You might know him from the legendary course Justice. Michael Sandel is a political
philosopher at Harvard University and the author of celebrated books such as What
Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits to Market and Justice:
What’s the Right Thing to do. His new book on the discourse of merit unpacks
the foundation of the ‘winner-takes-all’ world we live in. This is an important
work for our times and can be productively read with the last two reviews of this
blog on the Deaths
of Despair and the Future
of Work. The undercurrent that these thinkers are trying to navigate is
not just the causes of unacceptable inequality that exists in our world today,
but also how we have acknowledged, justified, and normalized it in our lives
through narratives and discourses. An important idea that we have used to make
sense of this inequality and impoverishment of many amidst prosperity and
abundance of some is that of ‘merit’.
By merit, Sandel does not allude to the rhetoric of ‘you
deserve what you get’, but how the institutionalization of the merit rhetoric
works in practice. Be it higher education or professional career, the accident
of birth and the substantial benefits it endows is rendered invisible and made
unnavigable to outsiders, creating a patina of neutrality behind which an
unequal and unjust world operates nonchalantly. Consequently, the public values
in social institutions such as education, healthcare and work that enables
social mobility is blocked and accountability is difficult to elicit when
ideology supports unjust privileges in the name of just desserts. Using the
case of the United States of America, Sandel argues how we veritably inhabit
two mutually exclusive worlds, one of privilege and the other of despair, with their
own norms that rule these worlds.
With seven chapters excluding an introduction and
conclusion, this book makes for compact reading. As always, Sandel makes the history
and the axiomatic premises of his arguments accessible and revealing. He uses
contemporary and relevant illustrative examples, asks challenging questions,
and pushes us out of our intellectual comfort zones. By doing so, he compels us
to look long and hard at the society we have designed for ourselves and deemed
worthy of passing on to the next generation. This is the type of writer that
you must never miss reading. Get your copy today.
