Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

What the Critics Say

"One of the world's most interesting political philosophers." (Guardian)

"Michael Sandel, perhaps the most prominent college professor in America...practices the best kind of academic populism, managing to simplify John Stuart Mill and John Rawls without being simplistic. But Sandel is best at what he calls bringing 'moral clarity to the alternatives we confront as democratic citizens'.... He ends up clarifying a basic political divide - not between left and right, but between those who recognize nothing greater than individual rights and choices, and those who affirm a 'politics of the common good,' rooted in moral beliefs that can't be ignored." (Michael Gerson, Washington Post)

"Sandel explains theories of justice...with clarity and immediacy; the ideas of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick and John Rawls have rarely, if ever, been set out as accessibly.... In terms we can all understand, Justice confronts us with the concepts that lurk, so often unacknowledged, beneath our conflicts." (Jonathan Rauch, New York Times)