The Places Where Patrick Deneen and the Left Can Agree

“I agree with Deneen—and I suspect many others on the Left do too—that the local community is the optimal setting to pursue the good.”

The idea of the common good as a goal worthy of being pursued has been gaining traction in conservative circles in recent years. Broadly, the pursuit of the common good means that society ought to do more than simply let each individual lead his own life. Instead, they argue that it is preferable to lead everyone towards some unifying moral goal, but more on this later. This philosophy stands in opposition to the more libertarian strand of conservatism that had previously been dominant for decades. Notably, this recent turn has been championed by academics like Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame and other public intellectuals such as Rod Dreher of The American Conservative. As such, it is relevant to consider this argument not just from a conservative perspective—but also from the Left. I believe the Left and conservatives supportive of a common good philosophy can have discussions that would be productive for both sides. I want to review only a few conversations, though, that I believe are key. First, there is one question for which anyone who advocates the advancement of the common good needs to answer. And, as the state of the discourse stands today, I do not believe conservatives have a satisfactory response, which is not to say they cannot have one. However, there are also issues that I think the Left should concede to conservatives, and perhaps, most surprisingly, there are some interesting grounds of potential agreement.

The first thing that we need to make clear when talking about the common good is that it is but a special case of the concept of the good: one pursued as a shared goal by all the members of a defined community. However, the existence of a conception of the good does not necessarily entail the existence of a common good. A Theory of Justice, by the late American Philosopher John Rawls, is one of the seminal works of Western political philosophy of the 20th century. Rawls is often depicted as a defender of the status quo of welfare state capitalism, which was the rule in many Western democracies at the time. In fact, he explicitly argues that welfare capitalism does not meet the requirements of his principles of justice. The two arrangements he identifies as being able to satisfy them are what he calls a property-owning democracy—a democratic regime in which the ownership of capital is widely and equitably distributed among individuals—and liberal socialism—a politically liberal regime in which workers exercise democratic control over the economy.

After all, Rawls explicitly says that his theory of justice prioritizes the right over the good, and I think this would be a fair characterization for many theories of justice coming from the Left.

One of the core tenets of Rawls’ theory is the priority of the right over the good. To understand this (and to understand the idea of the common good), we need to define what is meant by “the right” and “the good.” In a very broad sense, the good is the satisfaction of our preferences—or of a higher goal—that gives meaning and purpose. The right, by contrast, refers to rules that govern the morality of individual actions or of the structure of society. Both are moral issues, but the right, especially as it refers to social institutions, tends towards the universal, whereas the good does not, unless we speak of the common good. In this sense, conservatives are not entirely wrong when they accuse the Left of trying to impose homogenous standards, as Patrick Deneen suggests in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. After all, Rawls explicitly says that his theory of justice prioritizes the right over the good, and I think this would be a fair characterization for many theories of justice coming from the Left. But things are somewhat more complicated. The precedence that the right takes over the good does not imply that the good is less important. In fact, it could be argued that the opposite is true.