There are philosophers who write for other philosophers. Michael Sandel (Minneapolis, 1953) writes for everyone, and everyone reads him. His lectures on justice at Harvard accumulate millions of visits on the Internet, his books are translated into 27 languages and his name appears where no philosopher normally appears: in the trending topicson prime time shows, on lists of the most influential thinkers on the planet. This Thursday he participates in Venice, at the Casa dei Tre Oci, in a conference organized by the Berggruen Institute Europe—an institution that has just awarded him its 2025 Philosophy and Culture Prize—under the title Democracy in Peril: Paths to Civic Renewal. Attend this interview with the patience of someone who has spent a lifetime explaining difficult things with simple words.
Why do you think debates about complex topics like community, meritocracy, and patriotism have connected so deeply with so many people around the world?
We never imagined that tens of millions of people around the world would go to see philosophy conferences. But that’s what happened. And I think the reason is that there is a great hunger for moral and ethical debates that public discourse rarely addresses. Citizens of democratic societies are frustrated with the vacuity of current politics. They want fundamental questions to be addressed: What makes a society just? What do we owe to each other as citizens?
His critique of liberal individualism seems to touch on something very real: the idea that if you fail in society, you only have yourself to blame. Is that the big lie of modern Western society?
Yes, and this has become increasingly true over the last four or five decades of neoliberal globalization. Those who have reached the top have come to believe that their success is their own work, the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve all the rewards that the market bestows upon them. And that, by extension, those who struggle and are left behind also deserve their fate. That is the dark side of meritocracy. It corrodes solidarity and the common good. It leads the successful—if you’ll allow the metaphor—to aspire too deeply to their own success, to forget the luck and fortune that helped them along the way, to forget their debt to those who made their achievements possible. I believe that this way of thinking about success has produced the deep division between winners and losers that separates us and that has given rise to the polarized politics of our day.
He travels to Italy to talk about the dangers that democracies face. There are recent studies that indicate that today there are more autocracies than democracies in the world. How did we get here and is it possible to reverse it?
Democracy is going through difficult times and autocracies are on the rise. We must ask ourselves why many workers, in particular, are turning away from mainstream parties to embrace the authoritarian right. And I think this is connected to what we were discussing before. Our societies are deeply polarized. In recent decades, the gap between rich and poor has grown, but not only that: the division between winners and losers has also deepened. The difference is this: economic inequality has generated material difficulties for many workers, but the division between winners and losers has produced a politics of grievance and humiliation. Many workers, especially those without university education, feel that their work is no longer valued or respected as it once was.
What then is needed to renew democracy?
We need a new politics of the common good that directly addresses the dignity of work. Major parties have responded to the inequalities of the era of globalization by urging people to better themselves by obtaining a college degree. From the 1980s to today, the center-right and center-left have said that the answer to inequality is individual mobility through higher education. in my book The tyranny of merit I call this the rhetoric of ascent. The problem is that this rhetoric is not an adequate response to the inequalities that globalized neoliberalism produced, nor to the erosion of the dignity of work. We also need to strengthen institutions that mix social classes, where people of different economic, ethnic and religious origins meet in their daily lives. One of the most corrosive effects of recent inequalities is that the well-off and the poor increasingly live separate lives: in different neighborhoods, different schools, different businesses. That also destroys the community and solidarity that democracy needs.
How do you do all this in a world with Trump, Putin and Netanyahu?
If it is possible, we will only know if we try. The case of Trump and the MAGA world is clear: they are a threat to democracy. But you have to wonder why people turned to Trump not once but twice, including many workers who traditionally voted Democratic. The Democratic Party, since Roosevelt and the New Deal, represented workers against the powerful and privileged. And yet, in the United States and Europe, center-left parties have alienated the working class, which has ended up in the arms of figures like Trump. Trump won a majority of non-college-educated voters who previously voted Democratic. You have to ask yourself why. And the answer is that it was the center-left parties themselves who, by failing to address the growing inequalities during neoliberal globalization, paved the way for Trump and similar figures who have attacked the well-educated, traditional elites, who workers perceive as a class that looks down on them.
Trump is one of the elite…
Yes, but the path has been opened by the center-left parties, by not addressing the gap, by failing to be an effective voice for working people, by not talking about the need for greater justice, solidarity. Instead, what they did was follow the mercantilist path of the center-right since the 1980s and lost credibility with the workers.
Do you think that the European Union is at risk of disintegrating due to this new world order that countries like the United States and Russia want to impose?
The European Union has long struggled to build a sense of community, solidarity and identity that is European. It is not enough to have an economic union and a European Parliament: it is also necessary to cultivate that shared sense of belonging. And that requires greater citizen participation in European institutions. I think many citizens feel that they have no real say in the decisions of Brussels or the European Parliament. That’s the first part of the answer. The second: the challenges posed by Trump and Putin could become, paradoxically, an engine of unity for the European Union. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the need for unity in the face of Russian aggression. And Trump’s lack of commitment to Europe, his sympathy for Putin, his lack of support for Ukraine, all of this is making many Europeans see the need for greater unity. In that sense, what Trump and Putin have done could be the impetus for a more cohesive Europe. That is the challenge. I hope Europe lives up to it.
He also says that the left must recover the word patriotism. How to do it without handing a weapon to the most extremist right?
The fact that patriotism has become associated with the right is helping the right politically and hurting the center-left parties, because if the right-wing parties have a monopoly on that idea, they can portray those on the left and their voters as unpatriotic. However, in a world where citizenship is largely defined by the nation state, solidarity with fellow citizens is also a form of patriotism. Social democratic parties could argue, for example, that when large companies evade taxes by registering in tax havens, that is a failure of economic patriotism. As I said, center-left parties need to rediscover a language that moves away from the triumphant individualism of the market and articulates a new idea of patriotism linked to the politics of the common good and the mutual responsibility of citizens.
Instead, the wokismo.
Center-left parties have drifted toward narrow identity politics precisely because they have failed to address issues of class and economic inequality. Too many embraced neoliberalism. After the Reagan and Thatcher years, the leaders who replaced them—Clinton in the United States, Blair in Britain, Schroeder in Germany—softened their harsher speeches on market policies, but they never questioned the fundamental premise: that markets should be a primary instrument for defining and achieving the public good. And as a result, they stopped talking about the deepening inequalities. That said, I want to be careful about what is meant by that term, because part of what the right associates with it are movements for racial justice and gender equality. And I don’t think the center-left should abandon those causes.
The Pope has spoken of new forms of digital slavery and colonialism. Do you share that reading of artificial intelligence?
The Pope has made a great contribution. Too many people are dazzled by the utopian scenarios offered by Silicon Valley capitalists and believe that AI will solve all our social and political challenges. But that overlooks a real danger: If Silicon Valley is allowed to define the purposes for which artificial intelligence will be put, we run risks. The dangers identified by the Pope’s encyclical are the increase in inequality, the obsolescence of work for many citizens, and perhaps the most fundamental: the risk that technology undermines community and human connection, leading us to confuse the virtual and digital community with the real one. It’s a dark scenario: our own creation could end up alienating us from what makes us human.
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