Prof. Michael J. Sandel
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, Harvard University
Prof. Sandel has taught political philosophy in Harvard since 1980. His latest book, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" relates the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of our time. His 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 fifteen foreign languages, and has been featured in television series on PBS, the BBC, and NHK (Japan).
Sandel's undergraduate course "Justice" is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online (www.JusticeHarvard.org) and on public television. 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. In 2010, China Newsweek named him the most influential foreign figure of the year in China. From 2002 to 2005, Sandel served on the President's Council on Bioethics, a national body appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. He 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.