Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980.

 

His latest book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, a New York Times best seller, relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of our time.

Sandel’s other books include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; Democracy’s Discontent; Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics; and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. His work has been translated into 15 foreign languages. His writings appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times, and his work has been featured in television series on PBS, the BBC, and NHK (Japan). His next book, an April 2012 release, is What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.

At Harvard, Sandel’s courses include “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature,” “Ethics, Economics, and Law,” and “Globalization and Its Critics.” His undergraduate course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online (www.JusticeHarvard.org) and on public television.

A recipient of the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, Sandel was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 2008 for a career of excellence in teaching. He has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (Paris), delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University, and in 2009 delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, broadcast in the U.K. and worldwide on the BBC World Service. In 2010, China Newsweek named him the most influential foreign figure of the year in China.

In the U.S., Sandel has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. A summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University (1975), Sandel received his doctorate from Oxford University (D.Phil.,1981), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

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