>Noam Chomsky on The Common Good
>
>    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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