If you were to think of one person that has united Labour and the Tories over the last year or so, who would that be?
No, not him. Nobody agrees with Nick any more.
Andy Murray? Recall that grim picture of Ed and Dave toasting the newly crowned Wimbledon champion in the garden at Number 10. Yes. But not the answer I’m looking for. Try again.
How about the gilded baby George, over whom the party leaders strained to outdo each other in oleaginous welcome?
Nope, and kindly desist from mentioning him again.
In fact the man who more than any other has united the left and the right in British politics is the American philosopher Michael Sandel.
Such are my idle speculations as I await the arrival of Sandel in the lobby of his central London hotel. He has warned me that he’ll have no more than an hour spare, after which he has a lunch appointment at Parliament with one of the rising stars of the Conservative Party, Jesse Norman. Norman is a smart cookie – he’s a biographer of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke – and one of the Tory’s coming men. Norman has been lavish in his praise of Michael Sandel and argues, in a piece for the true-blue website Conservative Home, that Tories should not let the fact that Sandel is widely admired on the left put them off, calling his recent book “a profoundly small-c conservative book, which should be read by all Conservatives”.
In this respect, if in little else, Norman and Ed Miliband are in complete agreement. At the Labour Conference last year in Manchester, Sandel gave a 45-minute speech to the delegates about morality and markets. When he was finished Miliband patted him on the back and said: “We have never had anything like that before. Brilliant. Brilliant.”
From early on Sandel, currently Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, seemed destined for great things. His stellar academic career saw him graduate from Brandeis University and complete a doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol, where he studied under the philosopher Charles Taylor. He has been at Harvard for more than two decades, where he teaches the world-renowned and hugely oversubscribed course in justice.
His first book, Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, announced his preoccupation with the role of ethics in a liberal society, an interest that he has pursued in a series of increasingly influential books including Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, a critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do; Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics and The Case Against Perfection.
It’s been just over a year since the publication of his latest book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, a stinging critique of the marketisation of society, which became a bestseller and has catapulted him into the front rank of world thinkers. With it now coming out in paperback he has returned to the UK for another round of publicity.
The main thrust of the argument – presented, as is often the way with American philosophers, in lucid, concise and eminently readable prose – is that over the last three decades market values have come to govern our lives as never before. If we want to change this, Sandel argues, we need to rethink the role that markets play in our society.
When Sandel arrives he wastes no time getting down to business: “We have drifted,” he says, “from having a market economy to becoming a market society. There is a difference: a market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organising productive activity. But a market society is a place where everything is up for sale and where market values reach into every sphere of life.”
The scandal, for Sandel, is that this shift has taken place without any significant public debate. What we need now, he argues, is an explicit public discussion about where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong. His mission is to generate such a debate.
“When market faith took hold, public discourse itself became hollowed out,” he tells me. “Politics in most democracies became increasingly managerial. This is because we shy away from engaging with ethical questions in public life for fear of disagreement. That is understandable. But this went hand in hand with market faith. The appeal of market faith is that it spares us the need as citizens to deliberate, reason and argue about how to value goods. Markets, we are told, are a neutral way of sorting it out. That’s a mistake.”
Sandel is a model interviewee. He speaks in slow, authoritative sentences, with perfect diction. Whenever he makes a point he follows it immediately with a succinct example to solidify his claim. And, unlike the politicians who court him, when he’s asked a question he answers it. So, given how markets have come to dominate our political culture over the last three decades, who should we hold responsible? I list the usual suspects: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who under the influence of the “supply side” economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek precipitated market domination?
Sandel nods at these names. But he is careful to steer clear of party politics or anything that smacks of political point scoring. Nevertheless he concedes that the cultural and economic hegemony that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union has taken the West down the wrong path.
“I think we misread what the end of the Cold War meant,” he says. “We assumed it meant that capitalism had prevailed, and that this now means markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. The way was prepared by developments in economics. Previously economics was about issues like inflation, employment, how to avoid depressions, questions of foreign trade, banks, stocks and so forth. But, beginning in the 1970s, economics became a kind of imperial discipline and claimed to explain the whole of life. Gary Becker, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, was one of those who argued that economics could be applied to explain all of human behaviour.”
In What Money Can’t Buy Sandel examines how the ideology of the market has transformed Western societies. One of his examples is that subject so dear to British hearts: queuing. Whereas, he explains, the traditional ethic of queuing could be expressed as “first come first served”, under the relentless march of the market this has been replaced by an ethic that says “you get what you pay for”.
Where once a kind of democracy ruled – everyone had to queue and wait their turn – and to contravene such rules was to risk social stigmatisation, now, he argues, it would be rare to find an economist who would argue that it is morally wrong to pay people to stand in line on your behalf. We’ve seen a fundamental, but unacknowledged, shift in the ethical norms of society.
Two different arguments are used to justify this shift, Sandel says. One is about respecting individual freedom, the other is utilitarian. “The libertarian argument for markets is an argument in the name of freedom,” he explains, taking his suit jacket off and hanging it neatly on the back of his chair. “Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek would have argued for this. It’s the idea that market relations are free because they are voluntary.” He rolls up his shirtsleeves as he talks, in full-on teaching mode now. “Therefore, the argument goes, the more areas of life that markets govern, the more areas that will be free.”
“This is different from the utilitarian argument, which is about efficiency. It says: where markets govern, goods are allocated more efficiently because incentives are aligned, and they increase economic growth.”
The freedom argument is a matter of principle – honouring the choices that consenting adults make – and the utilitarian argument a matter of pragmatism. But, in Sandel’s view, the freedom argument is taken too far by libertarians and laissez-faire economists. “Market freedom refers to our freedom as consumers, but not as citizens, and not as full human beings. Our identity as consumers is only part of who we are. And if we allow our identity [as consumers] to dominate, then we miss out on important aspects of freedom to do with individual self-development and citizenship.”
“The utilitarian argument for markets is certainly valid up to a point. We do want to try and achieve the efficient organisation of productive activity and scarce resources. There is nothing wrong with that, provided that we are talking about the production and provision of material goods. The problem arises when we try and extend that utilitarian reasoning to other aspects of social and civic life.”
And here we get to those things that money can’t buy. Like friendship. Imagine buying your friend a gift, Sandel suggests: do you give them £100 in cash or a thoughtfully chosen present? Using transactional market logic, clearly the money is preferable (assuming the gift is not worth more than £100), offering the freedom to make your own choice about what you get. But buying our close friends gifts, says Sandel, is not like other transactions, as gift-giving is itself an expression of the relationship. Here Sandel draws on Aristotle’s notion that friendship matters because it is something that cultivates character and has an educative purpose – it contributes to “self-knowledge” and the development of our own identities. None of this is factored in if we imagine a gift only as a commodity with a fixed monetary value. In light of which the inappropriateness of thinking of a “market of friendship” (are you listening, Facebook?), or giving your friend a stack of cash for their birthday, becomes clear.
Sandel is fond of quoting Aristotle. He has become something of a modern champion of the ancient Greek philosopher, employing his ideas, for example, in a now famous dust-up with his then colleague at Harvard, the economist Larry Summers.
At the time Summers was Harvard President, having served a term as Secretary of the Treasury in Bill Clinton’s administration. In a speech he gave at Harvard in 2003 Summers made the case that everything could be understood through the frame of the market, even ineffable human qualities like kindness: “Economists like me,” Summers declared, “think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving.”
Sandel did not agree with this land-grab of human relationships by economists and was not shy to say so. The men, who had previously taught courses together, engaged in a series of public debates that revolved around a central question: to what extent can market mechanisms and economic thinking be extended to social and civic life? (Sandel admits that, despite a number of public discussions, they still haven’t fully ironed this one out.)
“There are some economists who make the argument that human beings should rely as much on possible on self-interest and as little as possible on altruism, solidarity or civic virtue. These economists seem to think that positive virtues are fixed in quantity, that they are like fossil fuels: the more you use, the less you have. But for me Aristotle is closer to the truth. There is not a finite supply of virtues, as if they were commodities. Aristotle says that we learn to become brave by acting courageously, and that we learn to care for the common good by engaging in civic acts and civic responsibility. These virtues are cultivated through practice.”
Sandel stands openly against the ideology touted by economists like Summers and Becker, who believe that human behaviour is amenable to explanation using the fixed objective logic of the market, where everything, even emotions, can be imagined to be a commodity with an intrinsic fixed value. Instead he promotes the work of economists who recognise that markets change the value of goods.
One such economist is the late Fred Hirsch, who served as a senior adviser to the IMF in the 1970s and is the author of The Social Limits to Growth – published just a year before he died in 1977 – which challenges the assumption that the value of a good remains stable irrespective of whether provided through the market or in some other way. Hirsch argued that commercialising a good can change its meaning, its value. The example he gave was sex. Sandel explains:
“Hirsh pointed out that the act of buying sex changes the meaning of sex. He shows that familiar examples of market mechanisms – buying and selling and economic thinking – when they are applied to human relationships can very often change the character and meaning of the goods. Buying sex [from a prostitute] is not the same as sexual relations between a loving couple. Hirsch used this example to argue against the Becker approach.”
The lesson to derive from Hirsch is clear: “Whenever we try and introduce market mechanisms into human relationships, or social and civic life, we have to ask the question, how will it change these relationships?”
Throughout our conversation Sandel emphasises the importance of “public and civic experiences”, and how these are threatened by marketisation. His example is sport: “When I was 12 years old I would go to a baseball game. There was a sense of common spirit and shared identity. When you went to a sports event it was a class-mixing civic experience that cultivated a sense that we were in this together. Now with skyboxes and so on there is a separation between the privileged, who can watch in air-conditioned comfort, and the common folk in the stands bellow. This is symbolic of what is happening throughout our society, where there are fewer events and occasions when people from different social backgrounds encounter one another in the ordinary course of life. We often take this for granted. But this is what enables us to think of ourselves as engaging in a common endeavour, in a shared way of life.”
“Democracy needs that. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that we share enough of a common life, that we see ourselves as engaged participants of a coming project. And the marketisation of everything puts greater pressure on the commonality that democracy requires.”
Sandel signals that it’s time to leave. As he makes his way to a taxi that will take him to the Houses of Parliament, I cannot help but reflect on how his lunch will go.
It strikes me that his ideas are far too radical for any member of the Conservative Party. Still, Jesse Norman should bring David Cameron and George Osborne along to lunch. They might learn a thing or two about the destructive nature of unregulated markets.
My cynical inclination is that neither the Tories nor Labour are really interested in Sandel’s ideas – they are simply looking for a public figure who can convince the electorate that the political class have a moral conscience. It seems a terrible shame that Sandel’s noble brand of public philosophy – done in public on behalf of us all – could be squandered on propping up the egos of power-hungry politicians; or that his eminently humane arguments could become merely another commodity in the marketplace of ideas, another victim of the marketisation of everything, the very process that he is so valiantly trying to resist.
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel is published by Allen Lane
