Mind the Economy/Justice 104

Ripping the Veil. The relational justice of Michael Sandel

11 May 2025

10' min read

In the very first pages ofA Theory of Justice by John Rawls, we read that 'Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, just as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however simple and elegant, must be abandoned or modified if it is not true. Similarly, laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well thought-out, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust'. This is the succinct statement of the famous thesis of the 'priority of the just over the good'. A thesis that lies at the heart of what we might call the 'third wave' of the debate that the publication of the Theory provoked in the years that followed. The 'first wave' referred to the clash between the utilitarians, the dominant current until then, and the more rights-oriented Kantian liberals a la Rawls. The second wave saw Robert Nozick and Friedrich von Hayek as the main protagonists and developed around the themes of freedom, original appropriation, the role of the market and redistributive policies. Finally, the 'third wave' is the one that, as we have said, questions the priority of the just over the good. It is the critique that Walzer, MacIntyre, Taylor and Sandel develop and which, for simplicity's sake, but with an awareness of the differences, we can call 'communitarian'.

In his The Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor focuses on three forms of malaise that have made their way into and grown out of contemporary times, undermining the roots of our societies. "Traits of our culture that humans experience as a loss or decline, even as our civilisation 'develops'," Taylor writes. The first of these traits is individualism, a 'deplorable self-absorption of the individual'. The questioning of a traditional view of life and a cosmic order from which it was necessary to emancipate oneself in order to conquer freedom as modernity understands it. This conquest, while on the one hand guaranteed fundamental civic achievements, on the other hand led to the destruction of a moral order within which people discovered the meaning and significance of their existences. 'Concern has been repeatedly expressed,' Taylor writes, 'that along with the broader social and cosmic horizons of action, the individual has lost something important.

Some have written about the loss of a heroic dimension to life. Men no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for (...) This loss of meaning was linked to a narrowing. Men lost the broader vision because they concentrated on their individual lives (...) The dark side of in-dividualism is its focus on the self, which at once flattens and narrows our lives, impoverishes their meaning, and distances them from concern for others and society.

Taylor studied at Oxford in the late 1950s under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin, and also at Oxford he later taught many others, including the American Michael Sandel. Starting from the critique of individualism developed by Taylor, Sandel deepened it by extending it systematically to liberalism as defined by Rawls in his Theory of Justice. Liberalism built around an idea of the sovereign individual, master of his own ends, creator of his own existence, free from any constraint that is not the product of his own will. A vision that finds one of its most accomplished and sophisticated expressions in the thought of John Rawls. A vision that Sandel critically places at the centre of his first important book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Perhaps the most dense and radical moment of this critique is found in the chapter entitled "Individualism and the Claims of Community", where the ontological, moral and political implications of liberal individualism a la Rawls are made explicit. Developing Taylor's "weak communitarianism", Sandel imagines the self as the fruit of a unique history, of belongings and ties that precede and constitute it. Where liberalism sees the individual as the foundation and measure of justice, Sandelian communitarianism glimpses a deeper injustice: that of a subjectivity deprived of its context and, therefore, of its truth. In Rawls' theory of justice, the individual who chooses the fundamental principles of coexistence finds himself in an "original position", concealed behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents him from knowing his own concrete identity. This methodological expedient - we have discussed it at length - is intended to guarantee the necessary impartiality when negotiating the principles of justice and the terms of the social contract.

But this is not a neutral assumption, Sandel tells us. In fact, it carries with it an implicit conception of the self: that of a subject that exists logically and morally 'before' any end, relationship or affiliation. In the Rawlsian model, the principles of justice are the result of a rational choice made by individuals in conditions of perfect equality, mutual disinterest and ignorance with respect to their own identity. The hypothetical social contract thus constructed should guarantee absolute impartiality. However, Sandel insinuates a radical doubt: if the subjects behind the veil know nothing about themselves, if they are identically rational and symmetrically situated, what kind of deliberation can take place? Where there is total uniformity, can there still be choice?

We should take into account, Sandel suggests, that behind the veil of ignorance, 'If someone, after reflection, prefers one conception of justice to another, then so must everyone else'. The unanimous agreement is not the result of negotiation, but of logical necessity. The contract, therefore, is not the product of a plurality of deliberating agents, but the inevitable conclusion of a 'moral algorithm'. What is presented as a collective choice is, in truth, a passive recognition. 'What takes place in the original position,' Sandel concludes, 'is not so much a contract or an agreement, but rather a kind of discovery'. In the Rawlsian conception of the individual 'the self is conceived as prior to the ends it chooses (...) and just as a person's values and ends are always attributes and never constituents of the self, so the sense of community is only an attribute and never a constituent of a well-ordered society'. This sentence condenses his entire critique of the Rawlsian view: if indeed nothing defines us before we choose, then nothing can truly be ours. But an identity without anchors, like a boat without a mooring, is prey to currents and illusions.

And indeed, the philosopher continues, 'Such a completely independent self excludes the possibility of a public life in which, for good or ill, the identity and interests of the participants are at stake. And it excludes the possibility that common aims and ends can inspire more or less extensive self-understandings and thus define a community in a constitutive sense, a community that describes the subject and not just the objects of shared aspirations. More generally, Rawls' conception excludes the possibility of what we might call 'inter-subjective' or 'intra-subjective' forms of self-understanding, ways of conceiving of the subject that do not presuppose that its boundaries are given in advance." How, then, can we imagine an individual uprooted from all ties? How can freedom be authentic if it presupposes a subject that has no roots, no memory, no language? The answer, for Sandel, is that it cannot, it is not possible. Liberal individualism, in fact, seems to be founded on that paradox by virtue of which it claims to affirm the autonomy of the individual but, at the same time, deprives him of everything that makes this same autonomy possible.

In an attempt to break out of this paradox, Sandel enunciates and develops a simple and profound insight: we are not only what we choose. Some ends, some roles, some communities are not objects of our will, but horizons in which our identity is formed and finds meaning. Constraints and opportunities. Boundaries that isolate, protect and define at the same time. Being children, citizens, members of a culture or religious tradition are not 'preferences' that we can abandon without consequences. They are, rather, structural conditions of our being. In this sense, then, Sandel's position does not express a denial of individual freedom, but rather a reinterpretation of it. Community is not so much an external constraint that hinders autonomy, but the fertile ground that makes it possible. A seagull soaring through the sky does not find in the air and the friction it creates only an obstacle.

It is that same air, in fact, that is the necessary condition for the lift that allows it to fly. Thus for the individual who, in relationship with the other, in mutual recognition, in a sense of belonging, learns to choose meaningfully. In this sense, liberal individualism fails not only because it is metaphysically unrealistic, but also because it is morally poor: it excludes the deep sources of ethical and civic bonding. "Together we can know a shared good that we are unable to know alone. Friendship, justice, solidarity,' Sandel writes, 'are goods that exist only in reciprocity; goods that we could call 'relational'. For this reason, to think of justice apart from the community is to reduce it to a distributive technique, when in fact it is, in the proper sense, an art of living together.

The political implications of this view are profound. A theory of justice based on the self-sufficiency of the self can only generate cold, impersonal, distant institutions incapable of promoting participation, cohesion and civic sense. On the contrary, a living democracy needs citizens who feel part of a common history, bearers of duties as well as rights. Because freedom is not just the absence of interference, but participation in the construction of the common good. Thus justice cannot be neutral with respect to conceptions of the good life, because it is precisely in the confrontation between these conceptions that politics finds its soul.

Just as, from a logical point of view, the critique of Rawls develops in the transition from a disembodied, abstract, isolated and unhistorical self to a narrative and relational self, in the same way, significantly, the structure of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is also characterised by a change in tone, from the analytical-style argumentation of the first chapters to the evocative, personal conclusion, almost a philosophical meditation on human nature, that we find in the final chapter.

It is a shift from abstraction to the flesh, from moral calculation to lived narrative. It is, after all, a return to the forgotten heart of politics: that invisible network of relationships and meanings that makes us who we are and allows us to say 'we'. The overcoming of the Rawlsian individual lies, for Sandel, in a 'narrative self', capable of evolution and change but not of arbitrary reinvention. Because this self, every self, has its own 'character', possesses 'a continuity that is discovered over time', a plot that is interwoven with that of others, a narrative that unravels with coherence, even in its most sudden changes. 'Self-knowledge,' writes the Harvard philosopher, 'is more like the knowledge of a story than the apprehension of a datum'. Knowing oneself, then, does not mean analysing oneself from the outside as if we were detached objects under the gaze of a generic other. Rather, it means writing and discovering, at the same time, the plot of our own existence, telling our story and having it told by those who are close to us and who know us; by friends, the mirror and place of truth.

Friendship, in fact, Sandel writes, is a privileged place for self-knowledge because it implies a mutual vulnerability: it is the willingness to be seen by the other in a light that may even surprise us, sometimes make us uncomfortable. "Arguing with friends means admitting the possibility that my friend knows me better than I know myself". That is why identity is a matter of relationships, something that happens between people, something that one does not possess but discovers. The friend, according to Sandel, is the one who can remind me of who I am when I myself may have forgotten. He is the one who can keep with you those parts of your story that hurt too much to be lived in solitude or that are so beautiful and luminous that they must necessarily be shared so that they can give true joy. This vision of friendship does not make us relapse into intimacy because, Aristotelianly, it is by its very nature political. It prefigures the possibility of a moral community in which the subjects are not competing atoms, but custodians of each other. Justice, in this perspective, does not arise from distance and blind balance, but from trust. Not from the removal of differences, but from their sharing.

Here the philosopher's proposal becomes more explicit: justice must recognise that we are situated beings, that our lives are woven into narratives, affiliations and memories. Community is not a constraint on freedom, but the condition of its existence. "Justice, then, is not a virtue to be chosen apart from the good, but a good itself - constitutive of the self," he writes, definitively denying the conflict between justice good and the priority of the former over the latter. Justice is not the neutral container that allows incompatible ends to coexist, but one of the ends that defines us, one of the goods through which we become what we are.

The failure of liberalism therefore lies not only in its disembodied anthropology, but above all in its political bewilderment. 'Where liberals are afraid to put their foot down, fundamentalists will crowd in'. He writes, somewhat prophetically in Justice. Our Common Good (2009). In its attempt to put the self 'beyond the reach of politics', liberalism forgets that it is precisely politics that sometimes reveals what we alone would not know about ourselves. What we owe each other cannot always be reduced to an agreement or traced back to a choice. Sometimes it is simply what we are.

The idea of justice that emerges from the critique of Rawlsian liberalism is, therefore, an idea of justice that is both more human and more demanding. It is not the cold neutrality of formal reason, but the enveloping responsibility of those who live in a community of meaning. Precisely today, when the individual seems to be the only measure of value and neutrality the only public virtue, it is more necessary than ever to reiterate that we cannot really know goodness alone, and that justice cannot dwell in a heart that has forgotten that it originally belonged to a 'we'.