Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997; translated into eight foreign languages), Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007). His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times. Sandel teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary political philosophy, including "Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature," "Markets, Morals, and Law," and "Globalization and Its Critics." His undergraduate course, "Justice," has enrolled over 12,000 students. In 1985, he was awarded the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, and in 1999 was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of his contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Sandel has lectured to academic and general audiences in North America, Europe, Japan, India, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and China. He was a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2001, and delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University in 1998. The recipient of three honorary degrees, he has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 2002 to 2005, he served on the President's Council on Bioethics, a national council appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. A summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University (1975), Sandel received his doctorate from Oxford University (D.Phil.,1981), where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He lives with his wife and two sons in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Hear Lawrence Buell, Michael Sandel, Stanley Cavell, and Wai Chee Dimock speak at the Bicentennial Emerson Forum to be held April 3, 2003 at Harvard University. Read more...

The defect, Sandel maintains, lies in the impoverished vision of citizenship and community shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. American politics has lost its civic voice, leaving both liberals and conservatives unable to inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that self-government requires.

In search of a public philosophy adequate to our time, Sandel ranges across the American political experience, recalling the arguments of Jefferson and Hamilton, Lincoln and Douglas, Holmes and Brandeis, FDR and Reagan. He relates epic debates over slavery and industrial capitalism to contemporary controversies over the welfare state, religion, abortion, gay rights, and hate speech. Democracy's Discontent provides a new interpretation of the American political and constitutional tradition that offers hope of rejuvenating our civic life.