There has been, especially in the USA, the re-emerging of an old idea, “the common good”. Usually this reflects the desire to control what happens in society by slightly authoritarian right-wing leaders and thinkers. It has economic elements (against free markets and especially free trade) and social elements (the desire for conformity and a dislike of diversity) but the concept tracks back through the European authoritarian right with an idea of a national will, to Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’. I wrote this criticism of now Tory MP Nick Timothy’s ideas around the common good back in 2020. But you could replace Timothy’s name with J D Vance and get a good idea of the direction for part of what will be the post-Trump right in the US.
The pursuit of the common good has little place in liberalism, for liberalism is principally concerned with the maximisation of individual freedom. Liberals have always tended to underestimate how the freedom of the rich and powerful can undermine the freedom of the poor and powerless. But it is only now that this reality is becoming so blatant, prevalent and, in the eyes of many, inevitable and even legitimate.
This argument, that the pursuit of individual liberty somehow runs counter to the common good, has been a companion to liberalism since its first days on the street of Paris, the salons of Philadelphia and the lecture halls of Edinburgh. It says that in some way people being free runs counter to the common good, that the existence of the rich necessarily requires the presence of the poor, and that liberalism is about the application of power over others not the exercise of choice.
The quotation above comes from Nick Timothy, erstwhile advisor to Theresa May and renewed advocate of anti-liberal, social conservatism. Timothy joins a growing crowd, on both left and right, that has drifted (in some cases fled screaming) away from the consensus that people being free to exercise choice is a good thing so long as that choice doesn’t harm others. And the prop that such people have reached for to hold up their argument is this idea of the ‘common good’, that we can in some alchemical way divine this thing and make it real. But who decides what that common good might be? How do we ascertain the general will? And how do we respond when a minority refuse to accept the definition - can it still be called common or general?
The worst take on the ‘common good’ is that which is implicit when Timothy talks about diversity - “...the more diverse a society becomes, the less trust and reciprocity there is, and less willingness to pay taxes to fund universal public services and welfare systems.” We read from this that the common good is, in some way, a homogeneity, the sameness of people, and that a functioning society is only possible where diversity is minimised.
The mistake that Timothy (and many others) make lies in the corruption of liberalism in American usage rather than our traditional understanding of liberal. If liberal means, as it mostly does in the USA, ‘progressive, left-wing, identity politics’, then Timothy and others’ objection to the idea is justified. So much of this ‘liberal’ assault on institutions does not reflect a love of liberty but rather a view that the power of government should be used to enforce a majority view onto a minority so as to protect group rather than individual interests. This is not liberalism.
Talking, however, about the common good or the general will, especially in language that seems to exclude difference and diversity, does not seem to me to be championing western values but rather to see the common good as oppositional to religious freedom, antithetical to sexual choice, and opposed to the idea of open markets. A common good doesn’t come about from the limiting of liberty or by a policy of reducing diversity. If the general will becomes about killing market freedom because the distribution of the riches it makes isn’t even then we should begin to worry that this will, this common good, doesn’t serve the people but instead satisfies compliance and adherence to rules defined by our betters. We are supposed to make more sacrifices for this common good - pay higher taxes, accept limits to our liberty - because it will be better for the nation.
Timothy and others set nations as greater than the sum of their parts, semi-mythical entities rather than temporary arrangements in the churn of human history. Rather than it being a shared place with a shared history (however contested), nation becomes a thing itself symbolised by flags, hymns and rituals not an association between free people to largely mutual benefit. We cannot know the common good, Rousseau was wrong about there being a general will, and those who lay claim to knowing the will of the people - even in a newspaper article - open up the doors to a less free, more controlled and less pleasant world.
Liberalism, for all that it is misused to justify oppression by the left, is the thing that made the world we have today. Not just “the west” but all of it. Moreover liberalism is the thing that will make our world even better - free speech, free assembly, free exchange, these are the most important things for us to champion. Limiting any of these for fear of diversity or because your religion is dying out does not serve the common good. The common good is served by remembering the mutual benefit that comes from our selfish interests - as one of liberalism’s founders, Adam Smith, put it: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”.
It is good to see you write about this recent phenomenon that has been labelled postliberalism. These ideas have surfaced among the "new" anti-liberal right and are not, in my view, sufficiently challenged.
So it is great to see this challenge.
I'll just take a few points and comment.
Most important is the abuse of the term Common Good, something even the Vatican has criticised.
Its postliberal usage "risks replacing liberal individualism with authoritarian communitarianism" where "the person is defined almost exclusively by its belonging to a cultural or religious community, and its freedom is subordinated to the collective project.” This according to the Pope's Nuncio to the US.
The Common Good, as of course you know, has a pedigree going back to Aristotle, later echoed by Thomas Aquinas. But the Common Good is not a policy bundle, blueprint or ideology.
It is, stripped to its core, the belief or understanding that there is a good for man as man, a good that is in principle knowable and is realised through the daily practice of living in a certain manner.
The "common" bit does not mean that everyone must conform to a blueprint. It means that it is a good that is in principle open to all who seek it.
Examples are: just laws, stable institutions, peace, education and formation, conditions, in other words, that are conducive to the happiness, completion and fruition of man as man.
Some postliberals, who lack the nuance of Aristotle or Thomas, and who are infected with the modern fetish for "ideology", think they can replace Aristotle's prudence and practical wisdom with systems, mechanisms and centralised solutions. The Common Good becomes something to be engineered rather than cultivated. A very modernist conception.
Just a quick word too on Rousseau's General Will. This was Rousseau's attempt to replace Natural Right or Natural Law with the Will of the People. Instead of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's, everything was to be rendered unto Caesar.
Put differently, the Will of the People was to be absolute. In practical politics it led to the Committee of Public Safety, the Terror, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Führer Principle. And of course this view still continues under various guises.
The irony with so much postliberal chatter online is that if you drill down, what many actually want is liberalism, if only they would stop and think. But their minds have been befuddled by American shock-jock terminology.
It makes them easy prey for those among the so-called postliberals who draw their inspiration from German demagogues of the 1930s.