The Common Good
Noam Chomsky
[From his speech delivered at the Progressive
Challenge, an educational forum featuring progressive thinkers and
activists, held on Capital Hill on January 9, 1997]
Background issues are worth attention, because it's important, I
think, to recognize how sharply contemporary ideology has departed
from traditions and values which are quite important and significant
and which it claims it upholds. That divergence is worth understanding
and I think it carries a lot of direct lessons about the current
scene.
Let's begin with the common good. We can trace that concept
back to the earliest foundations of political theory. Anyone who went
to a good college knows that it all comes from Aristotle's Politics
which is surprisingly timely in many ways. In Politics, which is
pretty subtle and complex, the main problem is how to achieve what
Aristotle calls, "the Common Good of All." Per Aristotle, "the
state is a community of equals." It's aiming at the best life
possible for all of them. The people must be supreme and they must
participate fully and equally. (A qualification: "people" is
a narrow category for Aristotle. We've at least learned something in
2,000 years.) But among those he considered the people, they have to
be equal, free, participatory. And the government must not only be
democratic and participatory, but also a welfare state, which
provides, as he put it, "lasting prosperity to the poor by
distribution of public revenues" in a variety of ways that he
discusses.
The point being that an essential feature of a decent
society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is
relative equality of outcome-not opportunity, but outcome. Without
that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state.
These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie
right at the core of classical liberalism, of enlightenment thinking.
Adam Smith, as everyone knows, advocated free markets, but if you look
at the argument for free markets, it was based on his belief that free
markets ought to lead to a perfect equality, which is a desideratum in
a decent society. Like Aristotle, Smith understood that the common
good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting
prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues.
So Adam Smith's praise of the division of labor is well known,
but less known is his condemnation of the division of labor for its
inhuman effects which, as he said, "will turn working people into
objects as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature
to be" and there fore must be prevented in any improved or
civilized society by government action to overcome the devastating
market forces.
Other leading contributors to classical liberalism went much
further than this, condemning wage labor itself, for the reason that
it deprives people of their humanity. When the laborer works under
external control, we may admire what he does but we despise what he
is-a classic liberal slogan. deToqueville said that the art advances,
the artisan declines. He was, of course, also a great figure of the
classical liberal pantheon and he agreed with Smith, Thomas Jefferson
and many others, that equality of outcome is an important feature-a
crucial feature in fact-of a free and just society. And he warned of
the dangers of a permanent inequality of condition and an end to
democracy if the manufacturing aristocracy (which is growing up under
our eyes in the United States in the 1830s, remember, one of the
harshest that has ever existed in the world) should escape its
confines, as it later did beyond his worst nightmares.
That's classical liberalism, way back to Aristotle.
Similar ideas run through the independent working class press
from the very origins of the industrial revolution. There was a lively
press, say in eastern Massachusetts-Lowell, Lawrence and places like
that-back in the 1840s and 1850s. It was run by working people, "factory
girls" as they were called, artisans and so on. They bitterly
condemned what they called "the new spirit of the age"- "gain
wealth forgetting all but self" which they regarded as a
demeaning and degrading doctrine that sweeps aside any concern for the
common good, and also was destroying their culture, the rights that
they'd felt they'd won in the American Revolution, later the Civil
War. They bitterly condemned the tyranny of rising industrial
capitalism, much as deToqueville had, insisting, in their words, "that
those who work in the mills should own them," and that people
should run their own affairs, certainly in the political arena, but
beyond as well. Well, I don't think the mill hands of Lowell and
Lawrence would have been much surprised by the views of America's
leading Twentieth Century social philosopher, John Dewey, who like
them was as American as apple pie. He describes politics as "the
shadow cast over society by big business" and he-the leading
philosopher of democracy in this century- goes on to say, "talk
of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of
the country through its control of the means of production, exchange,
the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication."
Like the working people in eastern Massachusetts almost a century
earlier, he held that in a free and democratic society, workers must
be masters of their industrial fate and private power must be changed
from a feudalistic to a democratic order.
These are ideas that trace back to the Enlightenment and
classical liberalism and they've reappeared constantly in popular
struggle in the United State and elsewhere. I don't think they have
lost their significance, or relevance or, for that matter, appeal.
Some of the concerns of working people had been expressed by James
Madison years earlier. By 1792, shortly after the Constitution was
established, he was already expressing deep concerns over the fate of
the democratic experiment that he had crafted. He warned that the
rising developmental capitalistic state was leading to a real
domination by the few under an apparent liberty of the many. He
deplored what he called, "the daring depravity of the times, as
private powers become tools and tyrants of government, bribed by its
largesses and overawing it with their powers and combinations, casting
over society the shadow that we call politics." Madison's words,
but not the values, can easily be translated into a description of the
contemporary scene, and you can read them in current writings. For
example, Business Week in late 1995, reported with wonder that the new
Congress "represents a milestone for business. Never before have
so many goodies been showered so enthusiastically on America's
entrepreneurs." Though they go on to say that's not enough-the
lobbyists are called to go back to the trenches to demand more.
Another accompanying headline reads, "The Problem Now: What To Do
With All That Cash"-as surging profits are overflowing the
coffers of Corporate America and dividends are booming, while wages
are stagnating or declining, along with security and work conditions.
In large measure, that's an effect of policy decisions which were
directed to these ends, including the criminal assault-criminal in the
technical sense-on labor rights in the '80s which happens to be
reviewed rather well in the same journal.
Let me turn to another contemporary issue that traces back to
Aristotle's Politics and took an interesting turn along the way.
Aristotle recognizes that democratic systems can come in many
different forms. The best functioning of them, even the best, most
properly functioning democracy would be flawed, he felt, as long as
the goal of equality is not reached. And the reason was that if you
had sharp inequality, but perfect democracy, the poor majority would
seek the interest of the needy, and not the common good of all. That
can be safeguarded only to the extent that people generally have
moderate and sufficient property-that is, neither great wealth, nor
poverty.
Similar concerns actually entered into our own Constitution,
but in a somewhat different form, and not without a lot of
tension-which continues right to the present. In the constitutional
debates, Madison raised the same problem. He warned that "democracy
would undermine the responsibility of government to protect the
minority of the opulent against the majority," that is, to keep
them from plundering the rich, as John Foster Dulles and President
Eisenhower described the great problem of international affairs in
secret some years later.
Madison expected the threat of democracy to become more
severe over time because he expected an increase in the proportion of
those who "will labor under all the hardships of life and
secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings." He
was concerned by what he called, "the symptoms of a leveling
spirit" that he already discerned, and he warned of the future
danger "if the right to vote were to place power over property in
hands without a share in it.
That problem confronting Madison-the same as Aristotle's
problem-could be solved in one of two ways. One is by reducing
poverty. The other is by reducing democracy. Aristotle's choice was
the first. Madison's was the second. He recognized the problem, but
since the prime responsibility of government is to protect the
minority of the opulent against the majority, he therefore urged that
political power be put in the hands of the more capable set of men,
those who represent the wealth of the nation, with the public
fragmented and disorganized.
And that's the Madisonian system, which has remained fairly
stable over two centuries-although with outcomes that he very soon
deplored, as I've indicated. The reason for his surprise, I think, is
that Madison, like the rest of classical liberalism, was
pre-capitalist and anti-capitalist in spirit. And he expected the
leadership to be benevolent and enlightened and so on.
He learned differently very fast.
There is no reason now-anymore than there ever has been-to
accept the doctrines that sustain power and privilege. Or to believe
that we are somehow constrained by mysterious and unknown social
laws-not simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to
human will. They are human institutions and they have to face the test
of legitimacy. And if they do not, they can be replaced by others that
are more free and more just, as has often happened in the past.
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