On Tuesday, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel received one of the field’s highest honors: the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. Established by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, it comes with a $1 million prize and is awarded each year to a thinker whose work “has led us to find wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding” in a rapidly changing world.
This has been Sandel’s project for more than four decades. The Bass professor of government lectures in packed stadiums and opera houses around the world and draws tens of millions of viewers to his YouTube videos and public television series. His books are reliable bestsellers, with titles like Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009), The Tyranny of Merit (2021), Democracy’s Discontent (1996, updated and re-released in 2022), and, most recently, Equality (2025, co-authored with the economist Thomas Piketty).
At Harvard, Sandel is best known for developing and teaching “Justice,” a sweeping political philosophy course that blends ancient theories of justice with present-day moral debates over issues like affirmative action, climate change, immigration, and income inequality. It’s become one of the most popular courses in College history, and in 2009, Sandel made it publicly available as Harvard’s first free online course. Last fall, Sandel revived the course in person for the first time in more than a decade, returning to Sanders Theatre for a revised set of Socratic back-and-forths with a new class of undergraduates.
Born in Minnesota in 1953, Sandel spent his teenage years in California, where in 1971, as president of the student body at Palisades Charter High School, he challenged then-governor Ronald Reagan to a debate. Reagan accepted. Days later, the future president was sitting onstage with Sandel in the school’s auditorium, debating contentious issues such as the Vietnam War, Social Security, and 18-year-olds’ right to vote. For Sandel, whose politics were, and still are, to the left of Reagan’s, the exchange was an early lesson in reasoned, respectful disagreement.
Harvard colleague Sean Kelly, the Martignetti professor of philosophy, called Sandel a “model” teacher and public intellectual, who convenes deep, necessary conversations about “justice, meritocracy, equality, and other organizing principles of modern society.” “We are better as a society for his contributions,” Kelly said.
Much of Sandel’s work has centered on a sharp critique of the way globalism reshaped American life, increasing economic inequality and creating an “impoverished” idea of freedom that is individualistic, consumerist, and much too narrow, he says, to sustain democracy. He sat down with Harvard Magazine for a wide-ranging conversation on globalization and inequality, the rise of right-wing populism, Harvard’s struggle against the Trump administration, the dark side of meritocracy, and the real purpose of higher education. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
Why did you bring back “Justice” last fall?
After we filmed “Justice” and made it available online, I tried teaching it a couple of more times, but I found that many students had already watched the course online in high school. So I retired the in-person version and taught other courses in ethical reasoning, such as “Money, Markets, and Morals,” “Tech Ethics,” and “Meritocracy and Its Critics.” But last year, I brought back “Justice” in a revised version to support Harvard's civil discourse initiative. It occurred to me that, at that moment when civil discourse had become a challenge, it might be helpful to relaunch it.
Did you find that the students or the course were different this time?
Part of what has always drawn students to “Justice” is the opportunity to reflect critically on their own moral and political convictions and to engage in discussion with students, in public, on hard and controversial ethical questions. The course has always had the effect of exposing students to reasoning across differences, and students have always responded with enthusiasm, even passion. And this time was no different. Given the opportunity, and given a hospitable forum and structure, students quickly learn how to engage—and they learn not by precept, not by being preached at about the importance of civility and so on. They learn by doing. They learn by plunging into the practice of persuading and being persuaded and learning the art of listening along the way.
Part of what’s missing in our broader public culture is the art of listening, not only in the sense of hearing the words spoken by one’s interlocutor, but listening for the moral convictions and principles that lie behind our disagreements and trying to address them, trying to engage with them, trying to respond. I think we make a mistake to think that the best way of teaching civil discourse is to announce in advance certain rules of the road and principles of what can and can’t be said in a classroom setting.
There’s actually a number that illustrates this. In a survey of Harvard students last year, only 55 percent said “yes” when asked whether they feel comfortable expressing their views on controversial topics. That’s alarming. Harvard asks the same question in course evaluations at the end of the semester, and among students in “Justice” last fall, 92 percent said they felt comfortable expressing their views.
What lessons do you see there for wider American public discourse?
We need to change the terms of public discourse to engage more directly with big questions that citizens care about, including questions of values. What is a just society? What should we do about widening inequalities? What should be the role of money and markets in a good society? What do we owe one another as fellow citizens? In recent decades, [we] have tended to shrink from addressing contested ethical questions in public discourse for fear of disagreement.
And it’s true, we live in a pluralist society where people disagree on fundamental questions, on moral issues. There is a tendency to assume that the way to a tolerant society in the face of this pluralism is to avoid engaging with these questions—to ask citizens to leave their moral and spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public square. I’ve criticized this approach as the “liberalism of neutrality.”
Instead, genuine pluralism requires not avoidance but engagement. People want politics to be about big things. When we avoid these questions, citizens come to feel frustrated with the empty terms of public discourse, and they feel that they don’t have a meaningful say. Many people think it is dangerous to have a morally more robust public discourse, because it brings in contestable, fraught questions. But I think that when public discourse feels hollowed out of larger meaning, sooner or later, it will be filled by narrow, intolerant moralisms of two kinds: fundamentalism and hyper-nationalism. And this is what we see today, not only the United States, but around the world. When there is a moral void in public discourse, the reach for meaning will take dark and undesirable forms.
What’s the mechanism for reinvesting public discourse with meaning?
In part, the media needs to do a better job of convening people with differing views and from different walks of life to engage in sustained argument about big moral and civic questions. Generally speaking, the media does a poor job of this because they prize short sound bites, and what passes for political discourse too often consists of shouting matches or sloganeering. It’s even worse when we turn to social media, whose business model depends on inflaming people to keep them glued to their screens and scrolling angrily.
And we need to experiment with forms of citizen participation that supplement representative government, because public confidence in Congress is low, and people understandably don’t feel that their voice matters.
Also, we need to create more class-mixing institutions, common spaces that gather people from different walks of life. I’m not talking just about classrooms or public forums or televised debates. I’m talking about parks and recreation areas: playgrounds, municipal swimming pools, sports stadiums. One of the most corrosive effects of recent decades is that beyond the income and wealth inequalities it has created, it has separated us. Those economic inequalities have been translated into social and civic inequalities. This isn’t good for democracy. Democracy does not require perfect equality in the sense of everyone having the same income and wealth, but it does require that citizens from different backgrounds bump up against one another in the course of their everyday lives, because this is how we learn to abide our differences. This is how we come to care for the common good.
These are some of the issues you explored in The Tyranny of Merit.
Yes. People often debate whether the populist backlash against elites and the rise of authoritarian figures have more to do with economic grievances or cultural ones. I think we should not distinguish too sharply between them. Here’s why: neoliberal globalization and deregulation created a growing gap between rich and poor. But the tendency of credentialed elites to look down on those without degrees, what I call the tyranny of merit, created a divide between winners and losers.
This divide arises from inequalities of dignity, respect, social recognition, and esteem. Those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, the measure of their merit, and by implication, that those left behind must deserve their fate too. This harsh way of thinking about success—the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their own success and forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way—is what generates the politics of grievance and humiliation that fuels the rise of right-wing authoritarian populists who promise retribution against elites.
Institutions like Harvard are very much implicated in your diagnosis of this problem. How do you view the Trump administration’s attacks and the ways in which higher education has left itself open to political attack?
We made ourselves vulnerable even before Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Public confidence in American higher education has eroded, and it’s related to the growing—and in some ways legitimate and well-earned—mistrust of experts and technocrats who have not governed very well over the last five decades. But it has also to do with the fact that universities have become sorting machines for a market-driven meritocratic society. They define the merits and confer the credentials that society rewards.
This role has given us a centrality in the public culture, and it has contributed to the frenzied meritocratic tournament among young people seeking to win admission. It’s given rise to massive industries of private consultants enlisted by families to give their children a competitive edge. And it’s contributed to the wealth of especially elite colleges. And yet, I think we’ve paid a price for it. Growing portions of the American public view universities primarily as institutions that equip young people for successful jobs and careers, rather than as instruments of the public good.
And it pains me to say that there is some truth to that. Because, as students increasingly view higher education as an opportunity for networking and a lucrative career, we are allowing ourselves to be distracted from our educational mission. What makes higher education “higher” is that we cultivate the love of learning for its own sake, that we provide students with a time to reflect critically on what they believe in and why, to reflect on what purposes and life ambitions are worthy of them. We should be places of moral and civic growth that cultivate in our students, whatever their fields of study, the ability to think and reason together and argue about hard ethical and civic questions.
Promoting career advancement and dispensing credentials risks diverting us from our fundamental reasons for being, and our students sense this. I worry that students, especially those who’ve had to endure the anxious, pressure-packed, meritocratic tournament to win admission and then find that the tournament continues unabated, will come to view their education only in instrumental terms, as a means to an end.
Does the way forward begin with places like Harvard or with the broader American society?
Both. As a society, we need to lessen the grip of market forces on our civic life, because this corrupts the way young people view themselves and their lives and their aspirations and their education. And at the same time, we in higher education have to redirect our energy and focus away from a careerist, market-driven view of our mission and re-emphasize the element of soulcraft in higher education. All students should have the opportunity, whatever else they study, to use their undergraduate years as an occasion to reflect on their moral and civic assumptions. We need to shift our focus away from our role as sorting machines and reimagine what lies at the heart of education.
