The Common Good

By Dan Hugger

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

On June 19, the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Its museum, featuring exhibits across four floors, is organized around four themes that shaped the Obamas, the Obama presidency, and the American people. They include “Toward a More Perfect Union,” “The People’s House,” “We the People,” and “Working for the Common Good.” The common good theme shaped the Obama administration from the very beginning. On January 20, 2009, President Obama would invoke the common good in his inaugural address:

 

The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

 

The nation was then still in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, which had come to a head with the bankruptcy of the financial services company Lehman Brothers in September of that year and would become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential campaign. The George W. Bush administration, the Federal Reserve, and Congress would pursue a series of costly interventions to mitigate the crisis and stimulate an economic recovery. Most controversially were government interventions such as loans, asset purchases, and injections of equity to save private corporations judged “too big to fail.” This struck many Americans at the time, on both the left and the right, as favoring the prosperous over the populace, and economic metrics over human need.

 

It was an ideal time for the recovery of the language of the common good.

 

A decade and a half later, we are now in the midst of a new attempt to recover the same language on the American right, and the New York Times has noticed. Elisabeth Zerofsky, writing on the recent ideological struggles within the Heritage Foundation, reported:

 

According to [Richard] Stern [former director of Heritage’s budget center], [Heritage President Kevin] Roberts began to talk, around the office, not about individual liberty but about the “common good” — not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you “ought.” Roberts adopted what Stern described as a “policy sweep,” a push not for smaller but for larger government, with more regulatory powers. One of his former chiefs of staff, Stern recalled, liked to say that the most appropriate limit on the government was no limit.

 

Andrew T. Walker, dean of the School of Theology and professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at Southern Seminary, while declining to comment on Zerofsky’s reporting, argued on X that this passage:

 

seems to helpfully capture the entire “fight on the right” as a fundamental, zero-sum dispute: whether there is such a thing as the “common good”—and, if so, what its substance and scope are. How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today’s conservative spectrum. The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.

 

On a superficial level, it seems that Walker’s assertion could be right, but as Lord Acton said, “Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality, as the initiated know it.” Employing the language of the common good, even doing so with great frequency, is not actually the same as having a thick conception of the common good. Obama, for example, would steer the nation through the 2008 financial crisis using government interventions like those of his predecessor. The Affordable Care Act, a signature achievement of his administration, required employers to provide no-cost birth control coverage to employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who would spend over a decade fighting this mandate to preserve their religious freedom, would surely have a word to say about whether the mandate really did further the common good.

 

Just as there are reasons to suspect the thickness of Obama’s commitment to the common good, so with many figures on the “new right” who loudly proclaim themselves its defender. In his 2023 book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, makes the case for using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Chris Rufo, senior fellow and director of the Logos Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, has argued that politics requires holding a tension between Aristotelian virtue and Machiavellian virtù. Such frank admissions open the possibility that the use of the language of the “common good” by the new right is cynical.

 

Cynical or not, the definitions of the common good offered by many on the new right as the controversy unfurled across X for the past week were both minimal and elastic. The political commentator Michael Knowles offered up the following definition: “It’s the kind of good that is not diminished when shared.” This definition has its roots in the classical world but has three deficiencies. First, it is a definition of a kind of good and not the common good as such. Second, it is essentially the same as what in modern economics is known as a “public good.” These goods and services, because of their non-excludable and non-rivalrous nature, are usually, although not always, provided by the government and paid for by taxation. The classic example is the lighthouse whose light is seen and shared by all. But the most damning of all, Knowles’ definition ignores more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection on the common good in the Christian West.

 

While no institution or tradition has a monopoly on the common good, the Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years, developing and extending its conception of it and bridging the gap between the reflections of the ancients and application in the modern world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes, defines the common good as, “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (section 1906).

 

The catechism further explains that the common good consists of three essential elements. First, respect for “the person as such” which obligates public authorities “to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person” ( section 1907). Second, “the social well-being and development of the group itself,” which obligates public authorities “to arbitrate … between various particular interests … [and] make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (section 1908). Lastly, to secure peace “the stability and security of a just order” which “presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defence” (section 1909).

 

Taking this mature, theologically informed perspective dissolves the “zero-sum dispute” that seemed so clear to Walker. If a thick conception of the common good includes “respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person,” the critics of the new right appropriation of the language of the common good are not necessarily enemies of the common good itself.

 

The language Stern heard Roberts employ at Heritage “not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you ought,” is another key to dissolving seeming tension. The turn of phrase is originally Lord Acton’s, truncated to obscure its true meaning:

 

The Catholic notion, defining liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought, denies that general interests can supersede individual rights. It condemns, therefore, the theory of the ancient as well as of the modern state.

 

Debates about the common good should not be framed as the common good versus the individual. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to the realization of the common good. Writing for the Daily Wire days later, Walker, on further reflection, acknowledged this reality. “We must assert what no healthy society can do without: a true account of the human person, the priority of the family, respect for human rights, and the rule of law,” he wrote. This rejection of the zero-sum new right and postliberal framing of the debate is the first step to the restoration of the common good.

 

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church lists the four permanent principles at the heart of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. It does so for good reason. None of them can be realized without the others. When postliberals and others in the new right devalue the dignity of the human person by celebrating the violent clerical fascist regime of Francisco Franco, undermine subsidiarity by arguing for the military occupation of American cities, and deny the demands of solidarity by devaluing and dismissing the concerns of their fellow citizens with their political program, they discredit the common good they claim to want to uphold.