Whose good is the common good?

More than Mere Rhetoric

Now one could dismiss the use of the notion of the common good as a rhetorical slogan, used to achieve strategic goals. On the one hand, those who use this slogan have the populist aim of enlisting the acclamation of a public that is known often to view politics, parties and associations with morose suspicion and cynical indifference. On the other hand, they oppose a set of related pressures: pressures that come from bearers of functional and territorial representation, thus from associations and regional bodies; that limit the scope of governmental action; and that can further diminish their credit with the voting public. In addition, it no doubt lies in the interest of ruling elites to shirk their own responsibilities and shift the burden of managing problem situations into the realm of ‘civic’ self-help and community spirit. However, I believe that these interpretations, which in the final analysis understand the rhetoric of common good as strategic speech acts, do not go far enough. An appeal like that made by John F. Kennedy – ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ – such an appeal, coming from the mouth of the right person and spoken in the right situation, could still earn moral credit and charismatic recognition even today. Schröder’s appeal to the ‘uprising of upstanding citizens’ [Aufstand der Anständigen] at least imitates this mode of politics, which admonishes citizens to fulfill their republican duties. ⁸

Across a broad front – both in political science and in political practice itself – the ‘neo-Tocquevillian’ insight has spread that successful ‘public policy-making’ and ‘good governance’ cannot be brought about exclusively with the legal and fiscal means of democratic representation and executive action – and that this holds not only in cases of major floods and other natural disasters. Successful government action in fact depends on the ‘receptive’ social-ethical dispositions of a ‘civil society’ that neither expects nor demands of state policy everything that is necessary for managing the problems and conflicts associated with social, political and economic change. Scarcely any sentence in the relevant German-speaking literature has been cited so often as Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde’s reminder of the pre-political foundations of state action: the liberal constitutional state is nourished by foundations that it cannot itself guarantee – namely, those of a civic orientation toward the common good. ⁹ The state can at most manage to foster and encourage this civic potential of politically relevant moral resources. ¹⁰ Precisely this goal is avowedly served by ‘third way’ approaches and the ‘New Labour’, which borrow political ideas such as the ‘devolution’ of power and ‘activation’ strategies from communitarian thought. ¹¹ Citizens, families, networks, neighborhoods and associations, as well as regional community bodies, are viewed as the field of operation for a certain ‘micropolitical’ practice, which is described by norms such as ‘individual responsibility’, ‘self-help’, the ‘new subsidiarity’ and ‘community spirit’. Summarizing these programmatic insights, one can say that (contrary to Max Weber) the common good does not take effect at the ‘top’, where leaders make decisions according to an ethic of responsibility, but rather just the opposite: at the base and in the everyday practice of citizens.

Now there is nothing new in asserting that legal institutions and the constitutional guarantees of the legal order must rest on non-formalized, political-cultural presuppositions and civic virtues, and that without this support they would remain ineffective. If liberal rights are supposed to have force in a society, then tolerance is required, because the use of such rights can provoke negative externalities, which are not simply accepted by affected parties without a second thought, but must indeed be ‘tolerated’. Rights to political participation and representation depend on relationships of trust among citizens; how else could individual citizens be willing to allow legislative outcomes to be tied to the votes of all the other citizens? Social security and redistribution can be ensured only if the life-opportunities of fellow citizens are viewed not with indifference but with an attitude of solidarity. And even that fourth family of basic rights – the group rights or special rights of representation that complement the three classical (Marshallian) families of rights ¹² – depends on a corresponding virtue, namely that of ‘recognition’ and positive appreciation for cultural and other sorts of difference.

At most, what is new is the extent to which not only the politically instituted legal order as a whole, but also the success of individual political programs and interventions (‘policies’), depends on the sympathetic support of the citizens with compatible dispositions, which cannot be conditioned solely by incentives of punishment and reward. Not only is this in fact the case, it is common knowledge among political elites. They react to this with a polyphonous chorus of targeted bureaucratic ads for virtue that go far beyond ‘moral suasion’ (e.g. appeals for patriotic consumer choices such as the motto ‘Buy British’). Citizens thus see themselves confronted at every turn today by quasi-educational appeals that ask them, for example, to bring children into the world and raise them with care; to exercise consideration and caution in traffic; to sort household trash and make other sacrifices for ecological reasons; to practise safer sex; to avoid criminal offences and to cooperate in police investigations; to maintain their health through preventive measures of correct diet and abstinence; to observe standards of cleanliness in public, as when taking the dog for a walk; to pay their taxes conscientiously and treat members of other cultures and ethnic groups with respect. It would be good to know more about the methods and success of this multifaceted program of training in virtue, officially instituted and interfaced with common-good arguments. Here a conjecture must suffice: that the agents of government policy are aware that they cannot manage with their own instruments – legislation, executive and judicial enforcement, and fiscal incentives – and thus depend on the norms and disciplinary effects of the citizens’ public spirit.

Naturally, these measures are by no means limited to appeals and ads that merely recall the norms of civility and common good. One finds a controverted spectrum – stretching from ads promoting desired behaviors, through the official discrimination against undesirable behavior, to the negative sanctioning and formal prohibition of such behavior and the associated occasions – in which not only libertarian but also liberal tenets of social-political analysis mingle with and rub against communitarian, republican and even paternalistic authoritarian positions. ¹³ In the ‘well-understood’ interest of the common good, the latter set of positions exhibits a readiness, in part aggressively conveyed, to suppress ways of acting that (allegedly) generate diffuse harms and risks (including perhaps for the actors themselves), even when the damage to the community does not reach the level that would be required for a legally punishable offense or incarceration. The use of tobacco products, more or less serious juvenile mischief (‘zero tolerance’), the use of pornography or provision of media access to the same, and problems of school discipline – all these exemplify areas in which a paternalistic practice of the common good operates. One can also mention cautious initiatives here, such as legal ‘brakes’ on the divorce of parents. ¹⁴

The most important domain for applying paternalistic ideas of the common good that have been reinforced with sanctions is probably that designated in Anglophone countries by the aptly chosen concept of ‘dependency’. Narrowly construed, this concept is associated with dependency on legal and illegal drugs. Understood more broadly, it also encompasses the phenomena that have been sensationalized since the 1980s as ‘welfare dependency’. This term refers to the fact that people who draw social-welfare benefits react to the given incentive structure, in the sense that they (allegedly unnecessarily) prolong the time span in which they make use of their claim on those benefits. They thus become accustomed to the benefits, more or less intentionally neglecting or putting off the effort to renormalize their life by earning an income. The social-political conclusion is that they thereby violate their duties to the common good – an abuse that can be remedied only by curtailing or eliminating their claims, ¹⁵ if necessary by authorizing agents with policing powers. As a rule, one finds essentially milder variants of this line of thought in the German discussion connected with the regularly recurring ‘abuse debates’ in welfare law. ¹⁶

All the ‘paternalistic’ attempts – that is, attempts proceeding from the ‘well-understood’ interests of those affected, though not (yet) understood by those parties themselves – all such attempts to justify ‘punitive’ employments of the notion of the common good provoke the liberal objection that the values and interests in question are perhaps not those of the polity as a whole or of those affected by the sanctions, but are rather the values and interests of an intolerant, suspicious and possibly xenophobic majority unwilling to accept obligations of solidarity. The ‘common good’ would then be only a euphemism for cultural and above all material majority interests (e.g. in the reduction of welfare transfers). When proponents of a neo-liberal free-market (or ‘libertarian’) political order – who are otherwise opposed to every form of paternalism – manifest their agreement with common-good talk in this vein, then the suspicion of such a masquerade is entirely appropriate. In general, then, such suspicion is appropriate when the addressees of claims on common-good obligations are minorities (e.g. juveniles) that are disadvantaged with respect to their material, political and cultural resources.

On the other hand, one cannot categorically exclude the possibility that suitable assistance can be justified, if that is the only means whereby persons – not only as citizens but also as economic actors – are to be placed in the status of responsible agency. Since the late 1980s, and more recently under the 1996 Clinton-administration motto of ‘welfare reform’ (‘From welfare to work’), political programs have spread throughout the OECD world with the paternalistic goal of mobilizing, in the name of obligations to the common good, the unemployed and welfare recipients for ‘responsible’ economic behavior. The two questions for testing the sincerity and moral validity of this claim on the common good are obvious. The first question asks whether or not the material interests of the majority are at stake for those in favor of such initiatives. The second question asks whether the addressees of such ‘activation’ initiatives actually acquire the status of self-sufficiency as a result of the initiatives – or rather are merely punished for failing to do so. For a normatively acceptable paternalistic strategy, one must always presuppose that after the completion of the measures in question, the addressees themselves are prepared to appreciate the outcome as successful and thereby acknowledge the legitimacy of those measures in retrospect. ¹⁷

Pragmatics of Defining the Common Good

One can distinguish an active and a passive side in the norm of the common good (or ‘welfare of the general public’ or the ‘public interest’). The public interest is served by the fact that all participants do their part in dutifully working together at bringing forth the values, goods and outcomes as defined by that interest. The ‘passive’ side is the situation of the polity that results thereby, which is then experienced by all participants as favorable and beneficial, that is, as a positive change in the conditions for realizing their individual life-plans. The idea of the public interest thus contains not only this inclusive favorable effect, but also the active side of identifying goals (‘concerns’) and mobilizing contributions. To further clarify this active side, one could also speak of ‘publicly tested and recognized’ or ‘publicly acceptable’ interests, whose content therefore is neither self-evident to all parties nor the privileged knowledge of bureaucrats or experts.

Common-good criteria are employed for justifying and, above all, criticizing concrete actions. Here the object of justification (in the sense of providing reasons or finding fault with the lack of ‘good’ reasons) is either the official actions of political elites who are obligated to the common good by oath of office, etc., or the actions of non-elites. In both cases, we find ourselves in the neighborhood of republican ideals of realizing the bonum commune in the civil actions of all those who belong to the political community. Such ideals appeal to a spirit of sacrifice and renunciation, a readiness to put aside one’s individual preferences, avoid conflicts, accept disadvantages, renounce the abuse of liberties. What is more, the idea can be employed in either a positive-prescriptive or a negative-critical manner. No doubt the latter predominates: those who use the idea point out offences against the common good. The idea itself is easier to grasp in negative categories (e.g. the prevention or avoidance of collective damages) than in positive categories, such as ‘progress’. Seldom do those who use the idea invoke concrete commands that they deduce from the common good. Critique has the character of an exhortation (e.g. to moderation for the sake of the common good) or of a morally disqualifying censure (‘selfishness’, ‘egoism’, ‘thoughtlessness’, ‘short-sightedness’).

Censures of the above sort occupy a peculiar middle position between the private, hence entirely non-binding, disapproval of an action of other, on the one hand, and lawsuits that enforce legal duties, on the other. In giving voice to such censure for transgressions of, or damage to, the common good, one appeals to norms that lie below the level of codified duties of office and legal obligations, yet nonetheless are invoked in the expectation that their general validity is recognized. At issue are common-good arguments about the evaluation of (collectively relevant) decisions, not the deployment of formalized (legal) norms.

The censure of violating the common good aims not at legal injuries, but at the attitude and way of thinking that the critic sees in the behavior of the censured party. This holds whether the target is a leading politician or a neighbor who disturbs me with a loud stereo system. Consequently, the domain of common-good arguments lies in between the spheres of formally prescribed, legally sanctioned requirements one ‘must’ observe, on the one hand, and the sphere of legally protected actions one ‘may’ choose, according to one’s free disposition, on the other hand. The common good is a sphere of distinct political-moral ‘oughts’, a sphere governed by the non-formalized guidelines of moral duty, civic virtue, fair consideration of interests, and behavior that is responsible, reasonable and carefully considered.

Now in modern societies the chances of consensus are quite limited when it comes to specifying what we neither ‘may’ freely do nor clearly ‘must’ do, but rather ‘ought’ to do. As usual, when the clear specification of ‘right’ conduct does not readily succeed, we place a premium on negative specifications. We do not know (or we at least do not agree about) what ‘right’ conduct is; but its opposite, ‘wrong’ conduct, is comparatively easier to specify and condemn. The blurred boundaries of the idea of the common good also find expression in the phrases in which that idea is typically clad. Whereas one ‘complies with’ or ‘obeys’ legal duties and commands and ‘exercises’ one’s rights – in both cases with objectively measurable effects open to assessment by the judiciary – the common good is something one ‘serves’ or ‘ought’ to serve. Here the category of service describes not only a result but also the attitude of the agent who brings about that result. Those who only do what they ‘must’ can harm the common good, just as those who do everything they ‘may’ do, thus everything that is not forbidden by legal regulations. The administration of justice is responsible for sanctioning what is forbidden and specifying obligatory conduct. By contrast, the specification of what satisfies or harms the common good rests on the authority of non-formalized ad hoc judgments of concerned parties and observers – and also on the educational endeavors of families, schools, the media, and other social mechanisms that shape norms. The forms of speech in which such judgments are expressed comprise disapproval and censure on the one hand, and on the other, respect and honorable recognition of conduct in conformity with the common good.

In all these uses of the idea of the common good we can see some typical reservations about positive rights as a source of rules that can order social life definitively and seamlessly. The criterion of the common good serves to mark out, within the universe of formally permitted conduct, a smaller universe of conduct that conforms to the common good and therefore merits approval; the remainder, though legally permitted, falls under the verdict of irresponsible, thoughtless self-centeredness, or the like. The idea of the common good, then, if it is thoroughly robust and vigorously deployed in political life, allows one to turn the trick of morally discrediting conduct that is entirely permissible from a legal standpoint. Therein lies an illiberal paternalistic temptation for those in charge of common-good criteria. In extreme cases, common-good arguments can be used by political elites (perhaps by trading on populist acclamation) as a vehicle for repealing established rights at a formal level, precisely by referring to an alleged ‘abuse’ of certain rights by certain groups. Similarly, reference to the common good can serve to expand the scope of positive legal duties. For good reason, therefore, talk of the exploitability of the common good for spreading resentment and discrimination – i.e. the ‘danger of improper uses’ inherent in that idea – constitutes an important topos in the relevant legal and political discussions. Those who brandish the ‘common good’ must be armed against the suspicion of misusing the power of political definitions merely for their own advantage, or for a practice of terror and (racist) discrimination posing as virtue.

Those who talk of the common good engage a third standard to which one’s own conduct and that of strangers must measure up, besides the categories of legal correctness and the strategic or instrumental rationality of publicly relevant actions. In this context, the common-good motif is not the only norm by which further criteria are added to the universe of formally justified or instrumentally effective conduct. Norms and precepts such as altruism, respect, assistance, care, or solidarity fulfill a similar function. But these differ from common-good criteria insofar as they always posit a concrete interaction-partner as the intended target of the positive consequences of conduct. For example, when a landlord forgoes a (legally permissible) increase in rent because the tenant would otherwise have to move, or when someone of high income and favorable actuarial risk nonetheless forgoes a (legally permissible) switch to a financially more favorable insurance policy in the system of public health insurance, then these altruistic or solidaristic actions are to the benefit of concrete persons or social classes (the tenant, the group insured by a policy). With the common good this social reference is diffuse, or at least less clearly demarcated. Compliance with these norms is to the benefit of the (political) community or the general public.

But who is that? One must ask which community is actually imagined as the beneficiary of the common-good-oriented conduct of its members: the local, the professional, the national, the European, etc. – or humanity as a whole? This question of the social referent of the common good designates one of the four problems that burden the idea. A second problem is indicated by the question concerning the temporal scope, that is, the planning horizon to which conduct should be oriented. The third problem arises when we ask about the substantive features, thus the goods and values that are supposed to be attained or realized through conduct oriented toward the common good. Fourth and finally, the question arises about which actors and procedures are supposed to be part of binding answers to these three thorny questions. I would like to offer some reflections on each of these four questions – and the difficulties we run into when we attempt to answer them.

The Social Referent of the Idea of the Common Good

Which totality is the community whose good is supposed to be served? Who belongs among the beneficiaries? References to the common good can play a role in meaningful sentences and valid critical stances only if the relevant totality is specified or can be non-contentiously presupposed in its social or territorial extent. Everything from families or households to global society or ‘humanity’ comes under consideration. ¹⁸ If in answering this question we may take for granted neither a Christian-theological nor a republican-national (or even an ethnic-national) framework, as though these were somehow obvious, then the boundaries of the respective social groups whose good is at issue become hazy. Or else those boundaries issue from a successful exercise of the power to impose a particular definition, which then provokes suspicion of being just such a result of deliberate imposition.

Only a doctrinal theological position escapes the extraordinary difficulties of definition and the dangers of misusing the idea of the common good. Within the space of a theological mode of thought, the recipients of the common good are human beings in general (as children of God). The temporal reference, at the individual level, is the single human life with its existential orientation toward salvation; at the collective level, the continuation of divine creation. And the substantive referent, as described by the papal encyclicals, is the ‘sum total of social conditions which allow people … to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily’ (1965: Gaudium et Spes, encyclical no. 26 ¹⁹ ).

The problem of contingency that persists everywhere but in theological contexts finds at best a provisional solution in cases of enduring national or local communities whose members have the wherewithal to dispense with the need to justify (or even to notice) the negative external effects that eventually arise from their practice of the common good. ²⁰ This idea of the common good, focused on the internal affairs of the nation-state or subnational regions, becomes blurred and contestable, however, to the extent that (1) there are affected persons outside the community who can complain about the negative external effects, or (2) the internal differentiation of members of a polity, and hence the plurality of value-orientations, grows to the point that it becomes all but impossible to reach even a somewhat instructive consensus over the operative content of the common good. Both of these together – internal differentiation and external accountability – constitute the ‘post-national’ constellation.

Questions about subsidies for agricultural producers can serve as an example of this two-sided problem. National or European farm subsidies are justified and demanded in the name of a self-sufficient food supply, and also with reference to the (seasonally, geographically, etc.) limited adaptive capacities of agricultural producers. In the meantime, with the progressive differentiation of social structures, the economic concerns of producers no longer have a hold on urban consumers of agricultural products as (potentially) their own concerns; today the fear that someone would have to go hungry, or that a nation would become subject to blackmail because ‘foreign lands’ would refuse to supply grain, is somewhat ludicrous. On the other hand, with modern communications media, it can escape neither the notice nor the moral sensibility of domestic observers that a policy of internal subsidies can unleash external harms – namely harms borne by external suppliers who are hindered by internal farm subsidies from entering internal markets, and who are driven from the market by (in their view) unfair practices (e.g. Argentine meat producers who were kept out of European markets by EU tariffs). Taken together, these two effects – social-structural differentiation and external responsibility – bring it about that a policy of structure-preserving agricultural subsidies now appears, not to serve the common good (for which the corresponding sacrifice of consumers and taxpayers is rightly to be expected), but as nothing more than a narrow-minded dispensing of national and class advantages.

If the national frame of reference is one we can no longer take for granted, then any collectively shared form of life, mode of living, or ‘identity’ of whatever sort – familial, ethnic, religious, political, sexual, generational, subcultural, linguistic, regional, even professional – can set itself up as an obligatory community. ²¹ If the champions of such arrogations of identity succeed in their aims, then as a rule that will have external effects, some of them negative, for other communities. For those who justify their conduct by referring to the common welfare of a particular entity, it might be a matter of indifference whether or not the welfare they promote for the members of that community implies, at the same time, (relative) damage to persons who do not belong to that community.

The engaged, and possibly self-sacrificing, service of members of one particular community can, therefore, give other communities reason to regard that service with suspicion, as dangerous for the community, or at least as a group-centered egoism and discriminatory. For every community that makes a claim on the collectivity-mindedness [Gemeinsinn] of its members and sets forth the corresponding duties as norms, there is a larger, more encompassing community, whose remaining members can then see themselves placed at the (at least relative) disadvantage of being excluded from the good of the smaller community. Thus, in the social-political debates in the United States one often hears the ‘Tocquevillian’ argument against establishing day-care centers, because they would discourage and undermine efforts for the common good that flow from the self-help initiatives of neighborhoods, ethnic groups and religious communities. To be sure, on account of their internal heterogeneity, ‘large’ communities cannot support as many obligations toward the common good as smaller communities can. The readiness to take part in associative activities and to acknowledge informal duties is greater in local groups than at the national or supra-national level. The responsive awareness of common identity and history strengthens an orientation to the common good and the recognition of corresponding duties to insiders, but it limits those attitudes toward outsiders.

Three kinds of remedies are recommended today for this problem, which results from the structural ambiguity of the social referents of common-good obligations: one is multicultural, a second is human-rights based, and a third involves plural or ‘gradated’ identities. As a social ethic, multiculturalism aims at the coexistence of equally entitled cultural memberships and their result, namely the internal duties and mutual external recognition of ethnic and religious communities. As a social reality, multiculturalism is limited to the urban centers of a few societies characterized by high levels of immigration, like Toronto and Sydney. Because everyone in these places is descended from citizens who voluntarily immigrated, no group has superior and older rights than any other group. (To be sure, as de Tocqueville clearly saw, that excludes not only the native population that was always in the country and thus did not immigrate, but also those who, or whose ancestors, did not enter the country voluntarily but as slaves.) The human rights solution is radically inclusive and universalistic. It has the disadvantage that neither individual citizens nor the states that represent them (which lack the institutions and resources for a ‘global domestic policy’) can actually meet the obligation this solution entails – to serve a common good that encompasses humanity – which thus remains largely nominal. Moreover, the validity and content of ‘the’ human rights are subject to diverse relativizing interpretations, as is also the case for the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights itself, which was inspired by Jacques Maritain’s ‘integral Christian humanism’. There remains, thirdly, the ‘European’ model of multi-level obligations to the common good. According to that model, commitments to the common good at the regional, national and European levels (among others) must be reconciled. Here a widely recognized problem lies in the decreasing intensity and binding force of obligations as one moves to respectively higher, more encompassing levels.

Problems of the Temporal Horizon of Action

Collectively relevant actions of elites and non-elites must be justified as serving the common good, not only from a cross-sectional social perspective but also from a longitudinal temporal perspective. If we look for values by which the idea of the common good could be rendered concrete and open to consensus, then what we find are such goals as international peace, social justice (understood as poverty-prevention along with ‘full employment’), public health and ecological sustainability. Let us take ‘sustainability’ as an example that can clarify the temporal structure of the common good. Three temporal relations characterize that structure, which one can set forth grammatically as present, future and second future.

Achieving a goal requires a persistent effort directed toward the future: the condition for which one strives is not immediately achievable, there is a stretch of time involving ‘provision for the future’, which one must traverse before the investment of effort yields ‘returns’ in the form of improvements in the general conditions of social life.

Now the efforts that are brought to bear in providing for the future in liberal democracies are constrained by various circumstances, as is well known. Periodic general elections make it politically costly to demand of voters sacrifice and efforts that might only begin to yield returns in the election period after next. In addition, present compromises can often be achieved only at the price of burdening future actors (e.g. as in the case of the the public dept incurred for purposes of present consumption). To that extent, the logic of the political process tends to discount the future (if not positively to exploit it), to underestimate the time that remains to plan for and shape the future, and to miss the right moment [kairós] for taking action. The uncertainty of future developments, which can be reliably ascertained using methods of projection and trend analysis only in a few areas, provides an excuse for discounting the future. The restrictions on action that stem from the past offer another occasion for excuse: the need to balance the budget, for example, sets limits on ‘provision for the future’. Moreover, issues of the distant future (e.g. social security) are generally not decisive for elections in an aging society, where by definition younger members interested in relatively distant problems are a minority. (Or if the future is such a topic, then it is only with an eye to safeguarding the funds available for current and prospective retirees.) Finally, in view of the inexorable long-term effects of facts that are already definite today – regarding demographics, developments in the environment and climate, scientific and technological innovations – we know it is already ‘too late’ in any case for any future-oriented initiative. On the other hand, however, insight into the growing long-term effects of today’s actions (genetic technology) or omissions (climate protection) can also motivate a willingness to recognize trans-temporal obligations to the common good that bind over the long haul – even when present-day efforts, sacrifice and contributions for the future common good must mature over a period of time that in some cases extends well beyond the lifetime of the actors.

A special difficulty confronting future-oriented attempts to promote the common good results when (as liberal economic theory and politics would have it) one must reckon with the fact that the price of the community’s future welfare is the blatantly one-sided promotion of today’s interests – precisely because it lies in the social power of these interested parties to decide on the future weal and woe of the community. This brings to mind the American slogan: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for the United States!’ To be sure, that is no rule for justifying policy, for the simple reason that it is fundamentally unknown, and thus contestable, how much partiality toward ‘today’ (e.g. regressive redistribution of investment stimuli) will bring about a greater common good ‘tomorrow’ (e.g. additional jobs).

Nevertheless, in my opinion it is instructive and symptomatic that an entire series of proposals for reforming liberal-democratic institutions converge today on the idea of freeing up national politics a bit from the chains of short-term thinking in important domains and transferring authority to institutional actors that do not need to worry about maintaining power and office. There exists a range of institutional bodies that are deemed capable of detaching themselves, in the interest of the future common good and its timely consideration, from the constraining dynamics and blinders of party competition and periodic elections. These include not only the Federal Constitutional Court, the German Federal Bank, the European Commission, and diverse, relatively new regulatory and supervisory bodies for privatized systems ²² (postal services, telecommunications, railroads, electrical grids), but also ad hoc advisory bodies, assemblies and expert committees that have advice-giving and decision-making functions, and a portion of whose members enjoy extremely lengthy, possibly even lifetime tenures (e.g. the United States Supreme Court). ²³

The common good designates a condition that not only continues to exist in the future, but also one whose results are appreciated retrospectively in a second future, thus from the perspective of descendants, as a valuable collective inheritance. As the young Max Weber explained in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895, the highest standard for justifying political action lies in this point of view, from which we are acknowledged by our followers (or by an imagined future self) as worthy predecessors. That is the same criterion that Alexis de Tocqueville applied to the micro-level with his famous formulation of ‘enlightened’ interests – interests about which we can make the judgment, looking back from the future and knowing the outcome, that we were right to pursue them. In both cases we have a secularized version of the Last Judgment, whose anticipation helps us in the present to change our conduct in ways that save us from future regrets. Anticipating the results and assessments of future historical research (whose findings, of course, they cannot know), leading politicians not infrequently like to boast of their ‘page in the book of history’. With this elitist rhetorical figure, they play off the temporal dimension against the social dimension and reject the criticism of contemporaries: knowledge of what constitutes the common good is known only in retrospect by a world to come, not by today’s world of their contemporaries, whose opinions and talk may therefore be ignored.

Ex ante it is unknown not only how posterity will issue its verdict; it is not even known whether posterity ex post will still judge according to the same standards and value categories that guide the conduct of today’s actors. Thus even if the latter have attained their goals, this success might remain unappreciated because the assessments have changed. There is one classical way out of this double uncertainty – the nation. That was still true, in any case, for Max Weber: the only thing we can know about the thinking and values of our descendants results from the fact that we belong to the same nation. Thus our descendants above all will be ready to appreciate contributions to the continuation and unity, greatness and welfare of the nation as such.

This emphasis on the role of the nation results from the circumstance that the nation (next to the family and institutionalized religions) counts as the only social entity whose members can link with a ‘fiction of eternity’, not only retrospectively, but above all prospectively. Because membership in nation-states (in contrast to civil-legal associations) and families (in contrast to marriages) is normally acquired not by decision or contract but through ‘birth’, such memberships are not grounded contractually and thus cannot be dissolved contractually. Consequently, for their members they are not ‘terminable’. This motif of a national certitude of continuity can also be deployed as an ultimate justification for duties to the common good. With this idea in hand, one grounds the model of ‘serial reciprocity’ for conduct and obligation: what past generations have done for ‘me’, so I am bound to do for the next generation as a whole or for the individual members. In this sense, I satisfy an obligation of making a contribution toward the ongoing existence of a super-individual, inter-temporal social context.

Today there is something bizarre about equating the common good with the continued existence of nation-states. However, this equation also reveals something about the opposite move, namely how difficult it is to detach the idea of the common good, in both its social and temporal dimensions, from the trappings of a national community of goods and values. Duties to the common good must be grounded from now on in the fact that they are evident duties toward ‘everyone’, and not in the fact that we owe them to our children’s children in anticipated exchange for their appreciative remembrance. Clinging to the national garb of common-good duties is bizarre, and not only because one would categorically exclude criteria of a supra-national common good. The national model is also abstruse, because the experience of transnational migration and mobility, the experience of new constitutions and of collapse, of supra-national integration, of the fusion as well as secession of states, of federal and regional national alignments, and the like, have irreversibly stripped ‘the’ nation and its persistence of the status as a perennial, and thus obliging, common good. But substitute mechanisms for generating long-term obligations to the common good are not easily identified.

The Substantive Components of the Common Good

In the substantive or ‘material’ dimension (as Niklas Luhmann would have put it), the further question arises about which metric should be used to calculate and pay out the common good, that is, the outcome that results when all citizens satisfy their obligations to the common good. Prosperity and full employment, education and health, internal and international peace, social, military and civil security, restraint in the use of natural resources – all of these are formulations of goals, in terms of which particular government agencies describe their contributions to the common good and citizens seek to engage in service of such goals. But there exists neither a hierarchy nor a common metric by which metric one another. At best, one might succeed at that task through recourse to the moral-political category of justice. But even with that idea, it turns out that at least three interpretations of justice partially conflict with each other, ²⁴ in particular when one no longer limits justice criteria to the nation-state framework (in light of the compelling considerations in the last section). At issue are the following: political justice, thus the guarantee of basic liberty rights and popular sovereignty, the idea that all those subject to the law should take part as equals in the process of law-making; social justice, the guarantee of social security and a share in societal wealth; and economic justice, whose precepts rule out conditions in which a society or part of a society fails to realize its attainable level of affluence because of the idleness or inefficient deployment of its resources. ²⁵ Perhaps the best approximation of an instructive specification that gives real content to the common good consists in this: that we seek such a good inside the magic triangle of these three types of justice. Even when we do so, more than enough remains open to contestation and requires decision.

The Social Location of Competence to make Judgments about the Common Good

This leads me to my final question: from which social location, that is, from what kind of persons, should we expect such carefully weighed assessments, understood as political achievements that rest on complex justifications? For Alexis de Tocqueville, the citizens of local communities played that role. Well versed in the art of joining together in associations (‘l’art de l’association’), such citizens had learned to make public affairs their own concern. De Tocqueville’s pleasing picture, painted from a mix of aristocratic and republican colors, turns into a darker shade with Max Weber: for the latter, competent citizens who are ready to take responsibility for the common good remain the exception, found at the top levels of large organizations, where they prove their worth as virtuosi of an ethics of responsibility, exercised in the loneliness of executive decision-making; the ‘iron cages’ of modern professional life have deformed all the other participants in the political process. The supposition of an elite competence for realizing the common good is also evident in constitutional documents, such as the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. ²⁶ There we read that mandated officials and office-holders have to judge when and in which matters ‘legal coercion is permissible … in the service of superseding demands of public welfare’ (article 151); but also non-elites, more specifically ‘every German is obliged to invest his intellectual and physical energies in such a way as necessary for public benefit’ (article 163); and the use that property-holders make of their property ‘shall simultaneously be of service for the common best’ (article 153). But even with these norms – should we not read them as mere declamation – it remains the charge of those who hold public office to pass judgment on their fulfillment or violation, or to see to their fulfillment themselves (as it states in article 87e of the Basic Law, according to which the federal government has the duty of taking the ‘welfare of the whole’ into account in regulating the railroad system).

Today we no longer even pose the question of competence for the common good and its social location. Thus the semantics of elitist ideas in the social sciences has also been purged of all positive connotations. Instead of elites, one prefers to speak – in both journalism and political science – of the ‘political classes’. ²⁷ Why should we have higher expectations of their competence for the common good than we do for the average citizen? It is symptomatic that political scientists around the world spend considerable mental effort today on the question of whether and how one can distinguish genuine public leadership from opportunism, mere opportunism from corruption, and mere corruption from exploitation of office for the personal acquisition of wealth. ²⁸ The old question of political theory, ‘In whose hands is the general good best kept?’, seems to have lost its point, and for good reason. In a democracy, where authorization to rule rests on electoral success, and electoral success on the votes of politically equal citizens, normative reasons categorically prohibit the attempt to distinguish between greater and lesser competence for making judgments relevant for the common good. Exaggerating a bit (and disregarding the logical traps), we would not get beyond the libertarian thesis that it damages the common good to talk about the common good at all.

In light of the extraordinary difficulties that arise in applying operative common-good criteria (that are specified in their social, temporal, substantive and personal aspects), and in response to the danger of the detrimental consequences for liberty when pursuing the common good through religious or authoritarian political regimes, pluralist political theories have taken a strictly procedural approach to the idea of the common good. According to that approach, the general welfare is no more and no less than whatever the political process brings forth as a binding outcome by adhering to constitutional-democratic procedures. On this view, the common good is not the outcome of the action of citizens oriented to the common good, but rather what emerges as the well-known ‘resultant’ of the dynamic interplay of economic, social, political and ideological forces and contextual conditions that actually play a role in the public life of a society. ²⁹ The rules of the game in a pluralist democracy, in other words, and not citizens who are motivated by republican virtue and judicious insight, are what bring forth the common good as a quantity that is never finalized, but always remains provisional, pending the outcome of the next election. ‘Constitutional democracy as a codified framework is thus itself the essential content of realizing the common good.’ ³⁰

Such self-assured trust in process has become rare among today’s pluralists. For one, ‘normal’ process-guided politics often yield outcomes whose quality does not match the idea of the common good, in the sense explicated above: namely, a common good requiring that political outcomes (1) benefit all members of the political community (however it might be conceived), (2) can later be assessed in retrospect as ‘right’ (and not rather as regrettable), and (3) bring about, from a substantive perspective, an equal consideration of values and interests. The empirical and normative literature on failed states, political obstruction and the shutting-down of political regulatory capacities at the national and European levels vividly illustrates how precarious the connection has become between ‘normal’ politics guided by institutional procedures, on the one hand, and results that can be represented as serving the common good, on the other.

With the recent turn to common-good talk in politics, this confidence in an automatic procedure for realizing the common good has come to an end. The fear is that the procedures might not be ‘good enough’ for reliably producing good outcomes. That concern can express the desire of leading politicians: to rise above procedures that provide countless opportunities for vetoes and obstruction and criticize them ‘from above’, as it were, in order better to serve the common good. Similarly, there are increasingly vocal and widespread efforts today to free fundamental political decisions from the closed circle of party competition and hand them over, at least for preliminary consideration, to committees and networks that function according to criteria of trust, reputation, personal responsibility and professional merit.

However, the procedures – party competition and party discipline, federalism, functional representation in associations and unions, media coverage of the political process, etc. – can also be criticized ‘from below’. To clarify this point, I would like to draw on a distinction proposed by Philippe Schmitter. ³¹ He maintains that what he calls (for this very reason) the ‘post-liberal’ democracies of the OECD world are, contrary to civics primers, by no means governed by the majority of equally entitled citizens. They are governed, rather, by two classes of citizens, the corporate actors and organized social groups (the ‘secondary citizens’) on the one hand, and citizens as natural persons (the ‘primary citizens’) on the other hand. The one group controls the themes, options, information, personnel and alternatives; the other reacts with its votes, support and decisions about whom to join. Secondary citizens thereby rob primary citizens of their political competence and capacity for judgment, reducing them to the status of clients and onlookers; primary citizens react to this with the well-known symptoms of apathy, cynicism, feelings of powerlessness and alienation. ³² Each of these two categories of citizens controls indispensable capacities that are not available to the other class. Corporate actors are specialized for functions of aggregation, integration and representation, as well as the selection of elites, whereas the primary citizens or ‘citoyens’ have access to everyday experience (in contrast to organizational archives), their own conscience (in contrast to a strategic position) and ‘social capital’ (in contrast to a body of functionaries) – a social capital from which secondary citizens draw their energy without being able to produce it themselves. If the leaders of ‘secondary citizens’, that is, of large organizations like political parties and associations, deliberately forgo an interest-oriented, strategic mode of action, then they may well be guilty of violating fiduciary obligations to their respective constituencies. When primary citizens forgo such action, they are at least acting expressively, and in the most favorable case they are even acting for the common good; paradoxically, that sort of action is made easier for them by the fact that they make decisions behind a ‘veil of insignificance’: given the certainty that their own vote will not in any case decide an election, they can look beyond a self-interested point of view without danger. ³³

Secondary and primary citizens confront each other as powerful organized interests and unorganized public. But primary citizens react to the strategic action of secondary citizens not only with apathetic non-involvement, but also with attempts at reappropriating their competence for political judgment and potential for action, of which secondary citizens have deprived them. They do so in the form of social and political movements, networks, NGOs and self-help initiatives, in foundations and voluntary activities. If nowhere else, then in such phenomena of weakly organized micro-politics we find the social contexts in which the idea of the common good cannot be a category mistake.

Translated by William Rehg