common good

common good, that which benefits society as a whole, in contrast to the private good of individuals and sections of society.

From the era of the ancient Greek city-states through contemporary political philosophy, the idea of the common good has pointed toward the possibility that certain goods, such as security and justice, can be achieved only through citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the public realm of politics and public service. In effect, the notion of the common good is a denial that society is and should be composed of atomized individuals living in isolation from one another. Instead, its proponents have asserted that people can and should live their lives as citizens deeply embedded in social relationships.

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The notion of the common good has been a consistent theme in Western political philosophy, most notably in the work of Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It has been most clearly developed in the political theory of republicanism, which has contended that the common good is something that can only be achieved through political means and the collective action of citizens participating in their own self-government. At the same time, the notion of the common good has been closely bound up with the idea of citizenship, a mutual commitment to common goods and the value of political action as public service. Therefore, it has played a prominent role in the defense of republican constitutional arrangements, notably the defense of the Constitution of the United States in the Federalist papers.

In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle asserted that man is political by nature. It is only through participation as citizens in the political community, or polis, provided by the state that men may achieve the common good of community safety—only as citizens and through active engagement with politics, whether as a public servant, a participant in the deliberation of laws and justice, or as a soldier defending the polis, that the common good can be achieved. Indeed, Aristotle argued that only matters of the common good are right; matters for the rulers’ good are wrong.

The notion of the common good was next taken up in the late 15th and early 16th centuries in the work of Machiavelli, most famously in The Prince. Machiavelli contended that securing the common good would depend upon the existence of virtuous citizens. Indeed, Machiavelli developed the notion of virtù to denote the quality of promoting the common good through the act of citizenship, be it through military or political action.

For Rousseau, writing in the mid-18th century, the notion of the common good, achieved through the active and voluntary commitment of citizens, was to be distinguished from the pursuit of an individual’s private will. Thus, the “general will” of the citizens of a republic, acting as a corporate body, should be distinguished from the particular will of the individual. Political authority would only be regarded as legitimate if it was according to the general will and toward the common good. The pursuit of the common good would enable the state to act as a moral community.

The importance of the common good to the republican ideal was notably illustrated with the publication of the Federalist papers, in which Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay provided a passionate defense of the new Constitution of the United States. Madison, for example, argued that political constitutions should seek out wise, discerning rulers in search of the common good.

In the modern era, instead of a single common good, an emphasis has been placed upon the possibility of realizing a number of politically defined common goods, including certain goods arising from the act of citizenship. The common good has been defined as either the corporate good of a social group, the aggregate of individual goods, or the ensemble of conditions for individual goods.

Because the common good has been associated with the existence of an active, public-spirited citizenry, which has acknowledged the duty of performing public service (whether politically or, in the case of the ancient Greek city-states, militarily), its relevance to contemporary politics has been called into question. In the modern era the emphasis has been placed on the maximization of the freedom of the individual, as consumer and property owner discovering that freedom in the private domain of liberalized markets rather than as citizen achieving the common good in the public domain.

Nevertheless, for contemporary politics, the importance of the idea of the common good remains in that it identifies the possibility that politics can be about more than building an institutional framework for the narrow pursuit of individual self-interest in the essentially private domain of liberalized markets. The common good points toward the way in which freedom, autonomy, and self-government can be realized through the collective action and active participation of individuals, not as atomized consumers but as active citizens in the public domain of politics. It also affords the possibility that political participation can have an intrinsic value, in its own right, in addition to its instrumental value of securing the common good.