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Whose good is the common

good?

ARTICLE in PHILOSOPHY &AMP SOCIAL CRITICISM · SEPTEMBER 2012

DOI: 10.1177/0191453712447770

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Claus Offe
Hertie School of Governance
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Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

38(7) 665–684
Whose good is the ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453712447770
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Claus Offe
Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany

Abstract
Reference to the common good has increased in recent political discourse, not only on the right but
also on the left. This development partly reflects genuine limitations in the liberal model of politics,
and thus should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. However, appeals to the common good face four
difficulties: its social referent; its temporal horizon; its substantive content; and its authoritative
identification. The article concludes with a modest suggestion for understanding the common
good in complex societies.

Keywords
common good, Gemeinwohl, public good, public interest, republicanism, Sittlichkeit

‘Common good’ – how surprising the renaissance of this concept, particularly the role it
seems to play on the left side of the political spectrum. The concept is popular not only
with conservatives who conceive the social order in terms of natural law, but also
recently with the political leaders of the ‘new center’ and the ‘third way’. Striking on
both sides is the bold republican pathos that accompanies talk of the common good in
the singular.1 There is nothing new in the fact that central ideas and conceptions of social
order are advertised as versions of the common good in the spirit of a reflexive plural-
ism, in the awareness of the irremediable contestability of all substantive interpreta-
tions of the common good. Every interpretation of the common good is only one
reading among many, proposed in the knowledge that it must compete with rival inter-
pretations. What is striking, however, and rather unexpected on the political left,2 is
talk of ‘the’ common good in the singular, which suggests a definitive clarity that
brooks no dissent. Proponents of such a common good, which is allegedly clear and
uncontested, rise imperiously above the contest of mere special interests and particular

Corresponding author:
Claus Offe, Dipl.-Soz., Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Hertie School of Governance, Friedrichstr. 180,
10117 Berlin, Germany
Email: offe@hertie-school.org; http://www.hertie-school.org/

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666 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

asset-holders. Thus shortly after taking office, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
declared at a meeting of the German labor union, IG Metall: ‘It is not the job of this
Administration to combine and push through the demands of individual groups, but
rather to organize the common good in Germany in a socially just and economically
robust manner. That is the guiding principle – not the demands of interest groups, com-
munities, or individual German states.’3
It is also striking that an ‘intrinsically valuable’, i.e. moral quality, is attributed to the
common good, as a political goal that synthesizes values of modernity and justice. In that
respect, the common good (bonum commune) differs from desirable aggregate condi-
tions that result from the adroit pursuit of individual interests – that is, from the devel-
opment of collective goods, positive-sum games and fair bargaining situations. Whereas
the latter, according to the liberal intuition, result from the rational pursuit of advantages,
from a republican perspective the common good results from obedience to duties held to
be incumbent on all social actors, both political leaders and ordinary citizens. We can
pinpoint the difference between these two – common good and desirable aggregate con-
ditions – in terms of the opposition between ‘costs’ and ‘duties’. The liberal mode of
government regulation operates by making undesirable behaviors more costly and foster-
ing desirable behavior through forms of support and subsidies. In this approach, the concept
of costs involves the thought that rational agents will avoid, reduce, or pass on costs when-
ever possible. Matters are entirely different with the concept of duties. Here the idea is that
actors, when confronted by the normative validity of openly declared duties, will recognize
and obey those duties rather than opportunistically dodge them. Liberal politics converts
the duties that issue from the demands of the common good into forms of positive and neg-
ative incentives, which are supposed to steer the behavior of social and economic actors in
the desired direction. However, not all of the required contributions to the common good
seem to be suitable for this conversion. Many of these demands are effective only when
they are recognized and obeyed as duties, whose satisfaction the political community as
a whole – and not merely the intimate social spheres of family and other communities –
can lay claim to. To this extent, recourse to the common good as the ground of public duties
indicates a ‘republican’ revision of the self-understanding of liberal administrations.
On the other hand, as Robert E. Goodin has shown,4 the semantics of the common
good can be linked with a strictly liberal, even libertarian model of politics – even if the
consequences are somewhat absurd. According to this interpretation (and using Pareto-
style welfare economics), one can speak of approximating the common good whenever
legislative and executive actions improve the conditions of one without disadvantaging
anyone else. The institutional test by which such progress toward the common good can
be measured is the rule of unanimity, to be sure under the idealizing condition that the
participants vote ‘sincerely’ and non-strategically.5 This ‘test procedure’ is absurd, how-
ever. The reason is that – say in a vote over a measure to improve air or water quality – a
single interested party that can save costs by polluting the environment would be enough
to refute the supposition that this measure served the common good. A further absurdity
consists in the fact that collectively binding decisions, because they do (must) not harm
anyone, also can hardly benefit anyone. What we have here is a thinly veiled (libertarian)
program for political immobility and non-intervention – ‘common good’ as the least
common denominator among existing individual preferences. In contrast to that concept,

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Offe 667

Goodin proposes a concept of the common good that satisfies the criterion of the ‘highest
common concern’. This concept does not reduce to fixed private preferences, but rather
involves preferences that are presentable in the light of the public sphere. These are
formed through their exposure to, and ability to withstand, the argued objections of
opposing interests. A concept of the common good so construed, however, suffers from
the lack of an obvious test procedure for validating contributions to the common good as
such. Procedural rules can at most ‘remind’ citizens and political elites of the obligations
and responsibilities they should live up to;6 but the rules cannot guarantee the practice of
these virtues when reminders fall on deaf ears. If political virtues are not already inter-
nalized in actors as normative resources or dispositions, then no institutional procedure
can evoke them.
If, and to the extent that, there actually is a renaissance of the idea of the common
good (in the demanding sense of ‘high common concern’), then this expresses a twofold
skepticism. On the one hand, there is skepticism whether a well-ordered society can arise
and endure by means of law alone (and the democratic control of legislation). This skep-
ticism cannot be removed even by the flawed logic that underlies Mancur Olson’s theory
of collective action.7 Olson maintained that despite a universal utility-oriented tendency
toward free riding, collective goods are reliably produced if the government assists with
selective incentives (i.e. with punishments and rewards). However, if the government
itself proves to be a collective good in its capacity as distributor of selective incentives,
then the attempt to reconstruct social order out of norm-free interest calculations within a
framework of legal rules fails.
On the other hand, one can see a skepticism about whether an acceptable social synth-
esis can emerge solely from individuals exercising their market liberties in the pursuit of
gain – especially when choices are steered by signals of shareholder value. Taken
together, these two skeptical assessments give rise to a lingering suspicion – not a crit-
icism of the system but nonetheless disquieting – that something is missing, has been
lost, or remains morally and functionally inadequate, if modern societies are conceived
merely as liberal constitutional democracies, without reference to categories of an obli-
gatory ‘ethical life’ [Sittlichkeit]. Beyond the force of law and pursuit of gain, a search is
under way today on a broad front – both in politics and in the social sciences – for the
sources of civic engagement, social cohesion, a ‘social capital’ and an active citizenry.
All sides seem to agree on how indispensable these are.

More than Mere Rhetoric

Now one could dismiss the use of the notion of the common good as a rhetorical slogan,
used to achieve strategic goals. On the one hand, those who use this slogan have the
populist aim of enlisting the acclamation of a public that is known often to view politics,
parties and associations with morose suspicion and cynical indifference. On the other
hand, they oppose a set of related pressures: pressures that come from bearers of func-
tional and territorial representation, thus from associations and regional bodies; that limit
the scope of governmental action; and that can further diminish their credit with the vot-
ing public. In addition, it no doubt lies in the interest of ruling elites to shirk their own
responsibilities and shift the burden of managing problem situations into the realm of

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668 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

‘civic’ self-help and community spirit. However, I believe that these interpretations,
which in the final analysis understand the rhetoric of common good as strategic speech
acts, do not go far enough. An appeal like that made by John F. Kennedy – ‘Ask not what
your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ – such an appeal,
coming from the mouth of the right person and spoken in the right situation, could still
earn moral credit and charismatic recognition even today. Schröder’s appeal to the
‘uprising of upstanding citizens’ [Aufstand der Ansta¨ndigen] at least imitates this mode
of politics, which admonishes citizens to fulfill their republican duties.8
Across a broad front – both in political science and in political practice itself – the
‘neo-Tocquevillian’ insight has spread that successful ‘public policy-making’ and ‘good
governance’ cannot be brought about exclusively with the legal and fiscal means of dem-
ocratic representation and executive action – and that this holds not only in cases of
major floods and other natural disasters. Successful government action in fact depends
on the ‘receptive’ social-ethical dispositions of a ‘civil society’ that neither expects nor
demands of state policy everything that is necessary for managing the problems and con-
flicts associated with social, political and economic change. Scarcely any sentence in the
relevant German-speaking literature has been cited so often as Ernst Wolfgang Böcken-
förde’s reminder of the pre-political foundations of state action: the liberal constitutional
state is nourished by foundations that it cannot itself guarantee – namely, those of a civic
orientation toward the common good.9 The state can at most manage to foster and
encourage this civic potential of politically relevant moral resources.10 Precisely this
goal is avowedly served by ‘third way’ approaches and the ‘New Labour’, which borrow
political ideas such as the ‘devolution’ of power and ‘activation’ strategies from commu-
nitarian thought.11 Citizens, families, networks, neighborhoods and associations, as well
as regional community bodies, are viewed as the field of operation for a certain ‘micro-
political’ practice, which is described by norms such as ‘individual responsibility’, ‘self-
help’, the ‘new subsidiarity’ and ‘community spirit’. Summarizing these programmatic
insights, one can say that (contrary to Max Weber) the common good does not take effect
at the ‘top’, where leaders make decisions according to an ethic of responsibility, but
rather just the opposite: at the base and in the everyday practice of citizens.
Now there is nothing new in asserting that legal institutions and the constitutional
guarantees of the legal order must rest on non-formalized, political-cultural presupposi-
tions and civic virtues, and that without this support they would remain ineffective. If
liberal rights are supposed to have force in a society, then tolerance is required, because
the use of such rights can provoke negative externalities, which are not simply accepted
by affected parties without a second thought, but must indeed be ‘tolerated’. Rights
to political participation and representation depend on relationships of trust among
citizens; how else could individual citizens be willing to allow legislative outcomes
to be tied to the votes of all the other citizens? Social security and redistribution can
be ensured only if the life-opportunities of fellow citizens are viewed not with indif-
ference but with an attitude of solidarity. And even that fourth family of basic rights
– the group rights or special rights of representation that complement the three clas-
sical (Marshallian) families of rights12 – depends on a corresponding virtue, namely
that of ‘recognition’ and positive appreciation for cultural and other sorts of
difference.

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Offe 669

At most, what is new is the extent to which not only the politically instituted legal
order as a whole, but also the success of individual political programs and interventions
(‘policies’), depends on the sympathetic support of the citizens with compatible disposi-
tions, which cannot be conditioned solely by incentives of punishment and reward. Not
only is this in fact the case, it is common knowledge among political elites. They react to
this with a polyphonous chorus of targeted bureaucratic ads for virtue that go far beyond
‘moral suasion’ (e.g. appeals for patriotic consumer choices such as the motto ‘Buy Brit-
ish’). Citizens thus see themselves confronted at every turn today by quasi-educational
appeals that ask them, for example, to bring children into the world and raise them with
care; to exercise consideration and caution in traffic; to sort household trash and make
other sacrifices for ecological reasons; to practise safer sex; to avoid criminal offences
and to cooperate in police investigations; to maintain their health through preventive
measures of correct diet and abstinence; to observe standards of cleanliness in public,
as when taking the dog for a walk; to pay their taxes conscientiously and treat members
of other cultures and ethnic groups with respect. It would be good to know more about
the methods and success of this multifaceted program of training in virtue, officially
instituted and interfaced with common-good arguments. Here a conjecture must suffice:
that the agents of government policy are aware that they cannot manage with their own
instruments – legislation, executive and judicial enforcement, and fiscal incentives – and
thus depend on the norms and disciplinary effects of the citizens’ public spirit.
Naturally, these measures are by no means limited to appeals and ads that merely
recall the norms of civility and common good. One finds a controverted spectrum –
stretching from ads promoting desired behaviors, through the official discrimination
against undesirable behavior, to the negative sanctioning and formal prohibition of such
behavior and the associated occasions – in which not only libertarian but also liberal
tenets of social-political analysis mingle with and rub against communitarian, republican
and even paternalistic authoritarian positions.13 In the ‘well-understood’ interest of the
common good, the latter set of positions exhibits a readiness, in part aggressively
conveyed, to suppress ways of acting that (allegedly) generate diffuse harms and risks
(including perhaps for the actors themselves), even when the damage to the community
does not reach the level that would be required for a legally punishable offense or incar-
ceration. The use of tobacco products, more or less serious juvenile mischief (‘zero tol-
erance’), the use of pornography or provision of media access to the same, and problems
of school discipline – all these exemplify areas in which a paternalistic practice of the
common good operates. One can also mention cautious initiatives here, such as legal
‘brakes’ on the divorce of parents.14
The most important domain for applying paternalistic ideas of the common good that
have been reinforced with sanctions is probably that designated in Anglophone countries
by the aptly chosen concept of ‘dependency’. Narrowly construed, this concept is asso-
ciated with dependency on legal and illegal drugs. Understood more broadly, it also
encompasses the phenomena that have been sensationalized since the 1980s as ‘welfare
dependency’. This term refers to the fact that people who draw social-welfare benefits
react to the given incentive structure, in the sense that they (allegedly unnecessarily)
prolong the time span in which they make use of their claim on those benefits. They thus
become accustomed to the benefits, more or less intentionally neglecting or putting off

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670 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

the effort to renormalize their life by earning an income. The social-political conclusion
is that they thereby violate their duties to the common good – an abuse that can be reme-
died only by curtailing or eliminating their claims,15 if necessary by authorizing agents
with policing powers. As a rule, one finds essentially milder variants of this line of
thought in the German discussion connected with the regularly recurring ‘abuse debates’
in welfare law.16
All the ‘paternalistic’ attempts – that is, attempts proceeding from the ‘well-under-
stood’ interests of those affected, though not (yet) understood by those parties them-
selves – all such attempts to justify ‘punitive’ employments of the notion of the
common good provoke the liberal objection that the values and interests in question are
perhaps not those of the polity as a whole or of those affected by the sanctions, but are
rather the values and interests of an intolerant, suspicious and possibly xenophobic
majority unwilling to accept obligations of solidarity. The ‘common good’ would then
be only a euphemism for cultural and above all material majority interests (e.g. in the
reduction of welfare transfers). When proponents of a neo-liberal free-market (or ‘liber-
tarian’) political order – who are otherwise opposed to every form of paternalism –
manifest their agreement with common-good talk in this vein, then the suspicion of such
a masquerade is entirely appropriate. In general, then, such suspicion is appropriate when
the addressees of claims on common-good obligations are minorities (e.g. juveniles) that
are disadvantaged with respect to their material, political and cultural resources.
On the other hand, one cannot categorically exclude the possibility that suitable assis-
tance can be justified, if that is the only means whereby persons – not only as citizens but
also as economic actors – are to be placed in the status of responsible agency. Since the
late 1980s, and more recently under the 1996 Clinton-administration motto of ‘welfare
reform’ (‘From welfare to work’), political programs have spread throughout the OECD
world with the paternalistic goal of mobilizing, in the name of obligations to the common
good, the unemployed and welfare recipients for ‘responsible’ economic behavior. The
two questions for testing the sincerity and moral validity of this claim on the common
good are obvious. The first question asks whether or not the material interests of the
majority are at stake for those in favor of such initiatives. The second question asks
whether the addressees of such ‘activation’ initiatives actually acquire the status of
self-sufficiency as a result of the initiatives – or rather are merely punished for failing
to do so. For a normatively acceptable paternalistic strategy, one must always presuppose
that after the completion of the measures in question, the addressees themselves are pre-
pared to appreciate the outcome as successful and thereby acknowledge the legitimacy of
those measures in retrospect.17

Pragmatics of Defining the Common Good

One can distinguish an active and a passive side in the norm of the common good (or
‘welfare of the general public’ or the ‘public interest’). The public interest is served
by the fact that all participants do their part in dutifully working together at bringing
forth the values, goods and outcomes as defined by that interest. The ‘passive’ side is
the situation of the polity that results thereby, which is then experienced by all partici-
pants as favorable and beneficial, that is, as a positive change in the conditions for

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Offe 671

realizing their individual life-plans. The idea of the public interest thus contains not only
this inclusive favorable effect, but also the active side of identifying goals (‘concerns’)
and mobilizing contributions. To further clarify this active side, one could also speak of
‘publicly tested and recognized’ or ‘publicly acceptable’ interests, whose content there-
fore is neither self-evident to all parties nor the privileged knowledge of bureaucrats or
experts.
Common-good criteria are employed for justifying and, above all, criticizing concrete
actions. Here the object of justification (in the sense of providing reasons or finding fault
with the lack of ‘good’ reasons) is either the official actions of political elites who are
obligated to the common good by oath of office, etc., or the actions of non-elites. In both
cases, we find ourselves in the neighborhood of republican ideals of realizing the bonum
commune in the civil actions of all those who belong to the political community. Such
ideals appeal to a spirit of sacrifice and renunciation, a readiness to put aside one’s indi-
vidual preferences, avoid conflicts, accept disadvantages, renounce the abuse of liberties.
What is more, the idea can be employed in either a positive-prescriptive or a negative-
critical manner. No doubt the latter predominates: those who use the idea point out
offences against the common good. The idea itself is easier to grasp in negative cate-
gories (e.g. the prevention or avoidance of collective damages) than in positive cate-
gories, such as ‘progress’. Seldom do those who use the idea invoke concrete
commands that they deduce from the common good. Critique has the character of an
exhortation (e.g. to moderation for the sake of the common good) or of a morally disqua-
lifying censure (‘selfishness’, ‘egoism’, ‘thoughtlessness’, ‘short-sightedness’).
Censures of the above sort occupy a peculiar middle position between the private,
hence entirely non-binding, disapproval of an action of other, on the one hand, and law-
suits that enforce legal duties, on the other. In giving voice to such censure for transgres-
sions of, or damage to, the common good, one appeals to norms that lie below the level of
codified duties of office and legal obligations, yet nonetheless are invoked in the expec-
tation that their general validity is recognized. At issue are common-good arguments
about the evaluation of (collectively relevant) decisions, not the deployment of forma-
lized (legal) norms.
The censure of violating the common good aims not at legal injuries, but at the atti-
tude and way of thinking that the critic sees in the behavior of the censured party. This
holds whether the target is a leading politician or a neighbor who disturbs me with a loud
stereo system. Consequently, the domain of common-good arguments lies in between the
spheres of formally prescribed, legally sanctioned requirements one ‘must’ observe, on
the one hand, and the sphere of legally protected actions one ‘may’ choose, according to
one’s free disposition, on the other hand. The common good is a sphere of distinct
political-moral ‘oughts’, a sphere governed by the non-formalized guidelines of moral
duty, civic virtue, fair consideration of interests, and behavior that is responsible, reason-
able and carefully considered.
Now in modern societies the chances of consensus are quite limited when it comes to
specifying what we neither ‘may’ freely do nor clearly ‘must’ do, but rather ‘ought’ to
do. As usual, when the clear specification of ‘right’ conduct does not readily succeed, we
place a premium on negative specifications. We do not know (or we at least do not agree
about) what ‘right’ conduct is; but its opposite, ‘wrong’ conduct, is comparatively easier

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672 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

to specify and condemn. The blurred boundaries of the idea of the common good also
find expression in the phrases in which that idea is typically clad. Whereas one ‘complies
with’ or ‘obeys’ legal duties and commands and ‘exercises’ one’s rights – in both cases
with objectively measurable effects open to assessment by the judiciary – the common
good is something one ‘serves’ or ‘ought’ to serve. Here the category of service describes
not only a result but also the attitude of the agent who brings about that result. Those who
only do what they ‘must’ can harm the common good, just as those who do everything
they ‘may’ do, thus everything that is not forbidden by legal regulations. The adminis-
tration of justice is responsible for sanctioning what is forbidden and specifying obliga-
tory conduct. By contrast, the specification of what satisfies or harms the common good
rests on the authority of non-formalized ad hoc judgments of concerned parties and
observers – and also on the educational endeavors of families, schools, the media, and
other social mechanisms that shape norms. The forms of speech in which such judgments
are expressed comprise disapproval and censure on the one hand, and on the other,
respect and honorable recognition of conduct in conformity with the common good.
In all these uses of the idea of the common good we can see some typical reservations
about positive rights as a source of rules that can order social life definitively and seam-
lessly. The criterion of the common good serves to mark out, within the universe of for-
mally permitted conduct, a smaller universe of conduct that conforms to the common
good and therefore merits approval; the remainder, though legally permitted, falls under
the verdict of irresponsible, thoughtless self-centeredness, or the like. The idea of the
common good, then, if it is thoroughly robust and vigorously deployed in political life,
allows one to turn the trick of morally discrediting conduct that is entirely permissible
from a legal standpoint. Therein lies an illiberal paternalistic temptation for those in
charge of common-good criteria. In extreme cases, common-good arguments can be
used by political elites (perhaps by trading on populist acclamation) as a vehicle for
repealing established rights at a formal level, precisely by referring to an alleged ‘abuse’
of certain rights by certain groups. Similarly, reference to the common good can serve to
expand the scope of positive legal duties. For good reason, therefore, talk of the exploit-
ability of the common good for spreading resentment and discrimination – i.e. the ‘dan-
ger of improper uses’ inherent in that idea – constitutes an important topos in the relevant
legal and political discussions. Those who brandish the ‘common good’ must be armed
against the suspicion of misusing the power of political definitions merely for their own
advantage, or for a practice of terror and (racist) discrimination posing as virtue.
Those who talk of the common good engage a third standard to which one’s own con-
duct and that of strangers must measure up, besides the categories of legal correctness
and the strategic or instrumental rationality of publicly relevant actions. In this context,
the common-good motif is not the only norm by which further criteria are added to the
universe of formally justified or instrumentally effective conduct. Norms and precepts
such as altruism, respect, assistance, care, or solidarity fulfill a similar function. But
these differ from common-good criteria insofar as they always posit a concrete
interaction-partner as the intended target of the positive consequences of conduct. For
example, when a landlord forgoes a (legally permissible) increase in rent because the
tenant would otherwise have to move, or when someone of high income and favorable
actuarial risk nonetheless forgoes a (legally permissible) switch to a financially more

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Offe 673

favorable insurance policy in the system of public health insurance, then these altruistic
or solidaristic actions are to the benefit of concrete persons or social classes (the tenant,
the group insured by a policy). With the common good this social reference is diffuse, or
at least less clearly demarcated. Compliance with these norms is to the benefit of the
(political) community or the general public.
But who is that? One must ask which community is actually imagined as the benefi-
ciary of the common-good-oriented conduct of its members: the local, the professional,
the national, the European, etc. – or humanity as a whole? This question of the social
referent of the common good designates one of the four problems that burden the idea.
A second problem is indicated by the question concerning the temporal scope, that is, the
planning horizon to which conduct should be oriented. The third problem arises when we
ask about the substantive features, thus the goods and values that are supposed to be
attained or realized through conduct oriented toward the common good. Fourth and
finally, the question arises about which actors and procedures are supposed to be part
of binding answers to these three thorny questions. I would like to offer some reflections
on each of these four questions – and the difficulties we run into when we attempt to
answer them.

The Social Referent of the Idea of the Common Good

Which totality is the community whose good is supposed to be served? Who belongs
among the beneficiaries? References to the common good can play a role in meaningful
sentences and valid critical stances only if the relevant totality is specified or can be non-
contentiously presupposed in its social or territorial extent. Everything from families or
households to global society or ‘humanity’ comes under consideration.18 If in answering
this question we may take for granted neither a Christian-theological nor a republican-
national (or even an ethnic-national) framework, as though these were somehow obvi-
ous, then the boundaries of the respective social groups whose good is at issue become
hazy. Or else those boundaries issue from a successful exercise of the power to impose a
particular definition, which then provokes suspicion of being just such a result of delib-
erate imposition.
Only a doctrinal theological position escapes the extraordinary difficulties of defini-
tion and the dangers of misusing the idea of the common good. Within the space of a
theological mode of thought, the recipients of the common good are human beings in
general (as children of God). The temporal reference, at the individual level, is the single
human life with its existential orientation toward salvation; at the collective level, the
continuation of divine creation. And the substantive referent, as described by the papal
encyclicals, is the ‘sum total of social conditions which allow people . . . to reach their
fulfillment more fully and more easily’ (1965: Gaudium et Spes, encyclical no. 2619).
The problem of contingency that persists everywhere but in theological contexts finds
at best a provisional solution in cases of enduring national or local communities whose
members have the wherewithal to dispense with the need to justify (or even to notice) the
negative external effects that eventually arise from their practice of the common good.20
This idea of the common good, focused on the internal affairs of the nation-state or sub-
national regions, becomes blurred and contestable, however, to the extent that (1) there

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674 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

are affected persons outside the community who can complain about the negative exter-
nal effects, or (2) the internal differentiation of members of a polity, and hence the plur-
ality of value-orientations, grows to the point that it becomes all but impossible to reach even
a somewhat instructive consensus over the operative content of the common good. Both of
these together – internal differentiation and external accountability – constitute the ‘post-
national’ constellation.
Questions about subsidies for agricultural producers can serve as an example of this
two-sided problem. National or European farm subsidies are justified and demanded in
the name of a self-sufficient food supply, and also with reference to the (seasonally, geo-
graphically, etc.) limited adaptive capacities of agricultural producers. In the meantime,
with the progressive differentiation of social structures, the economic concerns of pro-
ducers no longer have a hold on urban consumers of agricultural products as (potentially)
their own concerns; today the fear that someone would have to go hungry, or that a nation
would become subject to blackmail because ‘foreign lands’ would refuse to supply grain,
is somewhat ludicrous. On the other hand, with modern communications media, it can
escape neither the notice nor the moral sensibility of domestic observers that a policy
of internal subsidies can unleash external harms – namely harms borne by external sup-
pliers who are hindered by internal farm subsidies from entering internal markets, and
who are driven from the market by (in their view) unfair practices (e.g. Argentine meat
producers who were kept out of European markets by EU tariffs). Taken together, these
two effects – social-structural differentiation and external responsibility – bring it about
that a policy of structure-preserving agricultural subsidies now appears, not to serve the
common good (for which the corresponding sacrifice of consumers and taxpayers is
rightly to be expected), but as nothing more than a narrow-minded dispensing of national
and class advantages.
If the national frame of reference is one we can no longer take for granted, then any
collectively shared form of life, mode of living, or ‘identity’ of whatever sort – familial,
ethnic, religious, political, sexual, generational, subcultural, linguistic, regional, even pro-
fessional – can set itself up as an obligatory community.21 If the champions of such arro-
gations of identity succeed in their aims, then as a rule that will have external effects, some
of them negative, for other communities. For those who justify their conduct by referring
to the common welfare of a particular entity, it might be a matter of indifference whether or
not the welfare they promote for the members of that community implies, at the same time,
(relative) damage to persons who do not belong to that community.
The engaged, and possibly self-sacrificing, service of members of one particular com-
munity can, therefore, give other communities reason to regard that service with suspi-
cion, as dangerous for the community, or at least as a group-centered egoism and
discriminatory. For every community that makes a claim on the collectivity-mindedness
[Gemeinsinn] of its members and sets forth the corresponding duties as norms, there is a
larger, more encompassing community, whose remaining members can then see them-
selves placed at the (at least relative) disadvantage of being excluded from the good
of the smaller community. Thus, in the social-political debates in the United States one
often hears the ‘Tocquevillian’ argument against establishing day-care centers, because
they would discourage and undermine efforts for the common good that flow from the
self-help initiatives of neighborhoods, ethnic groups and religious communities. To be

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Offe 675

sure, on account of their internal heterogeneity, ‘large’ communities cannot support as

many obligations toward the common good as smaller communities can. The readiness
to take part in associative activities and to acknowledge informal duties is greater in local
groups than at the national or supra-national level. The responsive awareness of common
identity and history strengthens an orientation to the common good and the recognition
of corresponding duties to insiders, but it limits those attitudes toward outsiders.
Three kinds of remedies are recommended today for this problem, which results from
the structural ambiguity of the social referents of common-good obligations: one is mul-
ticultural, a second is human-rights based, and a third involves plural or ‘gradated’ iden-
tities. As a social ethic, multiculturalism aims at the coexistence of equally entitled
cultural memberships and their result, namely the internal duties and mutual external
recognition of ethnic and religious communities. As a social reality, multiculturalism
is limited to the urban centers of a few societies characterized by high levels of immigra-
tion, like Toronto and Sydney. Because everyone in these places is descended from
citizens who voluntarily immigrated, no group has superior and older rights than any
other group. (To be sure, as de Tocqueville clearly saw, that excludes not only the native
population that was always in the country and thus did not immigrate, but also those who,
or whose ancestors, did not enter the country voluntarily but as slaves.) The human rights
solution is radically inclusive and universalistic. It has the disadvantage that neither indi-
vidual citizens nor the states that represent them (which lack the institutions and
resources for a ‘global domestic policy’) can actually meet the obligation this solution
entails – to serve a common good that encompasses humanity – which thus remains
largely nominal. Moreover, the validity and content of ‘the’ human rights are subject
to diverse relativizing interpretations, as is also the case for the United Nations Declara-
tion of Human Rights itself, which was inspired by Jacques Maritain’s ‘integral Christian
humanism’. There remains, thirdly, the ‘European’ model of multi-level obligations to
the common good. According to that model, commitments to the common good at the
regional, national and European levels (among others) must be reconciled. Here a widely
recognized problem lies in the decreasing intensity and binding force of obligations as
one moves to respectively higher, more encompassing levels.

Problems of the Temporal Horizon of Action

Collectively relevant actions of elites and non-elites must be justified as serving the com-
mon good, not only from a cross-sectional social perspective but also from a longitudinal
temporal perspective. If we look for values by which the idea of the common good could
be rendered concrete and open to consensus, then what we find are such goals as inter-
national peace, social justice (understood as poverty-prevention along with ‘full employ-
ment’), public health and ecological sustainability. Let us take ‘sustainability’ as an
example that can clarify the temporal structure of the common good. Three temporal
relations characterize that structure, which one can set forth grammatically as present,
future and second future.

1. Achieving a goal requires a persistent effort directed toward the future: the condition
for which one strives is not immediately achievable, there is a stretch of time

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676 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

involving ‘provision for the future’, which one must traverse before the investment
of effort yields ‘returns’ in the form of improvements in the general conditions of
social life.
2. The future condition one strives for is not a lucky moment, but a balance that holds
up over the long term and is self-sustaining.
3. Looking back as observers from an anticipated point of time in the distant future, we
(or those coming after us) will judge whether the effort began at the proper time (or
was short-sightedly abandoned), whether the condition we describe as realizing the
common good has been robust, in the sense of a lasting balance, and whether the
values realized in that condition are still appreciated as such.

The common good is thus a moral-political condition of society, to which present efforts
are dedicated, which is realized in the future, and which is validated as such by looking
back from a second future.
Now the efforts that are brought to bear in providing for the future in liberal democra-
cies are constrained by various circumstances, as is well known. Periodic general elections
make it politically costly to demand of voters sacrifice and efforts that might only begin to
yield returns in the election period after next. In addition, present compromises can often
be achieved only at the price of burdening future actors (e.g. as in the case of the the public
dept incurred for purposes of present consumption). To that extent, the logic of the political
process tends to discount the future (if not positively to exploit it), to underestimate the
time that remains to plan for and shape the future, and to miss the right moment [kairós]
for taking action. The uncertainty of future developments, which can be reliably ascer-
tained using methods of projection and trend analysis only in a few areas, provides an
excuse for discounting the future. The restrictions on action that stem from the past offer
another occasion for excuse: the need to balance the budget, for example, sets limits on
‘provision for the future’. Moreover, issues of the distant future (e.g. social security) are
generally not decisive for elections in an aging society, where by definition younger mem-
bers interested in relatively distant problems are a minority. (Or if the future is such a topic,
then it is only with an eye to safeguarding the funds available for current and prospective
retirees.) Finally, in view of the inexorable long-term effects of facts that are already defi-
nite today – regarding demographics, developments in the environment and climate, sci-
entific and technological innovations – we know it is already ‘too late’ in any case for any
future-oriented initiative. On the other hand, however, insight into the growing long-term
effects of today’s actions (genetic technology) or omissions (climate protection) can also
motivate a willingness to recognize trans-temporal obligations to the common good that
bind over the long haul – even when present-day efforts, sacrifice and contributions for the
future common good must mature over a period of time that in some cases extends well
beyond the lifetime of the actors.
A special difficulty confronting future-oriented attempts to promote the common
good results when (as liberal economic theory and politics would have it) one must
reckon with the fact that the price of the community’s future welfare is the blatantly
one-sided promotion of today’s interests – precisely because it lies in the social power
of these interested parties to decide on the future weal and woe of the community. This
brings to mind the American slogan: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for the

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Offe 677

United States!’ To be sure, that is no rule for justifying policy, for the simple reason that
it is fundamentally unknown, and thus contestable, how much partiality toward ‘today’
(e.g. regressive redistribution of investment stimuli) will bring about a greater common
good ‘tomorrow’ (e.g. additional jobs).
Nevertheless, in my opinion it is instructive and symptomatic that an entire series of
proposals for reforming liberal-democratic institutions converge today on the idea of
freeing up national politics a bit from the chains of short-term thinking in important
domains and transferring authority to institutional actors that do not need to worry about
maintaining power and office. There exists a range of institutional bodies that are
deemed capable of detaching themselves, in the interest of the future common good and
its timely consideration, from the constraining dynamics and blinders of party competi-
tion and periodic elections. These include not only the Federal Constitutional Court, the
German Federal Bank, the European Commission, and diverse, relatively new regulatory
and supervisory bodies for privatized systems22 (postal services, telecommunications,
railroads, electrical grids), but also ad hoc advisory bodies, assemblies and expert com-
mittees that have advice-giving and decision-making functions, and a portion of whose
members enjoy extremely lengthy, possibly even lifetime tenures (e.g. the United States
Supreme Court).23
The common good designates a condition that not only continues to exist in the future,
but also one whose results are appreciated retrospectively in a second future, thus from
the perspective of descendants, as a valuable collective inheritance. As the young Max
Weber explained in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895, the highest standard for jus-
tifying political action lies in this point of view, from which we are acknowledged by our
followers (or by an imagined future self) as worthy predecessors. That is the same cri-
terion that Alexis de Tocqueville applied to the micro-level with his famous formulation
of ‘enlightened’ interests – interests about which we can make the judgment, looking
back from the future and knowing the outcome, that we were right to pursue them. In
both cases we have a secularized version of the Last Judgment, whose anticipation helps
us in the present to change our conduct in ways that save us from future regrets. Antici-
pating the results and assessments of future historical research (whose findings, of
course, they cannot know), leading politicians not infrequently like to boast of their
‘page in the book of history’. With this elitist rhetorical figure, they play off the temporal
dimension against the social dimension and reject the criticism of contemporaries:
knowledge of what constitutes the common good is known only in retrospect by a world
to come, not by today’s world of their contemporaries, whose opinions and talk may
therefore be ignored.
Ex ante it is unknown not only how posterity will issue its verdict; it is not even
known whether posterity ex post will still judge according to the same standards and
value categories that guide the conduct of today’s actors. Thus even if the latter have
attained their goals, this success might remain unappreciated because the assessments
have changed. There is one classical way out of this double uncertainty – the nation. That
was still true, in any case, for Max Weber: the only thing we can know about the thinking
and values of our descendants results from the fact that we belong to the same nation.
Thus our descendants above all will be ready to appreciate contributions to the continuation
and unity, greatness and welfare of the nation as such.

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678 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

This emphasis on the role of the nation results from the circumstance that the nation
(next to the family and institutionalized religions) counts as the only social entity whose
members can link with a ‘fiction of eternity’, not only retrospectively, but above all pro-
spectively. Because membership in nation-states (in contrast to civil-legal associations)
and families (in contrast to marriages) is normally acquired not by decision or contract
but through ‘birth’, such memberships are not grounded contractually and thus cannot be
dissolved contractually. Consequently, for their members they are not ‘terminable’. This
motif of a national certitude of continuity can also be deployed as an ultimate justifica-
tion for duties to the common good. With this idea in hand, one grounds the model of
‘serial reciprocity’ for conduct and obligation: what past generations have done for
‘me’, so I am bound to do for the next generation as a whole or for the individual mem-
bers. In this sense, I satisfy an obligation of making a contribution toward the ongoing
existence of a super-individual, inter-temporal social context.
Today there is something bizarre about equating the common good with the continued
existence of nation-states. However, this equation also reveals something about the
opposite move, namely how difficult it is to detach the idea of the common good, in both
its social and temporal dimensions, from the trappings of a national community of goods
and values. Duties to the common good must be grounded from now on in the fact that
they are evident duties toward ‘everyone’, and not in the fact that we owe them to our
children’s children in anticipated exchange for their appreciative remembrance. Clinging
to the national garb of common-good duties is bizarre, and not only because one would
categorically exclude criteria of a supra-national common good. The national model is
also abstruse, because the experience of transnational migration and mobility, the expe-
rience of new constitutions and of collapse, of supra-national integration, of the fusion as
well as secession of states, of federal and regional national alignments, and the like, have
irreversibly stripped ‘the’ nation and its persistence of the status as a perennial, and thus
obliging, common good. But substitute mechanisms for generating long-term obligations
to the common good are not easily identified.

The Substantive Components of the Common Good

In the substantive or ‘material’ dimension (as Niklas Luhmann would have put it), the
further question arises about which metric should be used to calculate and pay out the
common good, that is, the outcome that results when all citizens satisfy their obligations
to the common good. Prosperity and full employment, education and health, internal and
international peace, social, military and civil security, restraint in the use of natural
resources – all of these are formulations of goals, in terms of which particular govern-
ment agencies describe their contributions to the common good and citizens seek to
engage in service of such goals. But there exists neither a hierarchy nor a common metric
by which metric one another. At best, one might succeed at that task through recourse to
the moral-political category of justice. But even with that idea, it turns out that at least
three interpretations of justice partially conflict with each other,24 in particular when one
no longer limits justice criteria to the nation-state framework (in light of the compelling
considerations in the last section). At issue are the following: political justice, thus the
guarantee of basic liberty rights and popular sovereignty, the idea that all those subject to

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Offe 679

the law should take part as equals in the process of law-making; social justice, the guar-
antee of social security and a share in societal wealth; and economic justice, whose pre-
cepts rule out conditions in which a society or part of a society fails to realize its
attainable level of affluence because of the idleness or inefficient deployment of its
resources.25 Perhaps the best approximation of an instructive specification that gives real
content to the common good consists in this: that we seek such a good inside the magic
triangle of these three types of justice. Even when we do so, more than enough remains
open to contestation and requires decision.

The Social Location of Competence to make Judgments about

the Common Good
This leads me to my final question: from which social location, that is, from what kind of
persons, should we expect such carefully weighed assessments, understood as political
achievements that rest on complex justifications? For Alexis de Tocqueville, the citizens
of local communities played that role. Well versed in the art of joining together in asso-
ciations (‘l’art de l’association’), such citizens had learned to make public affairs their
own concern. De Tocqueville’s pleasing picture, painted from a mix of aristocratic and
republican colors, turns into a darker shade with Max Weber: for the latter, competent
citizens who are ready to take responsibility for the common good remain the exception,
found at the top levels of large organizations, where they prove their worth as virtuosi of
an ethics of responsibility, exercised in the loneliness of executive decision-making; the
‘iron cages’ of modern professional life have deformed all the other participants in the
political process. The supposition of an elite competence for realizing the common good
is also evident in constitutional documents, such as the Constitution of the Weimar
Republic.26 There we read that mandated officials and office-holders have to judge when
and in which matters ‘legal coercion is permissible . . . in the service of superseding
demands of public welfare’ (article 151); but also non-elites, more specifically ‘every
German is obliged to invest his intellectual and physical energies in such a way as nec-
essary for public benefit’ (article 163); and the use that property-holders make of their
property ‘shall simultaneously be of service for the common best’ (article 153). But even
with these norms – should we not read them as mere declamation – it remains the charge
of those who hold public office to pass judgment on their fulfillment or violation, or to
see to their fulfillment themselves (as it states in article 87e of the Basic Law, according
to which the federal government has the duty of taking the ‘welfare of the whole’ into
account in regulating the railroad system).
Today we no longer even pose the question of competence for the common good and
its social location. Thus the semantics of elitist ideas in the social sciences has also
been purged of all positive connotations. Instead of elites, one prefers to speak – in
both journalism and political science – of the ‘political classes’.27 Why should we have
higher expectations of their competence for the common good than we do for the aver-
age citizen? It is symptomatic that political scientists around the world spend consid-
erable mental effort today on the question of whether and how one can distinguish
genuine public leadership from opportunism, mere opportunism from corruption, and
mere corruption from exploitation of office for the personal acquisition of wealth.28

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680 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

The old question of political theory, ‘In whose hands is the general good best kept?’,
seems to have lost its point, and for good reason. In a democracy, where authorization
to rule rests on electoral success, and electoral success on the votes of politically equal
citizens, normative reasons categorically prohibit the attempt to distinguish between
greater and lesser competence for making judgments relevant for the common good.
Exaggerating a bit (and disregarding the logical traps), we would not get beyond the
libertarian thesis that it damages the common good to talk about the common good
at all.
In light of the extraordinary difficulties that arise in applying operative common-good
criteria (that are specified in their social, temporal, substantive and personal aspects), and
in response to the danger of the detrimental consequences for liberty when pursuing the
common good through religious or authoritarian political regimes, pluralist political the-
ories have taken a strictly procedural approach to the idea of the common good. Accord-
ing to that approach, the general welfare is no more and no less than whatever the
political process brings forth as a binding outcome by adhering to constitutional-
democratic procedures. On this view, the common good is not the outcome of the action
of citizens oriented to the common good, but rather what emerges as the well-known
‘resultant’ of the dynamic interplay of economic, social, political and ideological forces
and contextual conditions that actually play a role in the public life of a society.29 The
rules of the game in a pluralist democracy, in other words, and not citizens who are moti-
vated by republican virtue and judicious insight, are what bring forth the common good
as a quantity that is never finalized, but always remains provisional, pending the outcome
of the next election. ‘Constitutional democracy as a codified framework is thus itself the
essential content of realizing the common good.’30
Such self-assured trust in process has become rare among today’s pluralists. For one,
‘normal’ process-guided politics often yield outcomes whose quality does not match the
idea of the common good, in the sense explicated above: namely, a common good requir-
ing that political outcomes (1) benefit all members of the political community (however
it might be conceived), (2) can later be assessed in retrospect as ‘right’ (and not rather as
regrettable), and (3) bring about, from a substantive perspective, an equal consideration
of values and interests. The empirical and normative literature on failed states, political
obstruction and the shutting-down of political regulatory capacities at the national and
European levels vividly illustrates how precarious the connection has become between
‘normal’ politics guided by institutional procedures, on the one hand, and results that can
be represented as serving the common good, on the other.
With the recent turn to common-good talk in politics, this confidence in an automatic
procedure for realizing the common good has come to an end. The fear is that the pro-
cedures might not be ‘good enough’ for reliably producing good outcomes. That concern
can express the desire of leading politicians: to rise above procedures that provide count-
less opportunities for vetoes and obstruction and criticize them ‘from above’, as it were,
in order better to serve the common good. Similarly, there are increasingly vocal and
widespread efforts today to free fundamental political decisions from the closed circle
of party competition and hand them over, at least for preliminary consideration, to com-
mittees and networks that function according to criteria of trust, reputation, personal
responsibility and professional merit.

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Offe 681

However, the procedures – party competition and party discipline, federalism,

functional representation in associations and unions, media coverage of the political
process, etc. – can also be criticized ‘from below’. To clarify this point, I would like to
draw on a distinction proposed by Philippe Schmitter.31 He maintains that what he
calls (for this very reason) the ‘post-liberal’ democracies of the OECD world are, con-
trary to civics primers, by no means governed by the majority of equally entitled cit-
izens. They are governed, rather, by two classes of citizens, the corporate actors and
organized social groups (the ‘secondary citizens’) on the one hand, and citizens as nat-
ural persons (the ‘primary citizens’) on the other hand. The one group controls the
themes, options, information, personnel and alternatives; the other reacts with its
votes, support and decisions about whom to join. Secondary citizens thereby rob pri-
mary citizens of their political competence and capacity for judgment, reducing them
to the status of clients and onlookers; primary citizens react to this with the well-
known symptoms of apathy, cynicism, feelings of powerlessness and alienation.32
Each of these two categories of citizens controls indispensable capacities that are not
available to the other class. Corporate actors are specialized for functions of aggrega-
tion, integration and representation, as well as the selection of elites, whereas the pri-
mary citizens or ‘citoyens’ have access to everyday experience (in contrast to
organizational archives), their own conscience (in contrast to a strategic position) and
‘social capital’ (in contrast to a body of functionaries) – a social capital from which
secondary citizens draw their energy without being able to produce it themselves.
If the leaders of ‘secondary citizens’, that is, of large organizations like political par-
ties and associations, deliberately forgo an interest-oriented, strategic mode of action,
then they may well be guilty of violating fiduciary obligations to their respective
constituencies. When primary citizens forgo such action, they are at least acting
expressively, and in the most favorable case they are even acting for the common
good; paradoxically, that sort of action is made easier for them by the fact that they
make decisions behind a ‘veil of insignificance’: given the certainty that their own
vote will not in any case decide an election, they can look beyond a self-interested
point of view without danger.33
Secondary and primary citizens confront each other as powerful organized interests
and unorganized public. But primary citizens react to the strategic action of secondary
citizens not only with apathetic non-involvement, but also with attempts at reappro-
priating their competence for political judgment and potential for action, of which sec-
ondary citizens have deprived them. They do so in the form of social and political
movements, networks, NGOs and self-help initiatives, in foundations and voluntary
activities. If nowhere else, then in such phenomena of weakly organized micro-
politics we find the social contexts in which the idea of the common good cannot be
a category mistake.
Translated by William Rehg

Notes
I thank Claus Offe and Barbara Fultner for helpful suggestions on this translation.
The research for this translation received no specific grant from any funding agency in the pub-
lic, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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682 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

The original was published as: ‘Wessen Wohl ist das Gemeinwohl?’ [Whose Good is the Com-
mon Good?], in Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther (eds) Die O¨ffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die
Vernunft der O¨ffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas [The Public Sphere of Reason and
the Reason of the Public Sphere] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 459–88.
1. Prior to its secularization in republican political theory since Machiavelli and Rousseau, the
concept of the common good was explicated only in Thomistic social philosophy; see Michael
A. Smith, Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian–Thomistic Tradition
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995).
2. The topic is common in conservative political critique, which likes to hold the media respon-
sible for weakening the government: ‘The press . . . contributes to the undermining of the
legitimacy of government. It denies to governments the prerogatives of sovereign power to
exercise discretion in the choice of alternatives . . . and to refuse demands out of concerns for
the public good’; Edward Shils, The Virtue of Civility (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1997).
3. Presse- und Informationsdienst der Bundesregierung [News and Information Service of the
Federal Government], bulletin no. 79 (10 December 1998): 958–9.
4. Robert E. Goodin, ‘Institutionalizing the Public Interest: The Defense of Deadlock and
Beyond’, American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 331–42.
5. Consequently, insofar as consensus (or ‘basic consensus’) refers to particular political con-
tents and not to laws and procedures, it provides neither a normatively reliable nor an empiri-
cally well-established guide for realizing the common good. Friedhelm Neidhardt has shown
that political decisions, once taken, can be accepted as legitimate even by those who did not
agree, before the decision, with the alternative that is finally chosen; see his ‘Formen und
Funktionen gesellschaftlichen Grundkonsensus’ [Forms and Functions of the Basic Social
Consensus], in Gunnar Folke Schuppert and Christian Bumke (eds) Bundesverfassungsgericht
und gesellschaftlicher Grundkonsens [The Federal Constitutional Court and the Basic Social
Consensus] (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), pp. 15–30.
6. Goodin, ‘Institutionalizing the Public Interest’, p. 341.
7. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1971).
8. This remark was made in response to anti-Semitic and xenophobic violence. [See ‘Schröder
fordert ‘‘Aufstand der Anständigen’’’ (Schröder demands ‘Uprising of Upstanding Citizens’),
Spiegel Online (10 April 2000).] The Spiegel report was accessed 21 March 2012 @: http://
www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,96537,00.html
9. E. W. Böckenförde, Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit: Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfas-
sungsrecht [State, Society, Freedom: Studies in Theory of Government and Constitutional
Law] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 60 ff.
10. Cf. Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss, ‘Democracy and Moral Resources’, in David Held (ed.)
Political Theory Today (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 143–71.
11. [‘Third way’ approaches in politics include the various attempts (e.g. by the Clinton Admin-
istration in the USA, or the Labour Party in the UK) to move beyond the opposition between
strong free-market approaches and socialism. Trans.]
12. [i.e. civil liberties, political rights and welfare rights; see T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and
Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). Trans.]
13. For a rich collection of communitarian positions and case studies of these tensions, see Amitai
Etzioni (ed.) Rights and the Common Good: The Communitarian Perspective (New York: St

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Offe 683

Martin’s Press, 1995), esp. the essays by Robert E. Goodin, ‘In Defense of the Nanny State’,
and William Damon, ‘Moral Guidance for Today’s Youth, in School and out’; also contribu-
tions to the periodical The Responsive Community.
14. See William Galston, ‘A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family’, in Etzioni (ed.)
Rights and the Common Good, pp. 139–49.
15. The thesis is defended by a leading intellectual fighting for corresponding social-political
reforms, Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New
York: Free Press, 1986).
16. See Peter Bleses, Claus Offe and Edgar Peter, ‘Öffentliche Rechtfertigungen auf dem parlamen-
tarischen ‘‘Wissensmarkt’’: Argumentstypen und Rechtfertigungsstrategien in sozialpolitischen
Bundestagsdebatten’ [Theories of Justification in the Parliamentary ‘Knowledge-Market’:
Types of Argument and Strategies of Justification in Social-Political Debates in the Bundestag],
Politische Vierteljahresschrift 38(3) (1997): 498–529.
17. These two justifying grounds – lack of self-interest and effectiveness of the interventions –
also hold for the application of paternalistic strategies in international relations, hence for
measures that involve economic and political-institutional development assistance for third-
world (and former second-world) countries, as well as those involving military humanitarian
interventions. On the first of these two criteria, objections arise for the First Gulf War; objec-
tions based on the second criterion arise in the case of the Kosovo intervention, where neither
the declared goal of the intervention (prevention of the displacement of the Kosovo popula-
tion) nor a lasting pacification of the ethno-territorial conflicts in the region could be achieved,
due to the inadequate deployment of military and political resources.
18. But possibly – going beyond humanity – even the entire cosmos or creation, living nature, or
specific parts of the latter, e.g. the great apes.
19. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes [Joy and Hope], in Austin P. Flannery, The
Documents of Vatican II (New York: Pillar Books–Costello, 1975), no. 26.
20. If one can conceptualize one’s social group as an isolated community of fate, exposed to
danger (in analogy to the crew and passengers of a ship at sea), then the precept of the common
good actually has a clear sense. From that perspective, it would be interesting to use the cri-
tique of utopia and ideology to investigate the topos of the isolated collective (e.g. in the sense
of the spaceship or the Robinsonade; cf. ‘Big Brother’) in contemporary mass media and the
discourse over ecological catastrophe (‘spaceship earth’).
21. For example, why should not the activists of one of the two major parties, who direct private
funds into the reserves of their political organization, have deserved the highest praise for their
‘common-good oriented’ engagement in favor of their party? One sees in this thought-
experiment that everything depends on the choice of the appropriate social frame of reference.
22. Cf. Edgar Grande and Burkhard Eberlein, ‘Der Aufstieg des Regulierungsstaates im Infra-
strukturbereich’ [The Rise of the Regulatory State in the Area of Infrastructure], in Roland
Czada and Hellmut Wollmann (eds) Von der Bonner zur Berliner Republik [From Bonn to the
Berlin Republic] (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999).
23. Naturally, such proposals contradict not only the principles of liberal political theory (which
decries a ‘democratic deficit’), but also principles of liberal economic theory, which since
Adam Smith proceeds from the axiom that the future common good is best served when no
one is concerned about it or is authorized to be concerned about it, and markets are able to
carry out their beneficial work without disturbance.

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684 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(7)

24. This triad is adapted from Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Die Quadratur des Kreises: Freiheit, Solidarität
und Wohlstand’ [Squaring the Circle: Freedom, Solidarity and Prosperity], Transit 6(12)
(1996): 9–10.
25. The problem of ‘economic’ justice is thus characterized by the question of whether a Pareto-
optimal equilibrium has been achieved at all; the problem of ‘social’ justice consists in which
equilibrium is realized.
26. For an English translation, to which I the translator have made some alterations to reflect cur-
rent English usage, see PSM-Data: Geschichte, Weimar Constitution, accessed 21 September
2009, @: http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php#Fifth%20Chapter%20:%20The%20
Economy
27. Cf. Klaus von Beyme, Die politische Klasse im Parteienstaat [The Political Class in Partoc-
racy] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).
28. For further literature, see Herfried Münkler, Karsten Fischer and Harald Bluhm, ‘Korruption und
Gemeinwohl’ [Corruption and the Common Good], Neue Rundschau 111(2) (2000): 91–102.
29. Ernst Fraenkel, Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien [Germany and the Western
Democracies] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991[1964]), p. 273.
30. Alexander Schwan, ‘Gemeinwohl’ [Common Good], in Staatslexikon: Recht, Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft [Encyclopedia of Political Science: Law, Economy and Society], 7th edn, ed.
Görres-Gesellschaft (Freiburg, Basel and Vienna: Herder, 1995), vol. 2, p. 859.
31. Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Organizations as (Secondary) Citizens’, in William Julius Wilson (ed.)
Sociology and the Public Agenda (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), pp. 143–63.
32. Cf. Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam (eds) Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling
the Trilateral Countries? (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 2000).
33. Cf. Geoff Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Elec-
toral Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); also Dietmar Braun,
‘Gemeinwohlorientierung im modernen Staat’ [The Orientation to the Common Good in the
Modern State], in Raymond Werle and Uwe Schimank (eds) Gesellschaftliche Komplexita¨t
und kollektive Handlungsfähigkeit [Social Complexity and Collective Agency] (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus, 2000).

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