Book review - Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel

Tilly Lloyd from Unity Books reviews Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel. This book is published by Allen Lane. These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. Sandel argues that to overcome the polarised politics of our time, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalisation and rising inequality. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success - more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility, and more hospitable to a politics of the common good.