[Odyssey] Michael Sandel’s Dilemma: Civic Republicanism

In 2014, Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? sparked a boom in “theories of justice” in South Korea. But for some reason, Sandel’s theory of justice in Korea is no longer generating further interest or discussion.

Was it merely a fad? Indeed, the very fact that such a difficult book of moral philosophy sold 1.2 million copies in Korea was itself hard to regard as normal. Most readers, who were thirsting for justice, probably did not find a clear answer in Sandel’s theory of justice. That is because for Sandel, the political philosophy of civic republicanism was more essential than answering the question, “What is justice?”

This essay seeks to reflect on Sandel’s civic republicanism, which underlies claims that participatory democracy or deliberative democracy is an alternative for our politics. This issue is also highly important in the political philosophy of liberals, because Sandel himself sees himself not as a communitarian but as a liberal. For that reason, Sandel’s thought may be understood as liberal communitarianism or communitarian liberalism. To understand Michael Sandel in this way, however, we must first go back to the age of classical antiquity, because the roots of Sandel’s civic republicanism lie there.

The classical political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle did not emerge during a period when Greece was enjoying peace and prosperity, but rather during the twilight of the Greek poleis.

The age of these two sages came after the Peloponnesian War, when Alexander of Macedon was building the Hellenic Empire and heterogeneous cultures, values, goods, and religions from the East and Egypt were flooding into Athens. Athens could no longer sustain itself through the traditions of the polis, and the communal spirit that had supported Greece was collapsing with the emergence of individuals who transcended religion and nationality.

The point is that in such an age without visible prospects—that is, in a time of aporia—the political philosophies presented as theories for overcoming crisis were precisely Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. By contrast, with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, modern Western liberal thought emerged when modern Europe was enjoying prosperity during the Industrial Revolution. Political ideologies do not exist as universal orders transcending time and space; rather, they are advocated and endorsed by the class that leads a society economically.

When the German constitutional and political philosopher Carl Schmitt said that “norms emerge as concrete reality subsumes universality,” he was warning against the unreality that hasty universalist political philosophy can entail. Liberals understand this as “good intentions, bad results.” Therefore, Sandel’s political philosophy, which emphasizes universal morality, becomes a kind of savior’s book for political communities facing the fate of crisis, conflict, and disintegration.

For a community confronted by crisis, as Sandel argues, solidarity and a reaffirmation of the values that bind the community together are necessary, and at such a time, when one must decide without confidence in the outcome, the only possible principle for decision is morality.

The real reason Sandel’s book became such a tremendous hit in Korea, if one looks closely, may be said to be that Korea’s political and economic situation had fallen into a level of anxiety close to collective hysteria. It was certainly not because the Korean public had a particularly high intellectual level.

The Contradictions of Civic Republicanism

In Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Sandel often constructs dilemmatic situations. A dilemma, as the word itself suggests, is an unresolved situation—a condition like that of crisis-stricken Athens, where there is no path forward. Sandel argues that in such situations, conflict and convulsive hysteria can be resolved “through discussion.” Such a claim is unrealistic, and for that reason Sandel remains lodged within the contradictions of the liberal political philosophy he himself criticized.

Sandel’s political philosophy advocates civic republicanism, but it does not in fact mention that in a republic built on such a political philosophy, sovereignty exists, and because that sovereignty is unitary and indivisible, individuals cannot exercise it as an effective power of rule; government can operate only through delegation. For that reason, civic republicanism is no small headache for legal scholars. It is because civic republicanism cannot be established as a system of public law, and that is due to the principle of sovereignty.

Any ideology of a national community that excludes the principle of sovereignty is no more than an illusion. Therefore, as Carl Schmitt pointed out, we create political order by joining in solidarity with one another “to protect our lives, liberty, and property from the enemy,” and the governing order unanimously agreed upon in this way becomes the sovereign state.

The sovereignty of a state holds the power over the life and death of its people. When that sovereignty is vested in one ruler, it becomes a monarchical state; when it is granted to a small elite, it becomes an aristocratic state; and when it is vested in the people as a whole, it becomes a democratic nation-state. These types of state should be interpreted not as having arisen from some original plan or universal norm, but as having been produced by the concrete conditions suited to the realities of each age.

Therefore, for liberals, the state is necessary, but no particular form of government is required. Whether democracy, republic, or even monarchy, if such a political system can better protect individuals’ lives, liberty, and property, that is sufficient for it to be good.

This is also what the liberal political theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe shows in his work Democracy: The God That Failed, where he argues historically that citizens’ liberty and property were in fact better protected in enlightened monarchies than in modern democratic states. The enlightened monarchies of Northern Europe avoided war and encouraged education and industry.

Thus, liberals’ extrapolative approach to political systems comes into conflict with democrats. The “more political participation and more public forums” that Sandel always emphasizes are virtues of progressive democracy as advocated by constructivist liberals. To speak briefly on this point, constructivist rationalist liberals argue that because all human beings possess reason, they can discover universality through that reason; accordingly, if they meet one another in the public sphere, they will be able to determine whose claim is right and will willingly submit to that universality. That, they say, is the principle of democracy. But Carl Schmitt dismisses such claims by liberal political theorists as political romanticism that demands only “eternal conversation.” His point is that when the time comes to decide in the name of the sovereign in the face of the enemy, they are unable to decide.

What one wants to ask Sandel is whether, as a man who praises civic republicanism, he can truly decide on war when war against the enemy is necessary, or whether he would instead try to engage even the enemy in eternal dialogue for the discovery of the common good.

As Carl Schmitt pointed out, political order always begins with the distinction between enemy and friend. If there is no enemy, then the state and political community either return to a state of nature in which internal enemies and friends emerge, or else they inevitably create another external enemy. That is why there is no such thing as the “end of history.”

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Original title: [오디세이] 마이클 샌델의 딜레마: 시민공화주의

Author: Jeong-seok Han

Date: 2021-02-10

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=5&idx=23503