this was a passion, and that I hadn't solved all the questions that had led me there. So I wound up studying and doing a PhD in political philosophy.

Prof. SANDEL: For 15 years.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, they range from a graduate seminar of 10 or 11 students to a big undergraduate course that I teach which is about 800 or 900 students.

Prof. SANDEL: Yeah.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I've been a critic of a certain version of liberalism the political theory of liberalism that says government should be neutral with respect to the character of its citizens or with respect to moral and religious arguments. That version of liberalism, what I call in the book `procedural liberalism,' is what I'm arguing against. Now many conservatives argue that government should have more of a role in cultivating virtue and moral character, and I agree with them up to a point. Where I part company with them and would not consider myself a conservative is that they don't address the way they don't go beyond morality and culture to look at the economy. My argument in the book is that the economy as well as the culture has traditionally been a place, and should be a place, where we worry about the civic consequences, the consequences for character of our public arrangements. But conservatives leave the market as exempt. In my view, market forces undermine community and citizenship and civic virtue just as powerfully, sometimes more powerfully, than government does or the culture does.

Prof. SANDEL: Right.

Prof. SANDEL: Right.

Prof. SANDEL: Back when John Kennedy was president, three fourths of the people thought government could be trusted to do what's right most of the time, and they did believe government was concerned with people like them. And it's now reversed.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, they only began really tracking these in a systematic way around the around 1960, but I think yes. In the Eisenhower years, such figures as we have suggest a very high level of trust in government.

Prof. SANDEL: Yeah.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, this was in the wake of reconstruction, and there was there was a series the politics in the late 19th century was really trying, beginning to sort out the corruption and also the dislocation to do with industrial capitalism. The Civil War was over. Reconstruction had been harsh and severe and difficult. The industrial capitalism seemed to be undermining democratic possibilities. So it was not a happy time. And as Theodore White observed, 1968 was a time when the faith that Americans had that we were the masters of our destiny, that we could exercise our will in the world, this great faith that was an article of faith after World War II through the 1950s, suddenly came undone. It came clattering down. With Vietnam, with the riots in the cities, with the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, suddenly there was a sense that events were spinning out of control, and we were no longer the masters of our circumstance. Self government seemed the project of self government. It was unraveling.

Prof. SANDEL: I was 15.

Prof. SANDEL: I do remember that year. I remember...

Prof. SANDEL: I was in Los Angeles. I remember waking up in the morning and learning this was after that night had been the California primary learning that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. And I remember also, just prior to that, when Martin Luther King was assassinated the people telling us, you know, we should stay out of the street. There would be riots in reaction to this. It was a time of tumult and moral anguish. And even, you know, as a 15 year old, I think there was a culpable sense of this.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I think what happened is that, even in the 1960s, early '60s, when and in the late '50s when there was this sense of confidence, the civic resources of American politics were already beginning to wither. In many ways, we've been stuck in a debate, an obsolete debate, that goes back to the New Deal in our politics, but the parties' debate is what should be the role of government in the economy, what should be the scope of the welfare state? But that doesn't address the sense of disempowerment, the sense of frustration. It doesn't address the sense the community is unraveling, and for a while, our politics could coast along on the heady the rising economy and the heady sense of confidence of the late '50s, early '60s.

But with the succession of events in '68, politics the national government politics, generally seemed incapable of acting in the world, of exercising meaningful control over events, and in many ways, we've lived with that since. We're not out of it. Jimmy Carter, in many ways, reaped the bitter fruits of this frustration. The hostage taking crisis in Iran summed up why was it so politically potent? After all, they returned. None of them was killed. They returned safely in the end. But it summed up and symbolized this sense of disempowerment for a generation of Americans who had been weaned on the idea after World War II that we were the masters of our destiny at home and abroad.

Suddenly, "America Held Hostage" "Nightline" was invented, a nightly program called "America Held Hostage," this image that we were powerless, after all, despite what we'd been told. Vietnam ushered in that sense of frustration. The hostage taking crisis, the gas lines of the '70s, the OPEC oil shortage, the inflation: Americans no longer felt they were masters of their destiny in their families, in their jobs, or looking at America's role in the world.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I would begin by trying to change the character of our political debate, to change the subject, so to speak.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, to make the first question of our political debate is: What economic arrangements and what political arrangements are conducive to cultivating good citizens, citizens capable of exercising some meaningful control over the forces that govern our lives?

Prof. SANDEL: It wouldn't be a bad question. It wouldn't be a bad question. You know, in the through the 19th century and up through the New Deal, that really was a central question in American political debate: What political institutions and arrangements and policies will lead to the creation of good citizens? That's fallen away. Mostly what we debate now is what rights and entitlements should people have, or what should be the role of the welfare state how much government, how much for the market economy. And Democrats take one side and the Republicans take another. But that isn't addressing people's worry about community and self government and citizenship and the character of civic life.

Prof. SANDEL: I think that Robert F. Kennedy was on to this theme about citizenship and the character of civic life and community. He talked about familiar issues like crime and like jobs and like welfare issues that we debate all the time, and still do. But he talked about these issues from the standpoint of their effect on citizenship, civic responsibility and civic life. For example, he said the tragedy of crime in the inner city isn't just the threat to physical safety, which is bad enough; it's also that when people can't walk the streets of their own neighborhoods, those neighborhoods are no longer really theirs. And if that isn't the case, they can't take responsibility and have a sense of civic engagement.

Welfare: We forget easily that Robert Kennedy was a critic of welfare. You know, conservatives these days argue that welfare dependency corrupts the independence that citizenship requires. That argument does harken back to this older civic tradition, going back to Jefferson and up through Brandeis. But the first person I know of in American politics who worried about the consequences for character, civic character, of welfare was not a conservative who wanted to get rid of all programs for the poor, it was Robert Kennedy, who was at the forefront of concern for the poor, but he said he made a civic argument. `Welfare,' he said, `is our greatest domestic political failure because it saps citizenship.' Citizens are more than people who consume together. The highest the dignity that comes from having a job is the dignity that allows a person to say, `I'm a participant in the great public ventures of this political community.' And welfare, he said, undermined that. It was a civic argument, an argument about character.

Prof. SANDEL: In recent times, yes. I think he was on to the civic strand of the American political discourse that's been largely eclipsed in recent years. He wasn't a defender of a solely kind of rights based, individualistic kind of politics, but a civic politics.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, there are two who have made those arguments effectively. Unfortunately, to my mind, they're both conservatives. They're people who would not have agreed with much of what Robert Kennedy stood for. The most effective of recent presidents was in this respect was Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was held together two different kinds of conservatism.

On the one hand, he was an individualistic, laissez faire, free market conservative in favor of getting government off people's backs. But at the same time, and this was a kind of political genius in a way, he was also, and I think the most resonant part of his politics, was a kind of civic and communal conservatism. You remember he talked about families and neighborhoods and religion and patriotism and the small town. A lot of it was nostalgic. He didn't govern by it. He governed more as a market conservative. He didn't talk about the way market forces erode community. But he did speak to that hunger for a sense of community, moral authority, citizenship and particular forms of community.

Prof. SANDEL: The other one would be, even worse, to my way of thinking, Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan, though I don't share his politics for a moment, was on to the themes of the frustration and discontent that people have, both about coming unmoored from communities, communities that locate people in the world, and also the sense of disempowerment that he associated with downsizing and the effects of the global economy. What I would like to see would be a democratic politics small D democratic politics or progressive politics or liberal politics that addressed the same worries and frustrations Buchanan tapped, but with more promising solutions and a more promising politics.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, he lived in the third century B.C. And I think I've got that right, though if I have it wrong, I will hear from my students about it.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: He would ask, `Where is the where do citizens gather? Where is the assembly?' I think that's what he would ask, `Where is the assembly?' Because for him, the assembly was at the heart of the city. It was the place where citizens came to deliberate about the common good. I think he would look around, and he would see shopping malls. Shopping malls are really our gathering places today. You spoke of Wal Mart before, but shopping malls are, sadly, the kind of architectural and civic alternative, in our day, to the ecclesia, the assembly, which was in the center of the marketplace, at the heart of the city, in Aristotle's day.

Prof. SANDEL: Where did he live? In Athens.

Prof. SANDEL: I don't believe he did, though, I may also hear from my students about that. I'll have to look into the...

Prof. SANDEL: Well, what I was trying to acknowledge one criticism that could be raised against my attempt, or anyone's attempt, to revive the civic tradition, or what's sometimes called the republican small R civic republican tradition that Aristotle initiated, one argument against that is: `Yes, but this strong idea of citizenship has often been invoked to exclude people to exclude women, to exclude immigrants, to exclude Catholics, to exclude blacks.'

People say, `No, only citizens who are true members of this community can be full members.' And that is the dark side of the civic or civic republican tradition, and I pointed out that Aristotle sanctioned slavery, though it's complicated whether he himself there's evidence in Aristotle's writing he saw there was something wrong with slavery, but he defended it. And he said only men who have a certain kind of wealth can really be democratic citizens because they're the only ones with the independence, the leisure, and the ability, really, to deliberate about the common good. It is it was exclusive back then, and the challenge for republican politics small R republican, is to have an inclusive politics that's still concerned with obligation and citizenship.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: It means what, these days, we mean by middle class, roughly speaking.

Prof. SANDEL: That's right, in America today.

Prof. SANDEL: Aristotle wouldn't think so. He thought that people if a society is riven economically by class division, with some very rich and some very poor, that it's unlikely to be a place where citizenship and democracy will flourish. And the reason is that, for Aristotle and for the civic tradition, politics should aim at the common good. Democracy isn't just about adding up votes or adding up people's interests and going with the majority. It's actually arguing it out, deliberating what is the common good? And you can't do that in a society where people live such different lives that they can't possibly agree on the good for the community as a whole. They'll be too preoccupied with their own self interest, with luxury and corruption, he thought, in the case of the rich; and with the scourge of economic necessity that gives you no time to reflect about politics, in the case of the poor.

Prof. SANDEL: What would he think of the Internet?

Prof. SANDEL: He would say that people living in their own little worlds are not people from whom democratic politics can issue. As for the Internet, I think he, maybe like some of the rest of us, me included, would be struggling to try to figure it out and to sort out its political consequences. In some respects, I suppose you could argue, he would see I said before he would ask, `Where is the assembly?' Some people today, people who have great faith in technology, would say would point him to the Internet.

Prof. SANDEL: Some of them do. Some of them do.

Prof. SANDEL: We haven't really, no. Students want to know if I'll have office hours via e mail. I haven't resorted to that.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: You mean about Aristotle...

Prof. SANDEL: ...and the Internet.

Prof. SANDEL: Aristotle, yes, because I think students many students, as many citizens, sense that there is something missing from our democracy, which is really mostly about competing interests. And what's missing is really something that Aristotle writes about: What are the conditions what are the preconditions for citizens who are equipped to deliberate about the common good, to share in self rule?

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, he emphasized the role that the New England township played in shaping citizens. The idea that struck him was that American politics is decentralized, and this is a great advantage, because where people can participate, where they can exercise the art of government in `the small sphere within their reach' that was his phrase then they can learn the habits and dispositions, the qualities of character that will orient them to the common good. It will draw them out of their own private interests, if you give people that opportunity to participate. Now the challenge in applying Tocqueville to our present situation is we no longer live in a world of small New England townships; we live in the world of the Internet and the global economy and big national government.

So how is that relevant today? One way I think it could be relevant is that Tocqueville didn't want to stop with the small sphere of government represented by the New England township. His idea was the virtues we learn there, in small towns or in local communities, can point us outward. If we start worrying about a toxic waste cleanup in our own backyard, pretty soon we'll be led to reflect and worry about national environmental policy, and maybe even ultimately global environmental policy. So the idea is to find forms of political participation in community that begin, perhaps, locally, equip citizens with certain skills and a certain commitment to the common good, but point beyond themselves.

Prof. SANDEL: Right.

Prof. SANDEL: OK. Well, let me try. What I've been referring to as the small R republican tradition, or we could call it the civic republican tradition, is the one that goes all the way back to Jefferson and up through Lincoln and Brandeis and, to some extent FDR, that says we should worry first and foremost about shaping the character of citizens. It's concerned with civic character, and it says, `You can't keep moral and civic questions out of politics.'

Now how does that what does that have to do with our contemporary political debates? These days, mostly, Democrats and Republicans don't argue about the civic consequences of policy. They mostly argue about what will increase the gross domestic product, what will bring prosperity, and, to a lesser extent, what will be fair in to individuals. But what's missing is the civic voice, the civic strand of economic argument. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, for example, and, to in some moments, Reagan, have talked about civic character, moral character, religion, patriotism, and so on. But they've had a blind eye to the effect, so it seems to me, of market forces, of large scale economic power in eroding citizenship and virtue and the moral character that equips us to be citizens. But Democrats haven't been very good at seizing this civic tradition and trying to direct it to progressive purposes. I think that's one of the reasons that, up until Bill Clinton was elected, Democrats had a very difficult time competing at the level of the presidency with Republicans.

Prof. SANDEL: That we need to find ways and government can't do this of itself but we need to find ways, even as politics more and more is played out on a global scale with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization and the role of the United Nations, humanitarian operations abroad, all of which are important, global environmental accords; even as politics is being pushed beyond the nation, we also have to push politics back to levels below the nation. We have to try to revitalize those institutions of civil society that stand between the individual, on the one hand, and the nation or the global economy on the other families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations, workplace, forms of democracy and participation, social movements. We need to restore those civic institutions, those institutions of civil society, in order not to leave people as individuals adrift, disempowered, dislocated, without a way of effectively controlling those forces unfolding on a global scale.

Prof. SANDEL: Ten and eight.

Prof. SANDEL: Adam and Aaron.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, the first prediction I have about them is that they both be playing somewhere in the infield of the Boston Red Sox, which is the our current emphasis and aspiration. But as for the broader shape of our political life and public culture, it's very difficult to know. I would distinguish between hope and optimism, and the book ends on a note of hope, but not of optimism. The hope is that in the midst of our frustrations and discontent, we will find ways of recovering the civic aspirations of American public life. But that's different from optimism because it seems to me that's no easy task. The forces arrayed against the possibility of effective, meaningful democratic citizenship are growing more powerful by the day, and they have especially to do with the shape and momentum of the global economy that really defies effective democratic control and democratic participation.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, we've tried to involve them, even in a small way, when there have been local campaigns for an override a tax override to provide more funds for public schools and other public events. We've tried to involve them in that. We every once in a while, though, as I said before, we try to avoid too much television watching. From time to time, they are allowed to watch C SPAN and to identify the political candidates and to say which of the ones seem to make the most sense to them. And then the involvements that flow from school and synagogue and other kind of activities are ones that we hope ultimately will build a kind of concern for a common good which is beyond merely individual preoccupations.

Prof. SANDEL: Kiku Kiku Adatto.

Prof. SANDEL: Kiku is my wife, and she's a writer. She's right now writing children's stories, though before that she wrote as a commentator on American political culture, a book called "Picture Perfect" on political imagery. She was the one who discovered the shrinking sound bite, which also fits with the kind of diagnosis I have given here, the fact that in 1968 the average sound bite on the evening news for a presidential candidate was about 44 seconds when Nixon and Humphrey ran. And in by 1988 it had gone to a to about nine seconds. In 1992, it had dropped even lower. She discovered this and wrote it up in a cover story in the New Republic, and it got lots of a lot of debate about the shrinking sound bite, the withering of political discourse, which fits with the kind of withering of civic discourse that I've spoken about here. But now she's turned away from that to try her hand at children's fiction.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, there was a lot of talk that the evening newscasts were constraining political discourse candidates never got to speak, it was all about images and pictures. And so she had some assists. She had a grant from the Markle Foundation, got some assistance to actually time all of the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC in 1968, 1988, so that for the first time it was possible to document what many people had sensed, that we no longer really allow candidates, even candidates for president of the United States, to speak except for eight or nine seconds.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, we met at Harvard. She was teaching in the sociology department at Harvard at the time I had begun teaching in the government department.

Prof. SANDEL: Yes.

Prof. SANDEL: It did. It did because it drew the connection between the whole range of concerns and frustrations about downsizing and disempowerment which is a big theme of this book, and the way that economic forces, as well as cultural forces, contribute to the erosion of community and citizenship. It was just good fortune that it fit with that, I think, superb project that Sarah Rimer and a number of others at the Times wrote. The audience for the book is really intended to be a general audience of people who are concerned about politics; about the state of American politics. And it's not a partisan book, but it's a book that tries to diagnose our present discontent, and also to look back at the American political tradition to see what possibilities, what lessons there might be that we could draw upon to revitalize civic life in our time.

Prof. SANDEL: Well, I'm a slow writer, and the book took I hate even to admit it it took over 10 years by the time I had finished reading and researching and writing. So it's long and it's slow in the writing, and the hope is that it's because of that, it doesn't make slow reading, but you're a better judge of that.

Prof. SANDEL: The it's hard to say after all of after being too close to it, I suppose, but as far as premise, yes, the idea that our present politics isn't speaking to the worries and concerns that matter most, which are basically the loss of self government, sense of disempowerment and the erosion of community and moral authority. That's the premise that starts from the present, and then I try to look back and see, how did this arise? Why did American politics lose its civic voice? When has the civic strand of American political discourse been stronger? What are some actual concrete examples from the past? And what hints are there in our present politics that might be built upon to rejuvenate American democracy?

Prof. SANDEL: Next book, I don't know quite yet. I have some thoughts in mind, but for the moment, I want to try to sort of finish digesting and thinking about and recovering from this one.

Prof. SANDEL: Do you mean the...

Prof. SANDEL: The picture on the cover was one that was designed by the Harvard University Press. The photo inside was taken by my wife Kiku.

Prof. SANDEL: Thank you, Brian. Thank you.