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Democracy's Discontent In A Complex World: Can Avalanches, Sandpiles, And Finches Optimize Michael Sandel's Civic Republican Community?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Michael Sandel looks about him and finds a vast and complex world governed by impersonal institutions and structures, in which discontented, anxious, and frustrated individuals are losing control over the forces that govern their lives, and in which the moral fabric of community is unraveling. His solution is to revitalize the civic strand of freedom found in republican politics and thus equip individuals to govern themselves. Sandel wonders how civic republicanism can exist in today's world. Historically, republicanism has found a home in small, bounded places, which were largely …