In Defense of the Old Republic: Reclaiming the Common Good
Lessons from Classical Political Philosophy
In order to solve the problem of political unity it is useful to consider four foundational theses of classical political philosophy: (1) man is naturally political; (2) political community is effective because of its unity; (3) the primacy of the common good is the cause of political unity; (4) the primacy of the common good is rational and just.
Briefly, it is evident from experience that man is naturally inclined to form political communities, for wherever possible he does so. This is so because he depends upon political community in order to flourish. Individuals and limited particular communities, like families, contribute to human flourishing in innumerable ways. However, neither individuals nor particular communities are sufficient to secure the resources and services required for human flourishing, and this is especially true with respect to security, stability, peace, and justice. Accordingly, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive form of community and cooperation that is sufficient for human flourishing: namely, political community. Comprehensive political community is effective because it unites many individuals and particular communities into one integrated whole under law. This kind of integration coordinates and concentrates resources, creates opportunities for the division of labor, fosters stable and prosperous markets for exchange, etc. These advantages give the political community the wherewithal to establish and preserve security, stability, peace, and justice. Understood in this way, political community is a powerful and even necessary means for human advancement.
Finally, it is important to recognize that the primacy of the common good is not only necessary for political unity; it is also just and reasonable. According to Thomas Aquinas, the individual good is subordinate because every individual is compared to the political community as an imperfect part to a complete whole. It follows that the common good of the political whole is preferable, for (a) the imperfect is subordinate to the perfect and (b) the common good of the whole is a greater good than the individual good of the part. This abstract reasoning is confirmed by experience, for although political communities always suffer from various deficiencies, the peace, prosperity, order, and justice of well-ordered political life is among the greatest blessings of mankind. Accordingly, individuals and particular communities owe service to the common good.
In Search of the Common Good
If the basic elements of traditional political wisdom are correct, then the solution to the problem of political unity is obvious. Political unity is based on a shared vision of the goal and purpose of society; there must be some common account of the common good. Matters that fall outside of the common good serve to diversify, but as long as they are subordinate and non-subversive they are tolerable and in many cases even necessary and good, but must be left out of the legal system. So the question for any society, including our own, is this: “What is our common good? What is the common understanding of just temporal welfare that unites us with one another?” However much we may recoil from this assertion today, the fact remains that the problem of unity is solved only by answering the question of the common good.
There are reasons to think that the Christian ethos has been replaced by a postmodern egalitarian ethos—postmodern because of its antipathy to essences and objective values, and egalitarian because of its commitment to equality. In an interesting way, we are witnessing the translation of utilitarianism into a postmodern paradigm. Whereas the old utilitarianism maximized satisfaction qualitatively and quantitatively, the new insists that all desires and satisfactions are equal and therefore it enjoins the maximal equal satisfaction of pleasures—from coddling the indolent to endorsing any form of sexual gratification. Perhaps, then, the aggressive expansion of equality and the gradual elimination of differentiation serve as our new common good. Everything is equal. At the level of public rhetoric and popular attitudes, the egalitarian ethos has become the dominant social and ethical paradigm. Egalitarianism, however, cannot serve as a real common good, for it is simply an aggregate of individual goods—personal satisfactions — increasingly enforced by law. What we really have is a collection of individual goods favored by the majority—sexual pleasure, consumption, wealth, prestige, and power—increasingly entrenched and protected by legal coercion and imposed upon dissenting parties.
For a Return to Limited Government
It must be conceded that America is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy because of its abandonment of any coherent notion of the common good. We must recognize that the United States government is no longer the protector of the common good. Rather it is a coercive mechanism engineered to advance the individual good of factions in power at the expense of minority factions, and it cannot be otherwise until we rediscover a shared vision of the common good. This is not an idealistic condemnation, but a sober-minded judgment. No political community is perfect, but America (and other countries of advanced modernity) through its deep pluralism, its prioritization of the individual good, and egalitarianism has subverted the very possibility of reaching a shared account of the common good. It is not a matter of this or that corruption, but of a wholesale rejection of the very cause of political unity. And it is no defense to point out America’s democratic institutions, for a democracy that pursues the individual good of the majority is just as tyrannous as a monarchy that pursues the individual good of one.
However, it should be apparent that one way of resolving the American problem of the common good is to rediscover the original American combination of a thin, classically liberal political order, with a thick, shared social ethos. In other words, we need to rediscover and rearticulate some version of the original common good of America. I do not think in the short term that we will see a revival of Christian ethos, and America is too spiritually divided and too secular to reclaim piety as its common good. Nevertheless, perhaps both religious conservatives and progressive secularists can agree on a very thin, classically-liberal notion of justice and the common good.
Life, liberty, and property are individual goods, but justice is a common good. Justice is defined by Thomas Aquinas as the habit of conforming to that which is due to another. As such, justice is always about interactions and relationships. It follows that justice to one degree or another involves a network of social relations. This is important because it reflects the fact that justice always operates within a communal context. Justice is something that we do together; it requires the cooperation of diverse powers; it is something accomplished as the common end of a complex and comprehensive social whole.
However, more positively, the return to more modest political aspirations may yield very positive results. On this model, expansive government and strong political unity is to be replaced by personal responsibility and non-coercive particular communities. Replacing deep political unity with personal prudence and small-scale social unity and transferring most of elements common good to the lower level at least holds out the hope of rediscovering small, authentic, coexisting communities that need not compete for power over one another. To this end, we need to pull back radically from the expansion of government that has been at work in American politics since the Progressive era in order to decrease factionalism and to make more room for personal responsibility and particular communities. And there is a clear practical path for bringing this about. At the personal and psychological level we must renounce our deep desire to use government coercion to bring about desired results. Without a very robust account of the common good this becomes mere tyranny. At the legislative and political level every reasonable effort should be made to decrease the size of government, decrease government legislation, decrease the size of the military, decrease foreign military interventions, decrease judicial oversight, decrease taxation, decrease corporate handouts, decrease social spending, and decentralize authority. In our circumstances, the only alternative to the very limited government of the Old Republic is a never-ending competition by diverse factions to control government for the sake of advancing private interests, which will do nothing but rend the body politic and entrench the tyranny of the temporarily powerful.
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The simple fact is America needs to confront – and defeat – left wing evil. They are NOT about equality, but rather hostility to God and religious based values. That is why the two most powerful interest groups in the Democrat Party are the pro-abortion movement and the militant gay “Rights” movement. Both make a mockery of Judeo-Christian morality.