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On 19th March Paul Bickley spoke to the Contemporary Aristotelian Studies Group of the Political Studies Association about the common good. His paper is reproduced here. 

New Wine in Old Skins: Is the ‘common good’ a meaningful political objective?

In the wake of the Government’s recent defeat over the liberalisation of Sunday trading Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of the Mission and Public Affairs Division of the Church of England, was interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 evening news programme, The World Tonight. Asked to react to the Government’s defeat, his framing of response was worthy of note. In a two and a half minute edited piece, he deployed the phrase ‘common good’ three times.

Our argument has never been about religiosity, as you put it. Our argument has been about the common good and what it takes to make a good community… [We shouldn’t be] playing off individual freedom and the damage it can do to the common good… I think it’s really encouraging that Parliament today has shown that it can argue about the common good, and not just trying to say “freedom for individuals, regardless of the social effects”.[1]

 While the idea has a rich philosophical and theological heritage, from Aristotle and Augustine through Aquinas, Machiavelli and Rousseau, to LT Hobhouse, TH Green, John Rawls and Michael Sandel, it is hardly bread and butter of popular political discourse. Even well–informed Radio 4 listeners might be slightly confused.

To use a phrase such as the common good is to use a specific ‘term of art’ – a piece of philosophical jargon – in general public discourse. Counter–intuitively, the concept is cropping up more frequently in political discourse on both the left and the political right (no doubt this does not make for clarity). Here are three relatively recent examples:

1) In the wake of the Corbyn surge during the Labour leadership contest, Labour MPs from the centre and right of the party began to convene for policy seminars under the title of ‘Labour for the Common Good’. While the group has received considerable attention due to its alleged status as an anti–Corbyn platform, its esoteric moniker has escaped comment.

2) The 2015 Green Party Manifesto was given the title For the Common Good. In her forward to the manifesto, Natalie Bennett – Leader of the Green Party – writes “we believe that we can build a society that works for the common good – and that those with the broadest shoulders really should pay their fair share towards it.”[2]

3) In his 2010 Conservative Party conference speech, David Cameron spoke of the Big Society policy as “new ways of harnessing the common good” and “better alternatives to the oldfashioned state”. “The old way of doing things: the high–spending, all–controlling, heavy–handed state, those ideas were defeated. Statism lost… society won.”[3]

It hardly needs pointing out that we could infer very different political visions from these uses of the same phrase. This obliges us to ask exactly what work this phrase is doing in respective political discourses, how it should be interpreted, and whether it tells us anything significant about contemporary British politics?

Three points

I don’t have time to offer anything like a complete answer to those questions this morning. Instead, I will offer three preliminary and connected observations to frame a discussion of the questions which will highlight some of the limitations, but also some of the promise, of common good language.

First, we should not ‘read too much’ into these allusions to the common good.

It is tempting, for instance, to try and identify philosophical or even theological genealogies, even if these would find a variety of philosophical roots to contemporary uses, whether Catholic Social Teaching, the Aristotelean–Thomist influence of Alistair MacIntyre, or the British idealist tradition. There may be enough there to make an account of these connections plausible, but perhaps not enough to make such an account true.

For instance, we could point out that the association between Labour and the language of the common good isn’t entirely new – in 2012 the BBC’s Analysis programme featured the increasing influence of Catholic Social Teaching on the Labour Party under Ed Miliband. In CST, the concept of the common good, alongside subsidiarity and solidarity, is one of three fundamental principles.

However, summaries of ‘Labour for the Common Good’ discussions, published on the LabourList website, offer little to suggest that there is substantive reflection on the relationship between contemporary politics and the idea of the common good.[4] The goal of participants is a Labour government; the strategy is to develop electorally popular and pragmatic positions on key political issues – is Labour seen as anti–business, how should it position itself in regard to the European referendum, and so on. The nature of the discussion is therefore a tactical one about framing and electoral strategy.

Of course, all that’s simply to say that they’re politicians, and the most immediate concern of a politician is sadly not the philosophical authenticity of their language. You may recall that Tony Blair was once asked by Tony McWalter – who I think was a philosophy teacher by background – what philosophy underlay his policies. Mr Blair said, “The best example that I can give is the rebuilding of the national health service today under this Government—extra investment. For example, there is the appointment today of Sir Magdi Yacoub to head up the fellowship scheme that will allow internationally acclaimed surgeons and consultants from around the world to work in this country. I can assure the House and the country that that extra investment in our NHS will continue under this Government. Of course, it would be taken out by the Conservative party”.[5]

What then is the point of using language like the common good? I suggest that here it serves as rhetorical signalling – a little like the phrase ‘One Nation’. Politicians want to describe a politics that is in some way people–focused but free of too much ideological baggage. The ‘common good’ is a describer of tone and general direction of certain policies, rather than a criterion through which policies are discovered, known or adjudicated. Least of all, here, is it a description of the overall shape of political life – for where is the citizen in the conversation? Even if it were an attempt at a more ethically framed approach to politics, it lacks a participative and open element which I think is inherent in fuller articulations of the notion of the common good – more of this later.

This leads us to our second point.

Second, although many uses of the phrase ‘common good’ seem like place holders – shallow, or at least only allusive, and often contradictory – they are not necessarily cynical or completely meaningless.

Indeed, I want to suggest that they loosely share a meaning – even if not a very profound one. They gesture to a lost commonality in politics, though they do so at different levels. Let’s briefly, if this isn’t too chimerical, compare and contrast David Cameron’s use of the phrase with the Green Party’s.

For David Cameron, the idea of the common good helps him offer a critique of the state, but not from the perspective of individual freedom. Rather, the state has blunted common endeavour by absorbing money, power and responsibility and becoming the sole conduit for common action. The alternative is the Big Society initiative.

Three things could be said of the much derided and now largely forgotten Big Society – one, it was a memorable rhetorical motif; two, it was a flawed initiative because it lacked both a realistic policy strategy – it was a ‘what’ without a ‘how’; three, it was nevertheless a substantial vision, and steered away from the more austere individualism of Hayekian conservatism.

Again, I doubt that it was philosophically enriched, except perhaps retrospectively. The Conservative MP Jesse Norman – another philosopher – authored a book The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics. Cameron’s combination of the language of the common good and the Big Society also finds some resonance with the so–called Red Tory tradition. In his 2010 book, Red Tory: How Left and Right have Broken Britain and How we can Fix It, Philip Blond adopts a similar line of argument:

For a free society demands an account of the common good that is cultivated organically from within rather than imposed arbitrarily from without, and it is this that trumps both the extreme individualism and the statist authoritarianism of liberalism. Once the common good is restored as the associative expression of commonly shared moral and social belief, then the very first question to be asked is not ‘how do I protect myself from everybody else?’, nor ‘how do I ensure my own sensory happiness and cosy comfort?’, but rather ‘how do we look out for the needs of one another?’

How can this be said to share anything at all with the avowedly statist Green Party manifesto? It’s clear that, in the run up to the general election, the Green Party adopted the phrase as a counterpoint to government policies which they argued disadvantaged the poorest in society and exacerbated environmental challenges. Whereas the Big Society was an agenda about an overall political approach – a vision of the relationship between individuals, communities and the state – the common good for the Green Party captures a critique of the social effects of particular policies, said to disadvantage the many and the vulnerable as against a favoured elite.

This leads me to my third and final point.

When they use the language of the common good, politicians inadvertently do appeal to a language that has the opportunity to deepen and develop contemporary political discourse. Traditions like Catholic Social Teaching can be used to help surface and understand key tensions in political programmes.

As it happens, the difference between the Natalie Bennett’s and David Cameron’s uses of the phrase ‘common good’ broadly corresponds to two slightly different meanings of ‘common good’ in Catholic Social Teaching.

On one hand, in Gaudium et Spes – a document emerging from the Second Vatican Council – the common good is defined as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily”.[6] This seems to equate common good with what is known elsewhere in Catholic Social Teaching as ‘justice’ – which is usually taken to mean the minimum conditions for groups and individuals to flourish: access to basic rights, healthcare, education, and so on.[7] This ‘justice’ meaning roughly corresponds with the common good in the Green Party sense.

However, in Catholic Social Teaching the idea of the common good extends further than its basic justice sense. These basic conditions are necessary, but not sufficient, for the fulfilment of the common good, which are not only the goods achieved for the sake of the common, but by common endeavour: “the common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common’, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness”.[8]

In other words, realising the common good requires more attention to the how, rather than the what, of politics. In this second sense, it might be very receptive to an idea like the Big Society, providing the right conditions are met for wide participation (which would be a point contested by different political actors). It requires social participation beyond mere cooperation – the common good is like choral singing or a game of football. Without participation these things actually can’t exist. As has been observed, the common good – from the point of view of Catholic Social Teaching – is staked on a distinctive, though not unique, Christian anthropological claim, which is that human beings only find genuine fulfilment together, not just in the sense of fulfilling personal relationships, but in a participative public life all round.

Taken seriously, common good thinking and Catholic Social Teaching can be taken up as a robust form of political reasoning. For instance, the Big Society was not merely a beard for cuts, but cuts made it more difficult – people need secure material conditions from which to shape the common good, and that is the purpose of ensuring that they have secure material conditions.

Conclusion

In summary, common good language crops up not infrequently in political discourse. I have said that it should not be pressed too hard for philosophical coherence, nor is it easy to detect a philosophical genealogy. However, I do not say that it is empty rhetoric – rather, it is used to critique politics as missing a vital common dimension, though the blame is laid in different places. Finally, I have argued that the language is nonetheless useful in helping us think constructively and practically about political challenges and goods – it is not justice alone, but it can’t be less than that.

It requires substantially addressing how ordinary people can achieve a greater degree of agency in different forms of public life – not less, but certainly more, than politics as we have come to know it. It is surely no accident that some of those who have most convincingly advocated ‘common good’ politics have emerged not from the sphere of political theory, nor in fact from party politics, but from the practices of community organising. The common good is not something to be endlessly theorised, it has to be done.

In the Gospel of Mark (chapter 2), there is a parable which demonstrates the difficulty of mixing two different kinds of things – new wine can’t be stored in old wineskins. For me, something analogous is happening with language of the common good in contemporary British politics. If it seems ephemeral, it is because those that use it fail to combine political substance and political form, policy and citizenship, justice and participation.