7/26: Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

[논둑길맨발로]

동영상보기 아래 클릭

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/79201-1

May 19, 1996
Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
by Michael Sandel

---

The ANXIETY(DISCONTENT) of our age

Storylessness -- the drift to storylessness

BRIAN LAMB: Michael Sandel, author of "Democracy's Discontent." At the very end of your book, the last paragraph, you say the following: "Since human beings are story telling beings, we are bound to rebel against the drift to storylessness." What did you mean there?

MICHAEL SANDEL: "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 makes for an unstable politics.

LAMB: You say in that same paragraph, "Some in their hunger for story will be drawn to the vacant, vicarious fare of confessional talk shows, celebrity scandals and sensational trials." Did you have anything specific in mind?

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 a certain emptiness in our political debate.

LAMB: Do you ever watch any of those confessional talk shows?

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

LAMB: Do you ever...

SANDEL: That's refuge.

LAMB: Do you pay attention to the celebrity scandals?

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.

LAMB: How about the sensational trials? Did any of your students watch any of these things on television?

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 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.

--------------------------LAMB: How many children do you have?

SANDEL: Two two boys.

LAMB: How old are they?

SANDEL: They're 10 and almost eight.

LAMB: Now do you ever talk about any of this kind of thing with them?

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.

LAMB: Do they fight you on that? Do they want to watch things that you won't let them watch?

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.

LAMB: Where do you live?

SANDEL: In Brookline, Massachusetts.

LAMB: And where do you work full-time?

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

LAMB: What level?

SANDEL: All levels, beginning with first-year students all the way up through Ph.D. students.

justice class

LAMB: What do you find your students most interested in talking about in class?

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.

LAMB: How many years have you been doing this?

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

LAMB: Have you noticed a change over those 15 years in the attitude of the students, you know, as reflected in your book here about the discontent?

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.

LAMB: What book is this for you?

SANDEL: Well, this is the ...

LAMB: I mean, what number?

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

LAMB: What was the first one?

"Liberalism &the Limits of Justice," and "justice"

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 inphilosophy, 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.

LAMB: Eighty-two years ago, in 1914, Walter Lippmann -- you've got a quote in here -- said the following. Before I read, who was Walter Lippmann?

Walter Lippmann의 문제의식

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

LAMB: OK, 1914, he said this: "We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation" -- crank the paper here -- "There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no procedures to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves." Now couldn't you write that today?

SANDEL: I think you could write that today.

LAMB: Why did you pick that quote?

national economy& local political identy의 모순

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.

globalization&national political community의 모순

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 two, 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.

LAMB: Well, what happened over the last 84 years that got us to this point, and what needs to happen over the next 84 to change things?

도전에 대한 두 가지 해결 방향

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 two solutions that were proposed. There were those who said weshould 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 Crowley, 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 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.

--------------

LAMB: In that Brookline home, is there a library?

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: If we went in that library, would we find some of your favorite books from philosophers?

SANDEL: Yes.

마이클셀던의 정신적 스승,학문적 지주가 된 철학자들

LAMB: Who would be the three or four philosophers sitting up on that shelf that you'd grab for first, that would be your own personal philosophy to life?

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.

LAMB: Who else besides Aristotle will be on that other shelf?

SANDEL: On the other shelf? Well, maybe as 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?"

LAMB: When you look out at those students, do you ever see their eyes glaze over when you start to talk about -- I mean, you're talking about Harvard students, so I assume they're pretty smart when they get there, but do you ever see them glaze over when you start to talk about Aristotle and Hegel and Kant and all these people you talk about in your book?

현실의 문제로부터 시작하는 강의

SANDEL: Well, it depends. There's always the risk 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.

LAMB: OK, let me combine a couple of things. Mrs. Clinton was here a number of weeks ago, and she talked about, because I asked her, about her time serving on the Wal Mart board of directors.

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: You talk in your book, among Aristotle and Kant and all these, about Wal Mart ...

SANDEL: Right.

LAMB: ... and Louis Brandeis. Start with Mr. Brandeis, Justice Brandeis, who -- they have a university up in Waltham right near Brookline.

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

LAMB: How did that ...

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

LAMB: Well, how do you know much about him?

SANDEL: Yes. About Brandeis, you mean?

Brandeis의 사상-창여정치에 대한 확신, 독점(월 마트)에 대한 반대

LAMB: How did you get a school named after Louis Brandeis?

SANDEL: Well, the school was founded in 1948 by the American-Jewish community as a non-sectarian liberal arts school, and 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.

LAMB: Do only Jews go to Brandeis?

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

LAMB: What would he think of Wal Mart?

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

LAMB: Why?

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 ofprivatized consumer experience. You drive to an enormous place, and for the sake of lower consumer prices. Brandeis thought that in the rush to get lower consumer prices, Americans were selling out citizenship and democracy.

LAMB: Do you know how long Mr. Brandeis was on the Supreme Court?

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

LAMB: I don't know.

SANDEL: I'll have to check it.

LAMB: Do you know when he died?

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

LAMB: Did Felix Frankfurter replace him on the court?

SANDEL: Yes, yes.

LAMB: And he's also in your book.

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: What would he think today of all this?

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.

----------

고향,출신학교,학문입문의 계기

LAMB: Where was home for you originally?

SANDEL: Just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Midwest.

LAMB: What was it like growing up?

SANDEL: Well, I lived there till I was 13 years old, and then my family moved to Los Angeles. So it was quite a shift, but 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.

LAMB: What did your family do?

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

LAMB: For what company?

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

LAMB: And your mom?

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

LAMB: Brothers and sisters?

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

LAMB: And you moved to Los Angeles in what year?

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

LAMB: And where did you go to high school and then to college?

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

LAMB: Is that San Francisco?

SANDEL: No, Los Angeles. Pali High, it's called.

LAMB: I'm thinking of Pacific Heights.

SANDEL: It was a public high school, and it was very 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.

LAMB: But Ph.D. And masters?

SANDEL: And then I went for my Ph.D., I went to Oxford in England.

LAMB: Which college?

SANDEL: Balliol College.

LAMB: You there with anybody we know? I mean, was there any other American there that has become public?

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.

LAMB: And what was your Ph.D. in?

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

LAMB: And you got that where?

SANDEL: At Oxford.

LAMB: Oh, you did get that at Oxford. Do you remember how you ever got interested in writing a treatise on discontent and democracy?

SANDEL: Well, 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...

LAMB: Do you know why?

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

LAMB: Were your parents interested?

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, 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 Ph.D. in political philosophy.

LAMB: How long have you been at Harvard?

SANDEL: For 15 years.

LAMB: And when you teach, how big are your classes?

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

LAMB: The Kirkus Reviews -- they review books, usually ahead of time?

SANDEL: Yes.

procedural liberalism에 대한 비판

LAMB: The first line of the review, "A wide-ranging critique of American liberalism that, unlike many other current books on the matter, seeks its restoration as a guiding political ethic." That leads me to want to ask you, does that make you a liberal, and are you trying to bring back liberalism in the way you've written about it?

SANDEL: Well, I've been a critic of a certain version of liberalism and 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.

하락하는 미국정부의 대중적 신뢰도

LAMB: Your first footnote in the back, first chapter, "Only 20 percent of Americans believe they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right most of the time." This is from February 1994. It goes on, it says, "Three-fourths says they are dissatisfied with the way the political process is working." That's from 1992. And that's gone way down, as you say earlier in the book, from, like, 76 percent ...

SANDEL: Right.

LAMB: ... 25 years ago.

SANDEL: Right.

LAMB: What happened?

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.

LAMB: Let me go back, though. Would it also have been the case in the Eisenhower years?

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

LAMB: As you remember, in 1960, Teddy White wrote the "Making of the President, 1960," and you quote him here on page 295 as saying, "In 1968, this faith was to be shattered, the myth of American power broken, the confidence of the American people in their government, their institutions, their leadership shaken as never before since 1880."

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: What what shook them in 1880? What happened back then that shook their confidence?

SANDEL: Well, this was in the wake of reconstruction, and 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.

LAMB: How old were you in '68?

SANDEL: I was 15.

LAMB: Can you remember that year?

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

LAMB: You were in Los Angeles.

SANDEL: I was in Los Angeles. I remember waking up in the morning and learning -- this was after the night that 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.

LAMB: You also quote Scotty Reston, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. "Washington is now the symbol of the helplessness of the present day. The main crisis is not Vietnam itself or in the cities, but in the feeling that the political system for dealing with these things has brokendown."

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: Now if we were so enamored by government in the early 1960s, whathappened?

debate besides to the point--60년대 이후 아메리칸 pride의 상실

SANDEL: Well, I think what happened is that, even in the 1960s, early '60s, 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, 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.

LAMB: OK, bring us to today. If you were to sit down with either the president or the speaker of the House or just had a blank piece of paper, what are the things you would do to bring us back to this civic responsibility?

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

LAMB: To what?

근원적인 문제의식

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

정치 공론의 퇴행

LAMB: So in the debates this fall, that would be your first question of the two or three, whatever the number of candidates that are standing there?

SANDEL: It wouldn't be a bad question. It wouldn't be a bad question. You know, 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.

LAMB: Explain this sentence in the Loss of Mastery chapter: "Of all the candidates of recent decades who sought to articulate the inchoate frustrations that beset American politics, the one who offered the most was Robert F. Kennedy." You didn't mention John F. Kennedy. You think that Robert F. Kennedy was still the most compelling of all the visionaries on politics?

Robert F. Kennedy

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(떠올리게 하다) 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 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 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.(복지정책과 시민권 문제-justice의 주장과 연관해 볼 것)

LAMB: Would he be your favorite liberal?

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.

LAMB: Who's making the same kind of arguments today in politics? Anybody?

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 RonaldReagan. Ronald Reagan 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.

LAMB: Who is the other one?

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.

Aristotle

LAMB: A fellow that you bring up a lot in your book is Aristotle.

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: When did he live?

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.

LAMB: If he were sitting here today ...

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: ... and we were having this conversation, and he looked around the United States, what would he conclude?

ecclesia와 쇼핑몰

SANDEL: He would ask, "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.

LAMB: Where did he live?

SANDEL: Where did live? In Athens.

LAMB: Did he marry?

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

LAMB: You say here in your book that he considered women slaves?

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 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.

LAMB: You have this statement in here: "Aristotle held that persons of moderate means make the best citizens."

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: What's "moderate" mean?

SANDEL: It means what, these days, we mean by middle class, roughlyspeaking.

LAMB: You say in here that 1 percent of the population has 42 percent of thewealth.

SANDEL: That's right, in America today.

LAMB: So that 1 percent aren't -- they're not going to be the moderate -- they're not going to be very good citizens.

대중적 부(건실한 시민층의 존재)는 공동선을 실현하기 위한 기반

SANDEL: Aristotle wouldn't think so. He thought if a society is driven 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.

LAMB: What do you think Aristotle would think of the Internet?

SANDEL: What would he think of the Internet?

LAMB: What would he think of CD Roms? What would he think of all this, you know, people living in their own little worlds?

SANDEL: He would say that people living in their own little worlds are not people from whom democratic politics are an 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.

LAMB: Do your students use the Internet?

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

LAMB: You ever talk about it in class?

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.

LAMB: And when you talk about Aristotle in class, is this something they like to talk about?

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: Why?

SANDEL: You mean about Aristotle ...

LAMB: Yes.

SANDEL: ... and the Internet.

LAMB: No.

Aristotle 사상의 현실적 중요성

SANDEL: Aristotle, yes, because I think 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?

LAMB: You know, another fellow that you bring up quite a bit in your book, or at least enough, and we get this in all these books, is Alexis de Tocqueville.

SANDEL: Yes.

Alexis de Tocqueville-지방 자치와 참여민주정치

LAMB: Now first of all, why has he survived all this time, like Aristotle? What about his writings are relevant to today?

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.

LAMB: You know, on page 248 and 249, you talk about the paradox that conservatives endorse liberal ideas and vice versa, and you say, "In the name of economic efficiency, in deference to the market, the Reagan conservatives defended a policy once championed by Brandeis and Hubert Humphrey, progressive advocates of small producers and the civic case for anti-trust. In the name of lower consumer prices, liberals and consumer groups defended the discounting of chain stores once despised by progressives as destructive of a decentralized economy of independent producers." What is a republican and a democrat, what is a small republican --I mean a small "r" republican?

SANDEL: Right.

LAMB: Define all these terms today.

시민공화적 전통

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."

현재의 왜곡된 시민적 관심

Now 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 to individuals. But what's missing is the civic voice, the civic strand of economic argument. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, for example, and, 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.

LAMB: If you were in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton, just the two of you, and he'd say, "I've read your book -- tell me, just give it to me in straight doses, how can I improve the situation in this country?" What would you tell him, besides laying down the economic parameters?

시장의 대안으로서의 공동체 -지구화시대의 지방자치와 공동체적 가치의 회복

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 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.

LAMB: Your two boys are 10 and eight?

SANDEL: Ten and eight.

LAMB: What are their names?

SANDEL: Adam and Aaron.

LAMB: Now what kind of prediction do you have for those two guys about the future? I mean, is their life going to be things you write about, going to come about? more civic responsibility?

미래에 대한 희망과 낙관론

SANDEL: Well, the first prediction I have about them is that they will both be playing somewhere in the infield of the Boston Red Sox, which is 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.

LAMB: Are you going to do anything specifically to get them involved in civic activities?

SANDEL: Well, we've tried to involve them, even in a small way, when there have been local campaigns for a tax override to provide more funds for public schools and other public events. We've tried to involve them in that. 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.

LAMB: I'll probably mispronounce it, but you dedicate this book for Kiku?

SANDEL: Kiku -- Kiku Adato.

LAMB: Who is that?

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 by 1988 it had gone 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 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.

LAMB: How did she find it? What was the impetus for going after that statistic?

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.

LAMB: Where did you meet her?

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.

LAMB: And when you put a book like this together, what audience do you have in mind? I know The New York Times used a lot of this for their focus on Dayton and the downsizing series.

SANDEL: Yes.

LAMB: Did people notice that? I mean, did that help?

civic life의 정치적 기반 탐구-democracy's discontent/ civic life의도덕적 기반 탐구-justice

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 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.

LAMB: What's the writing experience for you like?

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 slow in the writing, and the hope is that because of that, it doesn't make slow reading, but you're a better judge of that.

LAMB: Do you have a favorite chapter or a favorite premise?

SANDEL: It's hard to say after all of being to 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?

LAMB: Next book?

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.

LAMB: By the way, where's this picture from?

SANDEL: Do you mean the ...

LAMB: On the cover.

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.

LAMB: And our guest has been Michael J. Sandel. "Democracy's Discontent" is the title of the book, "America in Search of a Public Philosophy." Thank you very much.

SANDEL: Thank you, Brian. Thank you.

return to the top of the document

Copyright © National Cable Satellite Corporation 1996.Personal, non-commercial use of this transcript is permitted. No commercial, political or other use may be made of this transcript without the express written permission of National Cable Satellite Corporation.

Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

Publisher: Belknap PressISBN: 0674197453

[논둑길맨발로]

중점 토론 과제-서술 순서대로 추출함

1.The anxiety of our age - what is the two main problems which consist of modern democracy's discontent in America?-테리

2 Liberalism 의 철학적 한계 및 procedural liberalism에 대한 비판-쥴리

3.미국 정치 현실에 대한 반성, 문제점의 근원, 로버트 케네디의 의미-베로니카

4.셀던의 입장에서 보는 아리스토텔레스 철학의 중요성과 시민 공화정-릴리

5,시장의 대안으로서의 공동체-참여민주주의와 새로운 시민공동체에 대한 전망-커렌, 에드윈