Democracy's Discontent.

It has been a quarter of a century since John Rawls, the Harvard philosopher, published A Theory of Justice, which is widely viewed as the most important work of political philosophy to be written in English in our time. It certainly has been the most widely discussed. Of all the commentary it has spawned, none has been more important than the critique offered by Michael Sandel of Harvard's government department in a book published in 1982 called Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which succeeded in calling into question some of Rawls's most fundamental premises, and in the process posed a challenge he has been struggling to meet ever since - unsuccessfully, in my judgment.

Sandel took exception in particular to Rawls's claim that political liberalism did not depend on any partisan assumptions about the human good, insisting that this contention would not withstand critical scrutiny. It was necessary, he said, for us to be "persons of a certain kind, related to our circumstances in a certain way," for Rawls's theory to work. The controversial assumptions Rawls had made about human beings and their welfare especially the claim that every good we seek is a matter of choice - would have to be defended on their merits and Sandel left a clear impression that he doubted that could be done adequately.

Rawls has been trying ever since to prove Sandel wrong. But the more he has had to say about the subject, the more obvious it has become that Sandel was indeed right, and that the resulting critique goes to the heart of what is problematic about contemporary liberalism. For try as he will, Rawls cannot get away from a way of thinking about the human good that is indeed partisan - and anything but uncontroversial. In his most recent book, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press), for example, he suggests that the presumption should be against reference to religious beliefs in public discourse. And it does not help at all to suggest, as Rawls has done with regularity when pressed to defend this view, that all he is trying to do is give expression to an emerging "consensus" in the constitutional democracies of the West about the basis of our public life.

The questions this raises are very much at issue in Sandel's new book. Even though it is much more historical and less philosophical, Democracy's Discontent is very much a sequel to Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. It provides a clear rejoinder to those who think that liberalism now deserves to be regarded as "the" political philosophy of the West. For even in this country, whose political life has been so deeply influenced by liberal ideas, it is just not true, Sandel reminds us, that liberalism has really been hegemonic in the manner so much recent liberal writing suggests.

Or, more precisely, it has not been so until very recently. In Sandel's narrative, which spans the whole history of the republic, liberal ideas have long been one current among others. Only in the last fifty years has this changed. Sandel regards liberalism's recent ascendancy as a real setback - and the source of some of the most serious problems besetting us as a nation.

Sandel is a republican thinker in the classic sense, which means that he is just as much concerned with (civic) virtue as he is with liberty. Like Thomas Jefferson, he understands the fate of the two to be intertwined. Liberty, understood as the effective control of one's destiny, is something that can only be realized through the exercise of self-government. It cannot be divorced, therefore, from a willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of civic life. People need to be prepared to conduct themselves as citizens if they are going to enjoy the fruits of liberty securely, and that means society must encourage the cultivation of certain virtues, such as self-sacrifice and a concern for the common good.

For much of our history the connection between virtue and self-government was taken for granted. Not only did democracy entail a strong commitment to self-government in localities, but it also involved a presumption that people there have a right - and even a responsibility - to create and maintain a way of life reflective of their values. That presumption was honored in the law in everything from Sabbath observance to the functioning of the public schools. Moreover, it was recognized that more was at stake in managing the economy than just securing prosperity and the distribution of its rewards. Notable figures throughout our history - such as Jefferson, again - understood the way economic conditions affect the rest of life, and insisted that economic policy be made with other concerns in mind. For better than a century (1780s-1890s), policies designed to protect the economic bases of a way of life thought conducive to self-government (such as the family farm, for example) were able to survive.

To our great loss, such concerns now seem sentimental and archaic. The federal judiciary has overruled one local practice after another in the name of protecting individual rights (school prayer, restrictions on hate speech, prohibition of the sale of contraceptives, etc.). Ever since the New Deal, those responsible for managing the economy have been doing much the same thing by adopting Keynesian-inspired measures to promote economic growth and consumption while neglecting virtually any other relevant concern. We are left, as a result, with weak communities that have little capacity to govern themselves and a citizenry that, for all the various liberations it has embraced, is frustrated by a growing sense of powerlessness.

The irony of this outcome is inescapable - which is why Sandel considers the influence of what he calls "procedural liberalism" in our public life as a problem to be overcome, not a source of needed remedies. Contemporary liberalism's retreat from moral deliberation about the good life is a distortion of what the American political tradition is all about. The only way we are going to avoid further cultural and political fragmentation is to strive to recover something of the republican heritage we have lost.

But how? Here is where Sandel's argument loses much of its force. It is a point where he is attentive to practical matters, and he shows in the last chapter that he has given much thought to identifying the forces in American life today that might function as agents of the kind of change he has in mind. But ironically it is not clear that he has given anywhere near enough reflection to the issues of principle his argument raises.

Sandel is obviously aware of the standard objections to the kind of participatory politics he favors, but does not begin to take them seriously enough. It must be admitted, for example, that the reason the federal judiciary has taken it upon itself to invalidate so many local practices - such as racial segregation - is that it found them morally objectionable. And if one is at all sympathetic to their intentions in doing this, the obvious question is whether it would really be preferable to revert to a situation where localities were free to do whatever they chose on such matters - which is not answered merely by acknowledging that republican politics is "risky business."

After all the debate generated by the rise of "communitarian" critiques of contemporary liberalism, it is very late in the day to be advancing an argument which raises issues of this sort without being prepared to argue their merits, and Sandel's unwillingness to do so constitutes a real failing, in my judgment. Even more disappointing is his failure to take up in any very direct way a question which is arguably even more critical to the success of his project. It is natural, I think, to wonder whether the republican ideal is a part of our heritage that has been overrun by the course of events. Maybe it is obsolete? There are moments when Sandel himself comes close to admitting as much, and the fact that he never really comes up with any good reasons for thinking otherwise makes it easy to dismiss the whole argument as an exercise in nostalgia.

That impression is only reinforced by the failure of the book to discuss in any very direct fashion the question of why as a matter of principle it would be better for us to live in the manner Sandel has in mind. For what that does, of course, is lend even more credence to the widely held suspicion that those who have been attacking contemporary liberalism along the lines Sandel has been doing have no viable alternative to put in its place. Because I find so much of his critique to be both persuasive and illuminating, I would like to believe otherwise. But this book, I am afraid, gives little basis for doing so.

R. Bruce Douglass is dean of the faculty at Georgetown College.