Philosophy prize awarded to Michael Sandel

The Berggruen Institute today named political philosopher Michael Sandel as the 2025 Laureate of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture. One of the world’s leading thinkers and public intellectuals, Sandel has had a far-reaching impact through his scholarship and teaching on justice, ethics, markets, and democracy. The one million dollar prize is given annually to individuals whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.

Throughout a decades-long career at Harvard University, Michael Sandel has striven to reinvigorate political discourse and renew civic life by imbuing both with morality and virtue. The arc of his philosophical interests bends from scholarly work on theories of justice early in his career to a consideration of increasingly urgent practical matters of politics, economics, and the need to reason together across our differences. 

Sandel argues for the importance of community in shaping individual identity. In his earliest work, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), he sympathetically criticized the version of liberalism advanced by John Rawls, according to which principles of justice and rights must be neutral on competing conceptions of the good life. He steadily developed this idea into his signature account of justice and the common good that culminated in Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009), which reached beyond an academic audience, selling more than two million copies. Calling for a morally engaged public discourse open to spiritual as well as secular moral argument, Sandel traced the history of ideas put forth by Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill and their application to matters like taxation, conscription, assisted suicide, surrogacy, reparations, patriotism, and more. This more capacious notion of public discourse is highly relevant today in light of widespread discontent with the hollow, often rancorous terms of moral and political debate. 

In subsequent work, Sandel has shown how the excesses of market faith and meritocratic hubris fueled a growing divide between winners and losers. In What Money Can’t Buy (2012), Sandel offered a sustained critique of how market values have expanded into spheres of life once governed by non-market norms. In The Tyranny of Merit (2020), Sandel argued that the contemporary American form of meritocracy, while ostensibly rewarding talent and effort, has instead produced corrosive hubris, deep inequality, and growing populist resentment. Sandel calls for greater elite humility, a recognition of the importance of luck in life outcomes, and a broader social reorientation toward the “dignity of work.”

Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, where he has taught since 1980, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 and received his doctorate in 1981 from Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar under philosopher Charles Taylor. He has made a lifelong effort to engage broader, international audiences with his philosophical ideas. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. His Harvard course “Justice,” one of the most popular in the university’s history, was its first to be made freely available online and on television, and has been viewed by more than 40 million people around the world. 

Michael Sandel was selected for the Berggruen Prize from hundreds of nominees, including some of the world’s most renowned scholars and practitioners in the fields of philosophy, social science, economics, human rights, theoretical physics, literature, and beyond. As the ninth winner of the Prize, he joins an esteemed cohort of Berggruen Prize Laureates, including Patricia Hill Collins (2023), Kojin Karatani (2022), Peter Singer (2021), Paul Farmer (2020), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2019), Martha C. Nussbaum (2018), Onora O’Neill (2017), and Charles Taylor (2016). Sandel will receive the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in Spring 2026 at a celebration to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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