Common Goods and Political Reasoning

 

Proposal for a research project to be sponsored by Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University

 

My aim is to complete what has been an ongoing project concerned with Aquinas’s conception of the common good of political societies, as he developed it from Aristotle’s account of the good of political community, and with whether and in what ways this conception might find application in the politics of modern societies. A major aim of the study is to identify the different types and styles of political reasoning that are at home in contemporary politics in advanced societies and to compare them with the type and style of reasoning which is needed, if one is to identify and achieve the common goods of political societies. The study will fall into four parts.

1. The concept and theory of the common good:

(a) in Aristotle’s texts;

(b) in Aquinas’s developed account, both of common goods in general and of the common goods of political societies and of households;

(c) in Jacques Maritain’s twentieth century reformulation of the theory in The Person and the Common Good and its background in the writings of Péguy, Maurras and Mounier;

(d) in the Thomistic critique of such views as Maritain’s in Charles DeKoninck’s The Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists;

(e) critiques and rejections of the concept of the common good,

(i) From individualist standpoints, (ii) from Marxist standpoints;

(f) political specifications of the common good (i) by distributists, (ii) by Charles DeGaulle.

2. The institutions of the modern state described and analyzed with a view to asking how far appeals to the common good, understood in Thomistic terms, might find a place in the politics of that type of state, especially in their contemporary politics:

(a) The foundation of modern states as secular, sovereign, allowing no appeal beyond their own highest courts, claiming a monopoly on the use of force, having the authority to conscript their populations for the purposes of war, self-defining as to the powers that they exercise;

(b) The liberalization and democratization of modern states from 1789 to the Norwegian Power and Democracy Project (1998-2003);

(c) The continuing extension of the powers of the modern state (the provision of welfare, education, etc.) and the partial integration of political and economic institutions;

(d) The changing distributions of power and influence in modern states and political parties and the functioning of political, economic, media and professional elites.

A major source for thinking about these topics will be the political philosophy of Pierre Manent.

3. If the work in part 1 has been adequately done, it will now be possible to ask what kind of political reasoning is involved in appeals to the common good and what the institutional and other prerequisites are for such reasoning to occur and to issue in effective conclusions. The kind of reasoning identified will be a type of practical reasoning, understood as Aristotle and Aquinas understood it.

If the work in part 2 has been adequately done, it will now be possible to ask what kinds of political reasoning are at home in the politics of the modern state and their relationship to the institutional and other settings in which that reasoning occurs and issues in effective conclusions. The types of reasoning to be identified include that characterized by rational decision theory in its application to bargaining situations, that which supports conclusions about how this or that may be maximized (or satisficed), including happiness, preference-satisfaction, the size of the GDP, and national security, and that which involves arguing from premises about rights.

4. It will be argued – here, on the basis of work done on this project so far, I anticipate my conclusions – that the institutional prerequisites for effective political reasoning aimed at achieving the common good of political societies are not just different from, but incompatible with the institutional structures of the modern state and of the advanced economies with which the activities of the modern state are increasingly integrated.

The outcome hoped for and expected will be the writing of a book, provisionally entitled ‘The Politics of the Common Good In and Against the Politics of the Modern State’. It is expected that the research and writing will take three years.

Alasdair MacIntyre