The new Democratic Socialists in America refer to the common good, or communist good, all the time.

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Is there such a thing as “the common good”?  What is government’s role in providing it?

It seems that many arguments are made assuming such or referring to some broad abstract concept naming such.  Often it appears to be the last defense of various forms of collectivism.

What should we make of competing notions of the common good?  Do we need one, or would it be better to just drop it from parlance and debate?  Is it ideologically dependent or a self-evident truth?  Or is it perhaps a myth?

The answer differs significantly depending on which philosophical or political tradition you belong to, and which writings carry the most weight for you.  The communist and socialist arguments of Marx and myriad latter day neo-Marxists depend on the vanguard of the proletariat and the stated goal of equality of outcomes.  Most liberals think in terms of welfare and the benefits of progressive taxation to bring about various forms of social welfare.  Utilitarians and pragmatists are less sanguine about the term and tend to shy away from it in favor of obtaining happiness or some kind of maximum efficiency.

There are four historically distinct and major ways of thinking about the question.

Classical tradition 

(associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas)

In this ancient tradition, the common good is not merely the sum of individual interests.  It consists of the social conditions that enable people to flourish together — justice, peace, trustworthy institutions, and shared moral norms.  Individuals achieve their own good partly through participating in the larger political community.  Catholic Social Teaching, based in Catholicism and papal encyclicals, is a large progenitor of this concept of common good, but it is denied by Protestants, who rebelled against Catholic hierarchy and corruption, creating their own Reformed tradition.

Liberal tradition 

(associated with John Locke and later thinkers)

Liberals have been skeptical that there is one substantive common good everyone shares.  They think the state’s role is primarily to protect individual rights and property and allow people to pursue their own conceptions of the good.  “The common good” often means maintaining fair rules rather than promoting some particular vision or normative program of human flourishing.

Utilitarian tradition 

(associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill)

Here the common good is identified with maximizing overall welfare or human happiness.  This can mean the sacrifice of the interests of minorities if doing so increases total welfare.  A calculus is performed to decide what to do and what to avoid.

Public Choice and Libertarian critiques

These advocates argue that appeals to the common good often mask the interests of particular groups.  Politicians and bureaucrats may invoke the common good while pursuing power or serving well organized and narrow constituencies.  This view is associated with thinkers such as James Buchanan.

In practice, truthfully, there are some things that almost everyone treats as common needs because they are difficult to provide individually or because everyone benefits from them.  Examples include national defense, public safety, clean air and water, certain basic public health measures, the rule of law, and reliable infrastructure.  The deeper disagreement is whether these examples point to a moral reality or are simply areas where individual interests happen to overlap or are agreed to be essential.

So the question “Is there really any such thing as the common good?” has two answers.

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Empirically, yes.  Every society seemingly depends on some, even if limited, shared goods and institutions that individuals cannot create or sustain alone.

Philosophically, the idea remains contested.  Some believe that the common good is an objective feature of political life; others think it is mainly a shorthand for overlapping private interests or a rhetorical concept that can be and is often misused.

Whether the common good is “real” ultimately depends on whether you believe that human beings are fundamentally atomistic individuals who cooperate for mutual advantage or seen as members of larger communities whose flourishing is intrinsically interconnected.  That difference in starting assumptions explains the enduring debate.

The free-market economy is a key link between the technological project and the logic of modernity, especially the civil institutions of limited government and personal autonomy.  That is because these civil institutions — and therefore the meaning of “liberalism” in the Anglo-American world, especially in the U.S. — is significantly different from its meaning in most of Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium — all formerly Catholic — and Germany).  

To begin with, most Europeans eschew what they call “social atomism” in favor of a democratically arrived-at common good (indistinguishable in practice from a Rousseauian collective good or “General Will” — thereby confusing it with what Rousseau meant by the “majority will”).  There is a deep-seated anti-clericalism (originally directed against the Church) and opposition to one-person or autocratic rule (Fascism, Nazism). 

They understand a free-market economy, which they insist on describing by using the French expression laissez-faire, to be only one way to meet the economic needs of society, and it could or should, conceivably, be replaced by something better under certain circumstances.  Continental liberalism is seemingly therefore compatible with socialism.

In this regard, most Europeans are close to Bentham’s implicit (yet confused) presumption of the compatibility with, if not reducibility of the individual good to a holistic social good.  Continental academics, politicians, and bureaucrats believe that “entrepreneurship” is a form of information that can be taught or forced.  And Europeans generally mistrust the market and the entrepreneurs it produces.  They want to confiscate wealth.

However, a distrust of free-market economies is accompanied in Europe by lower achievements in technology, a more activist and interventionist government with its implicit socialism, a formalistic rule of law that subordinates law to politics under the notion of a collective good (enterprise association) as opposed to the primacy of individual autonomy (civil association), and the reduction of religious institutions to at best a branch of the welfare system.  It has resulted in weaker economies, lack of growth, little charity, and a large role for the State.

This is why the many notions of the common good are both incompatible and fallacious.  We should be on guard and wary every time we hear its use and what it implies, since there isn’t even agreement on what the good itself entails.

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, scholar-diplomat-strategist, was a professor at Yale and Oxford and is the author of twenty books, including Common Sense Business.  His academic work revolves around business virtues and corporate governance.

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