Rejoinder to Michael Sandel Author(s): Richard Dagger Reviewed work(s): Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 61, No.

2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 215-217 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408355 . Accessed: 15/12/2012 18:10
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Rejoinder to Michael Sandel

Richard Dagger
Michael Sandel's response to my critical essay is thoughtful, generous, and characteristicallyelegant. I am not the only one, I am sure, who will welcome this clarificationof his views. YetI am inclined to think that what he does not include in his response is as important as what he does. What Professor Sandel's response does not include is any attempt to sort out, qualify,accept, or rejectthe criticismsadvanced in the "Sandel and the Self" section of my essay. He says in his second sentence that I bring out "the continuities and differences Discontentand my earlierwork with subtlety between Democracy's and care," but he fails to note that most of those continuities concern the unencumbered self he attributes to liberalism. We are left to wonder, then, what he makes of the three charges that I bring against his account of this self: that he mistakes the point of the unencumbered self in Rawlsian liberalism; that he trades on a false dichotomy between the encumbered and the unencumbered self; and that he neglects to notice a distinction, implicit in his as much as in Rawls's thinking, between the self in the abstract, general sense and the self in the concrete, particular sense. What Professor Sandel does say in his response indicates that he is not as hostile to liberalism as he has sometimes appeared to be. He draws a distinction between procedural and perfectionist liberalism, as others have done, and he appears to concede that a republican-liberal hybrid is plausible as long as the liberal portion is perfectionist rather than procedural. That is also my view, and Professor Sandel rightly surmises that I favor the perfectionist version of liberalism. We part company, though, when he says that "one reason for posing the distinction between liberalism and republicanism as starkly as I do is to force liberals to choose between their procedural and perfectionist impulses." If Professor Sandel really wants liberals to choose between these impulses, then I should think that he would concentrate his attention on developing the distinction between procedural and perfectionist liberalism in order to make a case for the latter.How he expects a sharp distinction between republicanismand liberalismto force

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liberalsto make this choice, however, is beyond me. Indeed, posing this distinction as sharply as he does seems to obscure ratherthan clarify any differences among liberals-and thus to force a choice between republicanism and liberalism, not between forms of liberalism that are more and less congenial to republicanism. The one point at which Professor Sandel clearly rejects my argument concerns the value of autonomy. My claim is that he is wrong to associate autonomy with procedural liberalism and the unencumbered self, for his own attempt to revive republican selfgovernment itself relies on an implicit appeal to autonomy. Professor Sandel's response is that there are two concepts or conceptions of autonomy, neither of which is at all helpful for the "formative project"that both of us endorse. He is right, of course, to point out that autonomy is hardly a simple or straightforward concept that precludes competing interpretations.He is also right to point out that conceiving of autonomy as obedience to a law that one prescribesfor oneself, in the manner of Rousseau's "moral liberty,"leads to some of the problems associated with Rousseau's "generalwill."' But these two rights do not make my claim wrong. As long as Professor Sandel's aim is to revive the republican ideal of self-government, he will need to appeal in some way to autonomy. His own formative project makes this point clear. What Professor Sandel hopes to form is people who will think and act as self-governing citizens, not as consumers or unencumbered individuals. We should be more concerned, he says in Democracy's Discontent, with "the political economy of citizenship" than with the distributive issue of who gets how much of what. To be a self-governing citizen, however, is not to be a self-governing hermit. The citizen is someone who acts in concert with others, which requires the citizen to rise above or set aside some of the features of his or her particular identity. That is not to say, as Professor Sandel does, that this kind of "moral freedom consists in abstracting from all particular interests, ends, and conceptions of the good." But it is to say that the particularinterests of the individual are sometimes at odds with the interests of the citizen. If they were not, then the concept of civic virtue would have no point.
1. As I acknowledge in Civic Virtues:Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York:Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 6, esp. pp. 96-97.

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Nor is the self-governing citizen some sort of public-spirited robot, always doing without reflection what the common good requires. Self-government demands citizens who reflect on the good-their own and that which they share with other citizensbefore they act. What the formative project needs, then, is to find a way of encouraging people to think for themselves-thus to be self-governing as individuals-and at the same time to think of and with others as self-governing citizens. If Rousseau's problems threaten the project, then we must look for some way to go over, around, or through them. The formative project, in sum, aims to foster autonomy. Professor Sandel may prefer to avoid the word, but he cannot avoid the concept-not without forsaking his commitment to republican self-government. He also is committed to individual rights, it seems, with the qualification that "rights cannot be detached from substantive moral judgments about the purposes and ends rights advance." The Sandelian republic thus would protect the rights of self-governing or autonomous individuals while it fosters their desire to pursue the common good. It may not be utopia, but it is the kind of place in which a republican liberal could be quite comfortable.

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