Rejoinder to Michael Sandel

Extract

Michael Sandel's response to my critical essay is thoughtful, generous, and characteristically elegant. I am not the only one, I am sure, who will welcome this clarification of his views. Yet I am inclined to think that what he does not include in his response is as important as what he does.

What Professor Sandel's response does not include is any attempt to sort out, qualify, accept, or reject the criticisms advanced in the “Sandel and the Self” section of my essay. He says in his second sentence that I bring out “the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care,” but he fails to note that most of those continuities concern the unencumbered self he attributes to liberalism. We are left to wonder, then, what he makes of the three charges that I bring against his account of this self: that he mistakes the point of the unencumbered self in Rawlsian liberalism; that he trades on a false dichotomy between the encumbered and the unencumbered self; and that he neglects to notice a distinction, implicit in his as much as in Rawls's thinking, between the self in the abstract, general sense and the self in the concrete, particular sense.