These days, it is commonplace for conservatives to say that government must serve the common good. That assertion is usually couched as a criticism of traditional conservative thinking since at least the Goldwater era, when government became excessively committed to individual liberty, market outcomes, and formal neutrality that worked against family, community, dignified work, and social cohesion. These last elements are obviously genuine goods. Free market liberals should not dispute that; the dispute is over what government should do about them. What if America has always possessed a political conception of the common good, one embedded in its institutions since the founding? It may be that the American common good is ordered liberty, sustained by constitutional institutions, and the real attack on the common good was carried out not by Reaganism or libertarianism, but by progressivism.
That the founders had ideas about how the common good and government institutions were to interact is indisputable. The relationship is all over the founding documents. The Declaration, of course, comes first. It does not talk about social cohesion or dignified work. It talks about liberty and, crucially, the pursuit of happiness; what that happiness is and how to pursue it is left to the citizens. Government does not get to define what a happy life entails.
The Preamble to the Constitution similarly outlines the responsibilities of government — justice, peace, defense — all to secure one thing above all, the “Blessings of Liberty” to the founding generation and subsequent generations. Once again, liberty is paramount.
The preamble does contain a reference to the “general Welfare,” which might be thought of as a “blank check” to support the common good, but James Madison made it very clear in Federalist No. 41 that the phrase was limited by the enumerated powers of the Constitution, and in particular by Article I, Section 8, which outlines the powers of Congress. Again, support for familial life or the dignity of work do not appear, the powers being limited most notably to peace, defense, and the promotion of the commercial republic that Samuel Gregg has shown was the intention of the founders to support.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison provides the reasoning behind this. He calls the protection of the differing faculties of men “the first object of government.” These differing faculties — talents, capabilities, and differences in things like intellect and ambition – require the rights of property and lead inevitably to what we would call today economic inequality. Yet nowhere does Madison call for the government to correct these inequalities, as that would be destructive of liberty.
Instead, Madison champions representative government as the way to manage the disputes between the diverse sets of interests that one must expect in a free people — by setting faction against faction in a deliberative process. This is the very fons et origo of American pluralism. A conception of the common good that requires everyone to think or act the same would in this context be nothing short of tyranny.
The postliberal critics of classical liberalism and its application in American constitutionalism do indeed focus on human flourishing. Vice President JD Vance argues that markets are means rather than ends and the government may legitimately favor ends like family stability and productive industry. Patrick Deneen goes farther and argues that liberalism undermines the tradition and moral restraints upon which flourishing depends. It follows that constitutional machinery alone is insufficient to produce a virtuous society. The disdain postliberals often display towards “neutral” institutions is a result of this argument. Was Madison incorrect?
Classical liberal philosophers Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl argue that government should protect people’s freedom to pursue good lives, rather than prescribe what those lives must look like. In Norms of Liberty and subsequent works, the Dougs reconcile human flourishing and liberty in an Aristotelian fashion. They argue that human flourishing is a real thing and depends upon virtues such as practical wisdom, but is also, importantly, individualized and self-directed. A single political definition of the good life can never be appropriate for everyone.
Rights, therefore, do not provide a complete theory of the good life, but establish political and legal conditions — metanorms, as they call them —under which people can undertake their pursuit of happiness. Rasmussen and Den Uyl explicitly do not argue from moral neutrality. Their argument is that a substantive account of human nature and flourishing by its very nature places limits upon political power. The good life, in Aristotle’s sense, must be self-directed, so political authority cannot by itself instantiate that good. The pursuit of happiness, rather than any specific definition of happiness, is what government is instituted to protect.
Yet there remains a problem. American government today does indeed seem biased against a virtuous pursuit of the good life. The reason for that is neither the Madisonian architecture of the Constitution nor the turn towards free market policies of the Reagan administration, but what was done to government by the Progressive era.
Woodrow Wilson and his fellow travelers argued that the constitutional framework frustrated purposeful government, which required expertise, technocracy, and active government. The invention of what was effectively a fourth branch of government — the administrative state — was the means to circumvent constitutional requirements like separation of powers into a more active government that embodied norms rather than metanorms.
As Michael Oakeshott argued, the American state transformed from being a rules-based civil association to being a teleocratic enterprise association. Certain social outcomes were desirable, and government would attempt to achieve them. Differing faculties would indeed be corrected as a matter of social justice. If liberty suffered as a result, so what? Differing outcomes that would previously have been regarded as risks or misfortunes were now to be mitigated by an active, scientifically informed government. In some cases, the very property rights that Madison regarded as sacrosanct were to be the object of this correction, which is why the government stopped a man from growing his own wheat on his own land for his own use, in the infamous case Wickard v. Filburn.
It is what happened as a result of the Progressive Era’s upheaval of the purpose of the state that deserves the postliberals’ full ire, not liberalism. When government assumes responsibility for desired social outcomes, the citizen’s relationship with that state and its politics both change. This process was described in one of the great conservative political theorist Kenneth Minogue’s last works, The Servile Mind. Like Rasmussen and Den Uyl, Minogue argues that freedom requires people capable of moral agency. A free individual deliberates, decides, and accepts consequences and responsibility. Thus, virtues like prudence, thrift, and self-control become more than just private virtues. They become, as the Founders intended, prerequisites of political liberty.
Minogue contrasts the free individual with the servile individual, echoing the distributist Hilaire Belloc in his work The Servile State. The servile individual looks for direction, explanation, and excuses and thereby surrenders his or her independent moral judgment. Indeed, Minogue argues that this affects the public view of morality itself. In what he calls the politico-moral order, moral judgment becomes less about one’s own conduct and more about one’s opinions about society. Servile individuals demonstrate their supposed moral virtue by holding the correct opinions about, say, inequality, war, or the environment. Or, dare one say, about the consequences of free trade.
Intellectuals, tellingly, play an important part in this process. They can construct theories that explain Madison’s differing faculties as systematic injustices. Politicians promise to do something about this, and citizens gain in moral prestige or status by endorsing them. Government gains more power as a result, and the individual loses it. Minogue gives as an example “the project of equalizing the world.” Others have drawn attention to “global salvationism,” the appetite for radical collectivist prescriptions. The result is attacks on traditional ways of organizing the world, a rejection of the authority of civil society, and a growing willingness to surrender agency and therefore individual morality.
This is, of course, strongly Tocquevillian. Democracy in America celebrates the young Republic’s mediating institutions and the self-reliance of associations. America did not therefore require strict moral neutrality, but rather encouraged moral pluralism. Each community, just as each individual, could pursue happiness their own way. It was the culture of liberty that allowed this. The common good of the founding included preserving the ecology of self-government, an ecology that the Progressive Era and the New Deal risked destroying.
In the American context, the common good is therefore best understood as the preservation of the institutions of liberty. That means equality before the law, the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech, conscience and religion, freedom of association, federalism, markets and voluntary economic cooperation, and the checks and balances of constitutional government, among others.
Postliberals allege that liberal economics has weakened the moral institutions that constitute the good life. In actuality, progressivism rejected both liberal economics and liberal constitutionalism and, in doing so, weakened the very institutions that enable the good life. Restoring those institutions would be both conservative and liberal, recovering the common good of a free people.
