This week, this year’s prize was awarded to Michael Sandel, who is among Harvard University’s most popular professors of political philosophy—as well as a veritable star on YouTube, where his lecture series on justice has been viewed tens of millions of times. Sandel’s work has focused on questions at the intersection of moral and political theory, which have gained newfound relevance as U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of both.

There is no official Nobel Prize for philosophy, but there is a de facto one. Since 2016, the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, has awarded a $1 million lifetime achievement award to thinkers whose ideas have “led us to find wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.”

There is no official Nobel Prize for philosophy, but there is a de facto one. Since 2016, the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, has awarded a $1 million lifetime achievement award to thinkers whose ideas have “led us to find wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.”

This week, this year’s prize was awarded to Michael Sandel, who is among Harvard University’s most popular professors of political philosophy—as well as a veritable star on YouTube, where his lecture series on justice has been viewed tens of millions of times. Sandel’s work has focused on questions at the intersection of moral and political theory, which have gained newfound relevance as U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of both.

Sandel spoke with Foreign Policy about the relationship between his own critiques of liberalism and the arguments advanced by so-called postliberal supporters of the Trump administration.

Cameron Abadi: You’re known as one of the leading figures in the movement known as communitarianism, which included a critique of liberalism as a system of politics. That seems to share an overlap with the contemporary intellectual movement known as postliberalism, which has growing political momentum. What did your own communitarian critique of liberalism consist of?

Michael Sandel: You’re right. I began with a critique of liberalism, or a certain version of it, as moral and political philosophy. My first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, grew out of my dissertation back in the early 1980s. I was critical of the version of liberalism that found its fullest contemporary expression in the work of John Rawls, which said we should try to be neutral in defining justice and rights, toward competing conceptions of the good life, toward the particular moral and spiritual convictions that citizens care about.

The book cover for Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael J. Sandel.

What motivated that version of liberalism, which goes back to Immanuel Kant, is the idea that in pluralist societies, we disagree about virtue and the good life. So, what we need in thinking about constitutions and principles of justice is a basic framework of rights that doesn’t take sides in the disparate views that citizens bring to public life—and that people should pursue those conceptions in their private lives.

I took issue with the liberalism of neutrality.