In the excerpts, “the common good” is used in at least three distinct ways: as a rhetorical cover for statist power, as a legitimate object of constitutional self-government, and as the name of an organization. The term is never defined by the host; each guest supplies his own account.
Allison: the common good as oxymoron
John Allison, in a discussion of what he calls the philosophical fight for the future of America, divides the field between statists and classical liberals and libertarians. Asked by Bob Zadek to explain “statist,” Allison describes statists as people who believe in big government, believe government can solve all problems, and believe that the average person is stupid and that they, in the pursuit of the common good, need to make sure that we make good decisions. Zadek reframes this as the statists’ pursuit of their vision of the common good, and Allison accepts the correction: their vision of the common good. He characterizes statists as elitist power-lusters found on both the left and the right, with the right typically wanting to control personal life and the left wanting to take all your money, and identifies progressives as the most visible statists today John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Allison’s substantive claim is that the whole idea of the common good is an oxymoron, because there is nothing, practically speaking, that is equally good for everybody. Some things are good for one person and bad for another; many things are good for all but unequally good. When the idea that we are going to act in the common good displaces the individual, so that only the group matters, the result is group warfare — what is good for the unions, for the taxi drivers, for a given business — and in that world no individual has rights; groups have rights, and power-lusters appear to decide which group gets what. Zadek adds that such decisions are made politically rather than through market valuation or individual decision, and largely independent of any democratic process, and invokes public choice theory to suggest they are made to preserve the decision-makers’ own power. Allison agrees there is no objective test of goodness for 300 million people, and contrasts this with the Founding Fathers’ ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: each individual’s right to their own life, to the pursuit of their personal happiness, and to the product of their labor, with government’s role limited to protecting individual rights against force and fraud.
Wurman: the common good as constitutional object
Ilan Wurman, presenting a drafted constitution, places the common good at the center of his project rather than at its margins. Comparing his team’s approach to the progressive and libertarian constitutions, he says the founders’ Constitution was not libertarian: it protected liberty but also sought to enable self-government for the common good. Under the original Constitution, he notes, states could legislate over public welfare, health, safety and morals, and he describes the conservative animating principle as balancing self-government and liberty, two objectives in tension because self-governing majorities often infringe minority rights. He attributes the same concern to the founders, who cared about ordered liberty and about legislating for the common good The Conservative Constitution (2021).
Wurman’s institutional proposals give the phrase operative content. His Senate would have one senator per state — fifty senators — serving a single nine-year term and not up for reelection, and each senator would pledge by oath or affirmation to promote the common good and long-term welfare of the nation and not the interests of any party or class. He says the committee considered making Senate deliberation secret but rejected it as too far for some members, and notes that the actual United States Senate deliberated in secret for its first six years. Zadek observes that because senators would run only once, an angered electorate could do nothing about a senator who let them down, and asks what benefit publicity confers beyond learning from the debate; Wurman replies that Zadek took the words out of his mouth and that the objection was an optics problem, since the body was already aristocratic and its members ineligible for reelection. Wurman also says the drafters eschewed substantive political ends — no provisions on gay marriage or abortion — on the view that a constitution should set the structure and terms of deliberation for the common good, and that the Senate oath is meant to put a thumb on the scale against rent-seeking and partial interest, though he holds no illusion that senators will stop seeking rents. He connects this to Madison’s treatment of faction in Federalist 10 and to public choice theory, which he says shows factions remain effective because they are intensely interested in one issue while the public is only diffusely interested.
Howard: Common Good as an organization
In a later episode, the phrase appears as an institution rather than a doctrine. Zadek introduces Philip K. Howard as the founder of Common Good, described as a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws so that Americans can use common sense in making their daily choices, and as the author of Not Accountable, which Zadek says argues that public employee unions undermine democracy and should be — and, Zadek adds, already are — unconstitutional Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023). The excerpt does not record Howard’s own account of the common good, and the discussion that follows concerns public employee unions, collective bargaining, pension liabilities and government transparency.
Across episodes: no development
The excerpts show the same term used to opposite effect in two 2021 and 2015 episodes — Allison rejecting the common good as an oxymoron that licenses group warfare, Wurman making it the object of constitutional deliberation and the subject of a senatorial oath — while the 2023 episode uses it only as the name of Howard’s organization. The excerpts do not show either position being revised in light of the other, and no guest responds to another’s treatment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no definition of the common good offered by Zadek himself, and no exchange in which Allison and Wurman’s positions are brought into contact. Howard’s own understanding of the phrase, beyond the description of his organization, is not stated in the excerpt. The constitutional text Wurman discusses is not quoted beyond the oath language and the amended postal power, and the excerpts do not report how the drafting committee resolved its debate over secret deliberation.