The Supreme Court in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce upheld the application to the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit corporation funded by dues from members, three-quarters of whom are business corporations, of a Michigan law that forbids non-media corporations from using corporate treasury funds to make independent expenditures in connection with state elections for public office. The decision in Austin can be seen as resting on the view that business corporations are constrained in ways that systematically preclude them from cultivating civic virtue. Ironically, despite its often enormous wealth, the corporation is a paradigm of the materially dependent actor that has no choice but to look relentlessly to its self-interest. The modern corporation is operated for the sake of fictional shareholders, who are assumed to care only about maximizing the financial value of their shares, but, given the increasingly broad ownership of shares, shareholders also may well be employees of the company in which they hold stock or members of a community in which the corporation is an important economic presence. Union activity represents an effort at self-governance in the workplace, which requires consideration of and trade-offs among a variety of both material and nonmaterial goods.

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In Democracy’s Discontent, Michael Sandel contrasts the civic republican approach to American politics with that of liberal neutrality and shows how the two views have played out over the course of US history. Sandel argues that liberal neutrality is overwhelmingly dominant today, and he urges a return to a more Aristotelian, republican politics; both positions are controverted here. Under republicanism, government, acting on the premise that self-government is intrinsically good, would take on the challenge of inculcating the virtues of character necessary for effective citizenship. Sandel is not completely clear as to just what America’s lost republican ideals are and precisely what policies his republicanism would justify that liberalism cannot; he fails to acknowledge what both he and his critics should reject as the dark sides of republicanism: right-wing extremism and the tendency toward aristocracy. Republicanism, as well as liberalism, has special dangers for women, though heterosexual women might benefit from a republican discourse on homosexual marriage. The traditional civic virtues may not be those most appropriate to the contemporary United States; liberalism may be able to justify the promotion of virtues appropriate to our times, and a new civic pluralism may be more desirable than a more traditional republicanism. Many Americans are encumbered with traditional group identities that do not sit well with Sandel’s democratic, progressive, redistributivist republicanism; religion can promote virtue and progress, but it can also conflict with republican citizenship. Whether strong beliefs and commitments are valuable is subject to debate; they can produce culture wars, and some way must be found of responding to Americans who are unwilling to yield cherished values in the face of procedural rules. The emotional void republicanism is offered to fill, as well as the goals it is offered to pursue, proceed in part from the behavior of corporations and the desire of middle-class individuals to control them. Americans, Michael Sandel among them, are encumbered with individualism.

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