Buy your rights here!

In the article and interview listed below, Michael Sandel makes a simple claim. In the past three decades, he says, market values have crossed the boundaries of the market and have been invading spheres of life that are not traditionally governed by the norms of the market.

In short, we have “drifted from having a market economy to being a market society”.

This tendency has at least three negative results. The first is a very unequal distribution of wealth (and therefore other goods) in our societies. The second is that the influence of the market tends to corrupt the intrinsic meaning of certain goods that are not traditionally defined in terms of money. The third thing (and this comes out clearly in the Guernica interview) is that democratic politics is “increasingly unsatisfying” since politics has been “emptied out of substantive moral discourse”. Democratic politics, Sandel says, “is increasingly about narrow managerial, technocratic concerns rather than [about] larger questions of ethics and justice and the meaning of the common good”.

In a review of Sandels’ book What Money can’t Buy: The Moral limits of the market, John Gray points out that Sandel’s overriding argument is that we cannot make decisions about the limits of the market by using a narrow form of economic reasoning. “We need,” he says, “to be less impressed by ideas of efficiency and more ready to make judgements about the good life” (The New Satesman, 14 May 2012, p. 41).

• »What isn’t for sale«, Sandel in The Atlantic [via: 3QuarksDaily]
• »What Money Can’t Buy«, Tana Wojczuk Interviews Michael Sandel for Guernica.
• For a view from the right, read Nicole Gelinas’ review »What Should Never Be For Sale« in The City Journal

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