Modern Political Philosophy

The very idea of a common good puzzles us. We all have views of the good of individuals. We might wonder about details and about how objective such views can ever be. Human lives, though, certainly vary in happiness, and we have views on the reasons.

The term “common good,” in contrast, rings of sermons and stump speeches. It conjures up vague images of solidarity, unity and interdependence. In what sense, though, could a group of people share a good that goes beyond each member's personal good? While cooperation can benefit all involved individuals, such as when we pool resources to realize a project that none of us could fund alone, the good furthered here still is that of every individual considered separately. Everyone achieves a personal benefit, only through collective action.

Our puzzlement has its roots, I believe, in a significant shift in political thought since the Renaissance. Plato (Republic, 369a–374a) and Aristotle (Politics, 1253a) described the state as the end of human development, in the chronological sense that it develops from simpler communities as well as in the teleological sense that it is the stage of full realization of human nature. Citizens share in some good that only exists as a joint good and that is, in some to be further specified sense, constitutive of their personal good.

Most modern philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, offer an entirely different picture. They conceive the relation between state and citizen as instrumental. Either the state is a mere means to advance the citizen's personal good or this citizen is a mere means to advance the community's good.

I call these views “privatism” and “collectivism,” respectively. Privatism understands the common good of a community as the sum of the personal goods of its members. Collectivism understands it as separate from the personal goods and as superseding these. Other names for the first view have been “atomism” and “individualism,” along with “totalitarianism” and “holism” for the second. Both views are summarized in Table 1.1. The rest of the current chapter will discuss them in detail.