Return of the Common Good

For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.

I often ask myself: What of a tough-minded, morally serious politics that unites principle and prudence, and advocates a broadly secular state but is not neutral between religion and irreligion? What about a project that defends liberty and equality without succumbing to the illusion of human autonomy, or an indiscriminate egalitarianism that levels and homogenizes? How about “liberty under God and the laws,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s memorable formulation, that is in equal measure liberal and conservative? Why can’t we think more deeply and dialectically and move beyond dichotomies that distort much more than they illuminate?

In his final lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, the great French political thinker Raymond Aron said that for many of our contemporaries “liberty essentially means the liberation of the desires,” marked by a concerted effort to tear down “all the prohibitions and all the institutions which, in effect, limit the liberty of the individual as a being of desire.” Aron wisely added that while individuals must be broadly free to choose their own “path in life,” this should not be confused with the right to choose one’s own “conception of good and evil.” But as Justice Kennedy’s famous dictum in Planned Parenthood v. Casey indicates, this is what liberty too often means today.