From left, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, University President Lawrence H. Summers, and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman debate in “Social Analysis 78: Globalization and Its Critics” yesterday.
The stage of Sanders Theater morphed into an ideological wrestling ring yesterday afternoon as University President Lawrence H. Summers, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman sparred in round one of their much-anticipated core class on globalization.
Though the new course is officially titled “Social Analysis 78: Globalization and Its Critics,” onlookers could have been forgiven if they thought that they were watching the latest installment of CNN’s “Crossfire.”
Sandel launched the intellectual brawl with a series of not-so-subtle allusions to the public relations fiasco sparked last month by Summers’ remarks about “innate differences” between the sexes.
Before agreeing to co-teach the course, Sandel said he approached Summers and warned, “Larry, this won’t work if you give us the bland, platitudinous talk that is characteristic of University presidents.”
“Larry, you have to be uninhibited…Larry, you have to be provocative,” Sandel said.
Not missing a beat, he continued, “I never imagined he’d spend the whole month before practicing.”
Sandel starred as globalization’s critic, while Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, championed global capitalism. Even as they expressed drastically different views, Sandel and Friedman interacted with the good-natured ease of ex-college buddies. Both men graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1975.
With the caveat that “as a reporter I would never put this in the paper,” Friedman jokingly suggested that Sandel had been one of the costumed protesters who hurled objects into store windows during the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle. Addressing Sandel as “Mr. Dress-up-like-a-turtle-and-throw-a-stone-through-a-McDonald’s-window,” Friedman said that “by the end of this course you will concede that the problem is not that we have too much globalization, but that we have too little.”
After Friedman’s paean to globalization, Sandel quipped, “I never thought that it would be possible to make President Summers look like a warm and fuzzy liberal.”
After delivering a trenchant rebuttal of Friedman, Sandel set his sights on Summers, who was a prominent advocate for global integration as chief economist at the World Bank and later as Secretary of the Treasury. Sandel mercilessly mocked Summers’ now-famous aphorism: “In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” Friedman has cited Summers’ quotation in four separate Times columns over the last two years.
“You don’t want to be remembered for that saying above all others,” Sandel told Summers. Then he turned to the audience and added, “Well, given the alternatives now, maybe he does.”
After noting that at least one person—a retired Georgetown University sociologist named Norman Birnbaum—has indeed washed a rental car, Sandel argued that Summers’ adage is a “normative claim thinly disguised.” Summers mistakenly assumes that all people act only in their own self-interest, Sandel said.
In response, Summers said the maxim’s true meaning is that property rights propel third-world development. He argued that peasants who have their own plot of land will use sustainable farming methods and not deplete the soil.
As he made this argument, Summers grew increasingly animated, at one point waving a writing utensil in an emphatic gesture.
“Michael thinks that property rights are some sort of right-wing plot,” Summers said.
