In April 2012, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published political philosopher Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy. Sandel, who is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, has previously written on the “moral limits of markets” for The Hedgehog Review. As his new book demonstrates with a wide range of telling examples, “we live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold.” Increasingly, market-oriented logic and values pervade realms of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms, raising the urgent need to “rethink the role that markets should play in our society.” As a contribution to this needed debate, we asked three scholars to offer some brief reflections on the book and the question of marketization. What follows below is a short excerpt from pages 9-10 and 202.

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