What is the

common Good?

noam chomsky

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umans are social beings, and the kind of creature that a person becomes
depends crucially on the social, cultural and institutional circumstances
of his life.

We are therefore led to inquire into the social arrangements that are conducive
to people's rights and welfare, and to fulfilling their just aspirations - in brief, the
common good.
For perspective I'd like to invoke what seem to me virtual truisms. They relate to
an interesting category of ethical principles: those that are not only universal, in
that they are virtually always professed, but also doubly universal, in that at the
same time they are almost universally rejected in practice.
These range from very general principles, such as the truism that we should
apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others (if not harsher ones), to
more specific doctrines, such as a dedication to promoting democracy and
human rights, which is proclaimed almost universally, even by the worst monsters - though the actual record is grim, across the spectrum.
A good place to start is with John Stuart Mill's classic "On Liberty." Its epigraph
formulates "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded
in these pages directly converges: the absolute and essential importance of
human development in its richest diversity."
The words are quoted from Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of classical liberalism. It follows that institutions that constrain such development are illegitimate,
unless they can somehow justify themselves.
Concern for the common good should impel us to find ways to cultivate human
development in its richest diversity.
Adam Smith, another Enlightenment thinker with similar views, felt that it shouldn't be too difficult to institute humane policies. In his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" he observed that "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are
evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing
from it except the pleasure of seeing it."
Smith acknowledges the power of what he calls the "vile maxim of the masters
of mankind": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people." But the more benign "original passions of human nature" might compensate for that pathology.
Classical liberalism shipwrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but its humanistic

The capitalist jungle is full of predators, and we who have to selll our skills for a wage
are on the menu! In this situation, by ourselves we are very weak, but working together
in solidarity, pooling our admittedly limited resources, our knowledge and our many
other redeeming qualities, we can be strong.
That kind of strength can give us room to be proactive in terms of defending our capacity and indeed our right to control the conditious of our own lives as the basis of
our freedom both as individuals and members of society. It is not something that
comes without effort however and that is why we have to make the effort to organise.
Reclaimining greater control over the conditions of our lives is entirely possible and
we owe it to ourselves to make the effort to do so. While class society might constrict
us and push us to and fro and then try to buy us off with gadgets and various forms
of escapism, our true salvation and true hope for happiness, peace and freedom paradoxically lies in organising and fighting the class war pushed on us every day.
We owe it to ourselves to be organised, and Common Struggle provdes us with a great
way to organise in a way that respects our ability to decide the course of our own fate,
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Reviewing a variety of political systems, Aristotle concluded that this system was
the best - or perhaps the least bad - form of government. But he recognized a
flaw: The great mass of the poor could use their voting power to take the property
of the rich, which would be unfair.
Madison and Aristotle arrived at opposite solutions: Aristotle advised reducing
inequality, by what we would regard as welfare state measures. Madison felt that
the answer was to reduce democracy.
In his last years, Thomas Jefferson, the man who drafted the United States' Declaration of Independence, captured the essential nature of the conflict, which
has far from ended. Jefferson had serious concerns about the quality and fate
of the democratic experiment. He distinguished between "aristocrats and democrats."
The aristocrats are "those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all
powers from them into the hands of the higher classes."
The democrats, in contrast, "identify with the people, have confidence in them,
cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most
wise depository of the public interest."
Today the successors to Jefferson's "aristocrats" might argue about who should
play the guiding role: technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, or bankers
and corporate executives.
It is this political guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry, as Dewey put
it, "from a feudalistic to a democratic social order" based on workers' control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands
of others.
Like Karl Marx's Old Mole - "our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how
to work underground, then suddenly to emerge" - the libertarian tradition is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to peek through, sometimes
in surprising and unexpected ways, seeking to bring about what seems to me to
be a reasonable approximation to the common good.
This article is adapted from a Dewey Lecture by Noam Chomsky at Columbia University in New York on Dec. 6, 2013.

commitments and aspirations didn't die. Rudolf Rocker, a 20th-century anarchist

thinker and activist, reiterated similar ideas.
Rocker described what he calls "a definite trend in the historic development of
mankind" that strives for "the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and
social forces in life."
Rocker was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in anarcho-syndicalism
- in European terms, a variety of "libertarian socialism."
This brand of socialism, he held, doesn't depict "a fixed, self-enclosed social system" with a definite answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of
human life, but rather a trend in human development that strives to attain Enlightenment ideals.
So understood, anarchism is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist
thought and action that includes the practical achievements of revolutionary
Spain in 1936; reaches further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in
the American rust belt, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and many other countries,
most extensively in the Basque country in Spain; and encompasses the many
cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil
and human rights initiatives.
This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then
subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself.
If these structures can't meet that challenge, they should be dismantled - and,
anarchists believe, "refashioned from below," as commentator Nathan Schneider
observes.
In part this sounds like truism: Why should anyone defend illegitimate structures
and institutions? But truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And I think they provide
useful stepping stones to finding the common good.
For Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the
curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement."
It should be noted that the American brand of libertarianism differs sharply from
the libertarian tradition, accepting and indeed advocating the subordination of
3

working people to the masters of the economy, and the subjection of everyone
to the restrictive discipline and destructive features of markets.

acter of "an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative
labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community."

Anarchism is, famously, opposed to the state, while advocating "planned administration of things in the interest of the community," in Rocker's words; and beyond that, wide-ranging federations of self-governing communities and
workplaces.

No one took the American philosopher John Dewey to be an anarchist. But consider his ideas. He recognized that "Power today resides in control of the means
of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever
owns them rules the life of the country," even if democratic forms remain. Until
those institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain "the shadow
cast on society by big business," much as is seen today.

Today, anarchists dedicated to these goals often support state power to protect
people, society and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. That's no contradiction. People live and suffer and endure in the existing society. Available means should be used to safeguard and benefit them, even if a
long-term goal is to construct preferable alternatives.
In the Brazilian rural workers movement, they speak of "widening the floors of
the cage" - the cage of existing coercive institutions that can be widened by popular struggle - as has happened effectively over many years.
We can extend the image to think of the cage of state institutions as a protection
from the savage beasts roaming outside: the predatory, state-supported capitalist institutions dedicated in principle to private gain, power and domination, with
community and people's interest at most a footnote, revered in rhetoric but dismissed in practice as a matter of principle and even law.

These ideas lead very naturally to a vision of society based on workers' control
of productive institutions, as envisioned by 19th century thinkers, notably Karl
Marx but also - less familiar - John Stuart Mill.
Mill wrote, "The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected to predominate, is . the association of the labourers
themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they
carry on their operations, and working under managers electable and removable
by themselves."
The Founding Fathers of the United States were well aware of the hazards of
democracy. In the Constitutional Convention debates, the main framer, James
Madison, warned of these hazards.

Much of the most respected work in academic political science compares public
attitudes and government policy. In "Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America," the Princeton scholar Martin Gilens reveals
that the majority of the U.S. population is effectively disenfranchised.

Naturally taking England as his model, Madison observed that "In England, at
this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed
proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," undermining the right to property.

About 70 percent of the population, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale,
has no influence on policy, Gilens concludes. Moving up the scale, influence
slowly increases. At the very top are those who pretty much determine policy, by
means that aren't obscure. The resulting system is not democracy but plutocracy.

The basic problem that Madison foresaw in "framing a system which we wish to
last for ages" was to ensure that the actual rulers will be the wealthy minority so
as "to secure the rights of property agst. the danger from an equality & universality of suffrage, vesting compleat power over property in hands without a share
in it."

Or perhaps, a little more kindly, it's what legal scholar Conor Gearty calls "neodemocracy," a partner to neoliberalism - a system in which liberty is enjoyed by
the few, and security in its fullest sense is available only to the elite, but within
a system of more general formal rights.

Scholarship generally agrees with the Brown University scholar Gordon S. Wood's
assessment that "The Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period."

In contrast, as Rocker writes, a truly democratic system would achieve the char-

Long before Madison, Artistotle, in his "Politics," recognized the same problem
with democracy.