Want to learn the ideas in The Common Good better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of The Common Good by Robert B. Reich here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
1-Page Summary of The Common Good
Overview
In the 1970s, Joni Mitchell sang that “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” This statement is true of many things, including the common good. As cities grow and capitalism develops in America, people are beginning to forget about the importance of community and a sense of belonging. The present generation can learn from this by studying what happened to the common good as well as ways to restore it through these key points. By learning more about how we’re losing our sense of community and what we can do about it, we will take an important step toward improving society for future generations.
Big Idea #1: The common good sums up the ideals and values society needs in order to function.
On any given day, thousands of nurses, doctors, social workers and teachers do what they can to save lives. There are also many police officers, firefighters and people in the armed forces who work hard to keep our country safe.
The common good is comprised of the values, ideals and norms shared by a society. It’s what citizens expect from one another and what connects them to one another. In other words, it’s the unwritten laws of morality that we choose to live by and the ideals we hold as one community. Explicitly, it consists of ideals like freedom, fairness, equality in the court of law, equal opportunity, respect for others and their opinions, a sense of community and trust in public institutions such as universities or courts. This notion has its roots in religion (the Bible) as well as philosophy (the Enlightenment). Indeed James Madison was influenced directly when he wrote Federalist No 45 stating “The Public Good” should be pursued above all else.”
The Bible also inspired the idea of the common good. America was once a country made up of many religious communities, whose devotees were pious and charitable.
People have a set of social values and ideals that they adhere to. This is partly because the people who came before us, like our parents and grandparents, believed in these ideals too.
If the idea of fairness and justice didn’t exist, we’d probably think that police officers, judges, legislators and regulators were benefiting from enforcing laws. If this were true, there would be no fair or just society left in which to live.
Some people believe that a chaotic society is better than a well-ordered, peaceful one. We’ll explore their views in the next section.
Big Idea #2: There are some people who don’t believe in or exploit the common good.
The common good is the idea that we should strive to promote the general welfare, as stated in the US constitution. The country has built schools and highways in order to help people. However, some philosophers disagree with this ideal. One of these philosophers is Ayn Rand. She says that it’s impossible for a society to be structured based on promoting the common good because it would lead to tyranny. People should instead act according to their own self-interests only (Rand).
Ayn Rand, a philosopher at Harvard who believed in individualism, developed Robert Nozick’s philosophy. He maintained that the individual was the only rational basis of society and said that rationing earnings for welfare is something inconceivable to him. The common good needs to be subverted because it’s not practical to think of everyone else first before yourself.
Moreover, the philosophers saw it as something that would inevitably be exploited. Once that happens, the common good can no longer be sustained. Let’s consider a small town in which no one locks their doors. Here, everyone trusts one another and there is an unspoken rule that no one would steal from their neighbor. This mutual trust makes everyone’s life easier because people don’t have to worry about being robbed or having things stolen from them. However, once a thief arrives on the scene and exploits this trust by stealing from others, people start locking their doors and the common good is broken because they’re concerned about being robbed instead of trusting each other anymore.
