Michael Sandel has won this year’s Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and the million dollars that comes with it. The prize, which was set up by investor and philanthropist Michael Berggruen, is a lifetime-achievement award given to an individual “whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement.” Previous winners include Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Farmer.
Sandel has taught at Harvard University since 1980, where he’s currently the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, but is probably most famous for his YouTube series on justice, the first of which, in October 2025, had amassed more than 40 million views. He’s also an internationally in-demand speaker whose lectures draw standing-room-only crowds in Asia and Europe. His teaching style follows the Socratic method, which poses a series of questions to listeners as a way of helping them examine their own beliefs and thought processes.
Sandel spoke exclusively to TIME ahead of the announcement about his attempts to help people think differently about opportunity, patriotism, merit and, of course, the way they think.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Congratulations on winning the Berggruen Prize, which is like a Nobel, except you don’t have to make a scientific discovery. If you were describing what you had done to win the prize, what would you say?
What I’ve tried to do is to use philosophy as an invitation to a more robust citizenship than we’ve become accustomed to, to prompt public deliberation about big questions that matter, such as what makes for a just society and how can we seek the common good.
Your Socratic style of lectures on justice, in which you engage students to think things through out loud, are very popular, not only where you teach, but on the lecture circuit and on YouTube, and you’ve been called the rock-star philosopher for the crowds you draw. How did you develop that style?
I came late to philosophy, at graduate school at Oxford. I wanted to teach political philosophy in a way that would have interested me back when I was an undergraduate who couldn’t make much sense of it, and so I put questions to the students, questions on contemporary issues. I also knew that in articulating and defending and debating those opinions, students would be drawn into dialogue with one another and with the famous philosophers of the past. I was so close in age to the students I was teaching, I could vividly remember what it was like to encounter philosophy for the first time, and I wanted to show students how they have a stake in it, because they do have opinions and convictions on moral and political questions that commit them to one or another philosophical perspective, even though they may not realize it at first.
As a student you debated then Governor Ronald Reagan in public at a left-leaning high school, and you felt that you lost because he was so reasonable. I wondered if you were aware of Charlie Kirk before he died, and what you thought of his approach?
There was a marked difference between Ronald Reagan’s approach to public discourse and argument and that of Charlie Kirk’s. Ronald Reagan defended his position but did not do so in a way that tried to score points over his challenger. He simply articulated his view and tried to make a case for it. In my brief exposure online to some of Charlie Kirk’s campus debates with challengers, he reminded me more of the high school debater seeking to score points that, as an 18-year-old debating Ronald Reagan, I was, and that I ultimately tried to move beyond.
In your 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, you argued that meritocracy is a dangerous mirage. I wonder if you could explain why you believe that?
Normally we think of merit as a good thing. If I need surgery, I want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it. That’s merit, allocating social roles to those well equipped to perform them. How can merit become a kind of tyranny? But if we look back over the last five decades, we see a growing divide between winners and losers. This has partly to do with widening inequalities of income and wealth, but it has also to do with the changing attitudes towards success. Those who’ve landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and by implication, that those who struggle must deserve their fate too. Meritocracy has a dark side; it induces hubris among the winners and humiliation among those who fall short. It encourages the winners to forget the luck that helped them on their way, to forget their indebtedness to those who made their achievements possible. I think these attitudes towards success, and especially the hubris of the winners, have been a potent source of the grievances, the anger, and the resentment that have prompted the populist backlash against elites. That’s what I mean by the tyranny of merit.
How do you interpret the actions of this Administration to defund Harvard and other universities? Is it trying to take down the hubris of the elites that you speak of?
The Trump attacks on higher education are part of a broader project to exert control, not only over the government, but also over the major institutions of civil society, including the universities, the law firms, and the media and cultural institutions. It’s dangerous, because the autonomy and independence of these institutions are essential to the health of the democratic project. I want to make that observation from the start. But part of what has opened the universities and elite institutions to Trump’s attacks is that increasing numbers of Americans don’t have confidence that colleges and universities serve the public good rather than promote the private privilege of the young people who are fortunate enough to win admission. If that’s all we are—a way for certain privileged young people to find their way to good careers and high earnings—then we have strayed from our mission of serving the public good. And this is a problem independent of Trump and his attacks.
Universities’ affirmative-action policies are seen by some members of society, and the Trump Administration, as putting a finger on the scale in favor of scholars of color. They have called these actions racist. What would be the defense against that accusation?
I disagree with the U.S. Supreme Court decision preventing colleges and universities from taking race into account in admissions. Affirmative action can be a valuable way of providing access to groups who have long been denied it, and it can be a valuable way of bringing to the university students with different life histories. I think it’s important to include in affirmative action young people who have struggled by virtue of their class background. I don’t think we’ve done enough to provide opportunities for students from low-income families. Despite generous financial-aid policies at Ivy League universities, there are more students whose families come from the top 1% than there are students whose families come from the entire bottom half of the country put together.
Although it’s true that the public opposes race-based affirmative action, I don’t think that’s the primary source of public anger and frustration against universities. I think it has more to do with the fact that most of the economic growth produced by the market-driven version of globalization of the last five decades benefited the top 20%. Almost none went to the bottom half. The wage of the median worker in the United States in real terms was almost flat for five decades. And what the mainstream political parties offered, Democrats and Republicans alike, was advice: if you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college, get a degree. What this bracing advice missed was the implicit insult: If you’re struggling in the new economy and you didn’t get a college degree, your failure must be your fault. The problem is not with the economic policies and arrangements we put into place. Today, as a result, the deepest political divide in electoral terms is the diploma divide. More than 60% of Americans do not have a four-year degree. It was folly to create an economy that set as a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life a four-year degree that most people don’t have. I think that’s the deepest source of the anger and resentment and backlash against universities and elites. And I think it’s this anger that opened the way to Donald Trump’s politics of grievance.
As you say, globalist policies have stranded many American workers in a place where meaningful, remunerative, dignified work is very hard to find. But it has also raised the fortunes of hundreds of millions of extraordinarily poor people in countries like China and Bangladesh and Vietnam and so on. So in terms of what is just and good, was globalism a worthwhile enterprise?
It’s certainly true that the free-trade agreements and the like did help enable China to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That’s a good thing, but I would make two observations about it. First, China succeeded partly by violating all the rules of neoliberal global economic policy. And two is that it’s an after-the-fact rationalization for an economic project that produced devastating, dislocating, and political blowback in the United States and in many other democracies.
You have said that philosophy is a distancing and even debilitating activity. What do you mean by that?
Philosophy estranges us from the familiar. It unsettles settled beliefs. It prompts us to reflect critically on the assumptions by which we live as citizens. It prompts us to reflect critically on our moral and spiritual convictions. In that sense, it distances us from the world, from our political community, from ourselves. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, and in a way the charge was just, because he was inviting the citizens of Athens to question the laws by which they lived. To be a citizen, to be a democratic citizen, is to deliberate with others about how we should live together, what makes for a just society, what we should do about inequality, about what we owe one another as fellow citizens, about what it means to seek the common good. To be a citizen is always, at least in part, to be a philosopher.
You have talked about a new style of patriotism. What would it look like?
Progressives and liberals view patriotism with suspicion because they see it as a source of hostility to immigrants, a reason to turn our back on friends and allies, a reason not to care about human rights or injustices around the world. But patriotism at its best is about cultivating the sense that we are all in this together, that political community matters, that in virtue of our shared history, traditions, and identities we have special responsibilities to our fellow citizens. Thinking of patriotism this way ties it more closely to solidarity. How can we make the case for a generous safety net or for the public provision to everyone in our society of health care and education and dignified work, if we don’t have some sense of mutual responsibility for one another? So I’m going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. The civil rights movement was about what we owe all Americans as Americans as a way of overcoming the legacy of racism and segregation. That’s patriotism.
What keeps you up at night about the American experiment?
Two things. First, the American experiment is endangered by the anti-democratic autocratic ambitions of the Trump Administration, attacking the key institutions of civil society and violating the separation of powers. But what worries me almost as deeply is that people of goodwill who would defend democracy have so far shown very little sense of how to go about it and how to address the legitimate grievances that Donald Trump was able to exploit. When people feel that the dignity of their work is not acknowledged and respected, a sense of humiliation and grievance builds, and the grievances are, in my view, legitimate. As troubled as I am by the danger to democracy posed by Trump’s violation of law and democratic norms, I’m at least as troubled by the failure of those who would oppose him to acknowledge their own role in it.
If I were to give you a magic wand to do something practical, what would you do?
I’d like to help create platforms and forums for a more robust kind of public discourse than the kind to which we’ve become accustomed. Our public discourse today is hollow of larger moral meanings, and when there is a vacuum of meaning in public discourse, that vacuum will be filled with narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds, fundamentalism or hypernationalism, and that’s what we’ve seen today. We need to recover the art of listening. And by listening, I don’t just mean hearing the words that people speak, but listening for the moral and spiritual convictions that lie behind the opinions that people bring to public discourse, listening especially to those with whom we disagree. Listening of this kind is a demanding civic art and civic virtue. We need to do a better job of cultivating it.
Do you find it at all ironic that you’ve won this $1 million prize and you’re partly known for writing a book called What Money Can’t Buy?
No—provided that the money is not the point, provided that what matters to one’s work as a philosopher is intrinsic, not instrumental.
Do you have any plans for what you’re going to do with the money?
I haven’t thought it through fully, but a portion of it will go to the Babayan story and music project that my wife Kiku Adatto and I have launched to try to show that citizenship and civic reflection should begin young, with children, whose moral and civic imaginations can be awakened through stories.
The post The ‘Rock Star’ Philosopher Who Just Won a $1 Million Prize appeared first on TIME.
