Last month, as the Nobel peace prize eluded Donald Trump’s covetous grasp, the Harvard professor Michael Sandel received an accolade sometimes described as a Nobel equivalent for philosophers. The $1m Berggruen prize is awarded annually to a thinker deemed to have helped humanity find “wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding”. Somewhat wistfully, given the state of the polls, I found my mind wandering back to the early 2010s, when Sandel was recruited by the Labour party to deliver just these benefits to the British centre left.

At the time, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, Labour was trying to develop a One Nation politics to address deepening social fissures which – we now know – were soon to turn our politics upside down. Having addressed the Labour party conference of 2012 on responsible capitalism and the “moral limits of markets”, Sandel was interviewed at a fringe event, where he elaborated on the challenges he believed modern progressives faced.

In that interview, Sandel was asked by the veteran centre-left thinktanker Nick Pearce: “What would you say to people in the Labour party in the UK, and people interested in progressive politics more generally? What should we be aiming at, if not an abstract notion of equality or justice?” He replies: “I think that it would be important to anchor the concern for social justice and equality in the longer tradition of the Labour party, which draws on resources of solidarity, civic virtue and community.”

This synthesis never came to pass. As........

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