MixedAmerican AffairsSandel’s prescriptions seem inadequate to this bracing indictment ... Sandel is especially adept in cataloguing the array of economic, social, and psychological pathologies of a society based upon rule by \'merit.\' His insight into the distance between the claims that justify meritocracy and its real-world implications is particularly striking. Whatever the benefits of meritocracy in demolishing the aristocracy of the ancien régime, meritocracy has produced in turn a pervasive system of inequality and resulting instability ... Sandel is especially insightful in dismantling the egalitarian veil that many Left academics have donned to assuage their bad conscience, even as they blithely participate in and benefit from the meritocracy ... Sandel is less curious, however, about the increasingly central role played by \'identity politics\' ... In the end, Sandel flinches: in spite of accusing the new ruling order of \'tyranny,\' he fails to locate any tyrants. This silence on the meritocracy’s self-deception, in what is otherwise a singularly powerful critique of the pathologies of meritocracy, is telling. Sandel is remarkably incurious about whether meritocrats’ justifications of their moral eminence might in fact shroud the deeper \'will to power\' one would expect to find among tyrants ... What is sorely needed is deeper reflection, and paths to action, for how to realize the common good.
George F. Will
PositiveThe Washington Post[Will\'s] is a rousing defense of a distinctly American form of \'conservatism,\' one that embraces a political, social and economic system that encourages novelty, dynamism and constant, unpredictable change. Thus, American conservatism — or classical liberalism — Will acknowledges, does not, and does not wish to, conserve very much ... Will wrote a conservative book during the ascendancy of libertarianism in the 1980s, and today, a more libertarian book in an age when conservatives see more clearly how economic and social libertarianism combine to undermine conservatism. His current book has one vice that is frequently attributed to conservatives: It is backward-looking, proposing a solution relevant to a bygone era. By contrast, his conservatism in 1983 was prophetic, anticipating the forces that are today on full display. It is the very dynamism of America that Will now celebrates that has made his new book antiquated upon arrival, an insight he might have recognized had he harked back to his younger, more conservative self.
