What is the Common Good?

Noam Chomsky

Truthout, January 7, 2014

(Adapted from a lecture by Noam Chomsky at Columbia University

on December 6, 2013)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
Or perhaps, a little more kindly, it’s what legal scholar Conor Gearty calls
“neo-democracy,” 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.

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

character 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Long before Madison, Artistotle, in his “Politics,” recognized the same

problem with democracy.

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.