Rate My Professor Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he teaches political philosophy. He joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1981. Sandel earned a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1975 and a D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1981, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His writings address justice, ethics, democracy, and markets, and have been translated into more than 30 languages. Sandel developed and teaches the course “Justice,” the first Harvard course made freely available online and on television, viewed by tens of millions of people worldwide.

His major books include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005), The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (2007), Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012), and The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020). Sandel has delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford, the BBC Reith Lectures, and the Kellogg Lecture on Jurisprudence at the U.S. Library of Congress. He received the Princess of Asturias Award in Social Sciences in 2018 and the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2025. Sandel has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has lectured in stadiums and public venues across five continents and led global discussions through BBC series such as “The Public Philosopher” and “The Global Philosopher.”