A more meaningful, more noble type of politics

Sandel's new book, Justice: What's The Right Thing to Do?, attempts to show that most of our current notions of justice and fairness, whether leftwing or rightwing, share one problematic assumption: the idea that our political system should embody "a certain kind of neutrality". What (all political views) share, Sandel argues, is a belief that it's possible to talk about a "fair" or "just" society without getting involved in questions of morality or virtue – remaining neutral on the question of what, exactly, it means to live a good life, or to be a good citizen. "Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal," he says, "the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life." Politics, looked at this way, works like a market: it is a technical, fundamentally neutral mechanism for helping people with different ideas about "the good" to live peaceably together, without judging between those ideas. "To argue about justice," Sandel says, "is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions."

Our current politics, by contrast, seems to require citizens "to leave their deepest moral convictions at the door when they enter". Perhaps it's little wonder that so many are so cynical about public life, or that MPs feel justified in fiddling their expenses: our political philosophies themselves may have sapped politics of its moral weight. In Sandel's view, Barack Obama won last year's US presidential election because he understood that there was a widespread yearning for civic life to mean more. On the campaign trail, his language, as Sandel noted in the Reiths, "was very alive to the hunger for a politics of moral and spiritual resonance".

(Sandel has a strong) sense that our politics has become impoverished, and that we might aspire to remake it as something more meaningful, even noble.