American Political Science :: Politics Government Essays

American Political Science In politics as in political science and legal scholarship, the world sometimes seems to be divided into those who think that for the sake of efficiency as well as justice markets must be free from regulation by morals and those who believe that, considerations of efficiency notwithstanding, justice demands that morals govern markets. In his instructive and admirably balanced new book, Cass Sunstein contends that, for all concerned, this is a bad way for the world to be divided. Sunstein sets out to show the superiority of a third view: markets and morals exercise a reciprocal influence on each other, and a respectable political science and a responsible jurisprudence must grasp the complicated relationship between them. In support of his thesis, Sunstein examines a remarkable range of ideas and issues: the ambiguity of preferences; the need to devise empirical measures of human well-being to solve problems of adjudication and public policy that arise in the modern welfare state; the complex origins, the pervasive influence, and the political regulation of social norms; why markets alone cannot put an end to discrimination; free speech issues raised by the Internet; constitution making in Eastern Europe; the relation among property rights, democracy, and constitutionalism; neglected consequences and complicated trade-offs in the regulation of the environment and health; and the project of using the legal system to democratize America. In making his case, Sun stein is conscientious about introducing qualifications to his claims, drawing out problems of implementation inhering in his reforms, and identifying dangers associated with his programs, though occasionally he blurs the distinction between openly acknowledging a difficulty and responding to it by scaling back his theoretical ambitions or revising his political programs. The two crucial and connected points, to which Sunstein returns again and again, are that markets are complex institutions and that morals are an irreducible element of social and political life. It is not exactly that there is no such thing as a free market or that morals are everywhere, but that free markets cannot be understood in isolation from beliefs and practices, especially beliefs about what is just and good for human beings and practices that prepare or prevent one from participating effectively in commercial, democratic society. Moreover, because they depend on and are partly constituted by law, free markets are not only more complex but also less autonomous than they sometimes appear. For example, the law of property provides rules of entitlement and the law of contract establishes rules of transfer.