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14 books match the query 'Common good'

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A New Constitutionalism

Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society

Edited by Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In The New Constitutionalism, seven distinguished scholars develop an innovative perspective on the power of institutions to shape politics and political life.

Believing that constitutionalism needs to go beyond the classical goal of limiting the arbitrary exercise of political power, the contributors argue that it should—and can—be designed to achieve economic efficiency, informed democratic control, and other valued political ends. More broadly, they believe that political and social theory needs to turn away from the negativism of critical theory to consider how a good society should be "constituted" and to direct the work of designing institutions that can constitute a "good polity," in both the economic and civic senses.

Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan begin with an overview of constitutionalist theory and a discussion of the new constitutionalism within the broader intellectual and historical context of political and social thought. Charles Anderson, James Ceaser, and the editors then offer different interpretations of the central issues regarding institutional design in a constitutionalist social science, consider various ways of performing the task, and discuss the inadequacy of recent political science to the job it ought to be doing. The book concludes with essays by Ted Lowi, Cass Sunstein and Edwin Haefele which apply these themes to the American regime.

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Architecture and the Right to Heal

Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster

Esra Akcan

Duke University Press, 2025

In Architecture and the Right to Heal, Esra Akcan calls for architecture to take an active role in healing communities affected by socioeconomic, political, and environmental disasters. Akcan frames these processes by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to climate change mitigation and transitional justice. Focusing on lands held by the former Ottoman Empire, Akcan highlights the ongoing struggle to heal after internal social, state, and business-led violence ranging from forced disappearance to mass extinction. Putting forth the concept of resettler nationalism as a source of displacement and partition, she argues that while architecture and urban planning have been weaponized to segregate and subjugate minorities throughout history, they could instead confront systemic violence and make accountability and reparations possible. For Akcan, healing constitutes a matter of rights as well as a holistic notion of justice that addresses the intersections of social, global, and environmental issues and one can be achieved through architecture. By locating spaces of political and ecological harm, Akcan advocates for healing on individual, communal, and planetary levels.

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Beyond Self-Interest

Edited by Jane J. Mansbridge

University of Chicago Press, 1990

A dramatic transformation has begun in the way scholars think about human nature. Political scientists, psychologists, economists, and evolutionary biologists are beginning to reject the view that human affairs are shaped almost exclusively by self-interest—a view that came to dominate social science in the last three decades.

In Beyond Self-Interest, leading social scientists argue for a view of individuals behavior and social organization that takes into account the powerful motivations of duty, love, and malevolence. Economists who go beyond "economic man," psychologists who go beyond stimulus-response, evolutionary biologists who go beyond the "selfish gene," and political scientists who go beyond the quest for power come together in this provocative and important manifesto.

The essays trace, from the ancient Greeks to the present, the use of self-interest to explain political life. They investigate the differences between self-interest and the motivations of duty and love, showing how these motivations affect behavior in "prisoners' dilemma" interactions. They generate evolutionary models that explain how altruistic motivations escape extinction.

They suggest ways to model within one individual the separate motivations of public spirit and self-interest, investigate public spirit and self-interest, investigate public spirit in citizen and legislative behavior, and demonstrate that the view of democracy in existing Constitutional interpretations is not based on self-interest. They advance both human evil and mothering as alternatives to self-interest, this last in a penetrating feminist critique of the "contract" model of human interaction.

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Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Fate of the Commons

Bruce R. Sievers

University Press of New England, 2010

Among the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century is that of sustaining a healthy civil society, which depends upon managing the tension between individual and collective interests. Bruce R. Sievers explores this issue by investigating ways to balance the public and private sides of modern life in a manner that allows realization of the ideal of individual freedom and, at the same time, makes possible the effective pursuit of the common good. He traces the development of civil society from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, analyzes its legacy for modern political life, and explores how historical trends in the formation of civil society and philanthropy aid or impede our achievement of public goods in the modern era.

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DeVoto’s West

History, Conservation, and the Public Good

Bernard DeVoto

Ohio University Press, 2005

Social commentator and preeminent Western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. At his death in 1955, DeVoto had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. But he was most famous for his eloquent writing that advocated conservation of America's prairies, rangeland, forests, mountains, canyons, and deserts.DeVoto's West: Essays on History, Conservation, and the Public Good showcases the complexity, depth, and breadth of DeVoto's thinking. Editor Edward K. Muller introduces these twenty-two essays (many of which originally appeared in Harper's renowned column The Easy Chair) that passionately and coherently advocate federal control for vast tracts of public land. DeVoto addressed many issues, including the plundering of resources by absentee eastern corporations, Westerners' conflicted relationship to exploitation, and the degradation of the national parks. He believed that conservation of natural resources in the West required government control of public lands against livestock associations, timber interests, and their congressional allies who plotted the privatization of the national forests and the extraction of resources in the national parks.DeVoto's West collects the best of DeVoto's conservation pieces for the first time. It will introduce a new generation to prose that has retained its relevance and remains a remarkably current and timely argument for protecting public lands. Bernard DeVoto was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1897. He spent his adult life in the East, first teaching English at Northwestern University, Chicago, then living in New York, and finally settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the subject of an acclaimed biography, The Uneasy Chair, by Wallace Stegner.

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For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good

A Biography of Jean Price-Mars

Celucien L. Joseph

Vanderbilt University Press, 2026

Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) was a doctor, teacher, diplomat, and one of Haiti’s most visionary intellectuals. This biography offers the first comprehensive look at his writings, revealing a thinker dedicated to the transformation of Haiti, the advancement of his people, and the broader Black Diaspora.

From his rigorous education and intellectual formation to his engagement with social, political, and cultural issues, Price-Mars championed women’s empowerment, gender equality, and transformative leadership. He reinterpreted the Haitian Revolution and Dessalines’ legacy while articulating Pan-Africanist ideals that connected Haiti to the wider Black world.

A modernist scholar and pluralist, Price-Mars affirmed the validity of all religions while remaining independent of any single tradition. His humanistic spirituality and radical epistemology reimagined race, culture, and nation-building, offering a new vision for Haiti and the possibilities of Black achievement across the Americas.

This book presents a full portrait of Price-Mars as a thinker, reformer, and moral visionary, and a man whose lifelong mission was nothing less than the birth of a new people and the pursuit of the common good.

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Global Common Good

Intercultural Perspectives on a Just and Ecological Transformation

Edited by Michael Reder, Verena Risse, Katharina Hirschbrunn, and Georg Stoll

Campus Verlag, 2015

Global challenges such as poverty, climate change, and economic crises are all problems that the global community must face collectively. But in order to do so successfully, we need to engage in a continued intercultural dialogue on alternative approaches to development that are ethically justifiable, politically acceptable, and ecologically sustainable. To this end, the Institute for Social and Development Studies at the Munich School of Philosophy in cooperation with MISEREOR, the German Catholic Bishops’ Organization for Development Cooperation, invited scholars from across the world to define and explore an overarching goal: the global common good. This book represents the product of their efforts; in it, contributors investigate normative ideals, analyze obstacles that prevent the realization of these ideals, and propose paths for global transformation.

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Reconstructing the Commercial Republic

Constitutional Design after Madison

Stephen L. Elkin

University of Chicago Press, 2006

James Madison is the thinker most responsible for laying the groundwork of the American commercial republic. But he did not anticipate that the propertied class on which he relied would become extraordinarily politically powerful at the same time as its interests narrowed. This and other flaws, argues Stephen L. Elkin, have undermined the delicately balanced system he constructed. In Reconstructing the Commercial Republic, Elkin critiques the Madisonian system, revealing which of its aspects have withstood the test of time and which have not.

The deficiencies Elkin points out provide the starting point for his own constitutional theory of the republic—a theory that, unlike Madison’s, lays out a substantive conception of the public interest that emphasizes the power of institutions to shape our political, economic, and civic lives. Elkin argues that his theory should guide us toward building a commercial republic that is rooted in a politics of the public interest and the self-interest of the middle class. He then recommends specific reforms to create this kind of republic, asserting that Americans today can still have the lives a commercial republic is intended to promote: lives with real opportunities for economic prosperity, republican political self-government, and individual liberty.

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Strike for the Common Good

Fighting for the Future of Public Education

Rebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2020

In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy.

Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools.

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The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy

Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching

Martin Rhonheimer

Catholic University of America Press, 2013

The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy offers a rich collection of essays in political philosophy by Swiss philosopher Martin Rhonheimer. Like his other books in both ethical theory and applied ethics, which have recently been published in English, the essays included are distinguished by the philosophical rigor and meticulous attention to the primary and secondary literature of the various topics discussed

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The Political Economy of Distributism

Property, Liberty, and the Common Good

Alexander William Salter

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

In recent years, prominent scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians have advocated reforming America’s economic model to embrace “common-good capitalism.” Catholic social teaching is a major influence on this movement. Is common-good capitalism compatible with the historical American commitments to private property rights and ordered liberty? What resources from Catholic social teaching can help orient free enterprise towards the common good? This book is the first scholarly inquiry into these exciting new questions. We can better understand common-good capitalism by exploring the political economy of distributism. Formulated in the early 20th century by prominent Catholic intellectuals such as Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, distributism emphasizes the importance of widely dispersed property ownership for human flourishing. Distributist thinkers, opposed both to capitalism and socialism, sought a humane approach to politics and economics that reflected the truths of Catholic social teaching. Some of the distributists’ claims about markets and government must be revised in light of contemporary social science. Nevertheless, their political-economic vision contains profound truths about the human condition, which social scientists would be unwise to ignore. Distributism’s insights about the nature of liberty and the social foundations of human dignity can improve ongoing conversations among economists, political scientists, and philosophers. The Political Economy of Distributism explores distributism both as a research program and a blueprint for political-economic reform. As many are reconsidering the relationship between markets and government, this timely book demonstrates the perennial relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition to public affairs. Academics, public servants, policy experts, and concerned citizens can all benefit from this timely study of common-good capitalism’s prospects.

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The Politics of Value

Three Movements to Change How We Think about the Economy

Jane L. Collins

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The Great Recession not only shook Americans’ economic faith but also prompted powerful critiques of economic institutions. This timely book explores three movements that gathered force after 2008: the rise of the benefit corporation, which requires social responsibility and eschews share price as the best metric for success; the emergence of a new group, Slow Money, that fosters peer-to-peer investing; and the 2011 Wisconsin protests against a bill restricting the union rights of state workers.

Each case shows how the concrete actions of a group of citizens can prompt us to reflect on what is needed for a just and sustainable economic system. In one case, activists raised questions about the responsibilities of business, in the second about the significance of local economies, and in the third about the contributions of the public sector. Through these movements, Jane L. Collins maps a set of cultural conversations about the types of investments and activities that contribute to the health of the economy. Compelling and persuasive, The Politics of Value offers a new framework for viewing economic value, one grounded in thoughtful assessment of the social division of labor and the relationship of the state and the market to civil society.

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Unquiet Americans

U.S. Catholics, Moral Truth, and the Preservation of Civil Liberties

Gerard V. Bradley

St. Augustine's Press, 2013

Before the Second Vatican Council, America’s Catholics operated largely as a coherent voting bloc, usually in connection with the Democratic Party. Their episcopal leaders generally spoke for Catholics in political matters; at least, where America’s bishops asserted themselves in public affairs there was little audible dissent from the faithful.

More than occasionally, the immigrant Church’s eagerness to demonstrate its patriotic bona fides furthered its tendency to speak with one voice about national matters, and in line with the broader societal consensus. And, notwithstanding the considerable conflict which Catholics encountered, and generated, in American political life, there was before the Council broad agreement in American culture about the centrality of Biblical morality to the success of Americans’ experiment with republican government.

In other words: before the Council, American Catholics’ relationship to the political common good was mediated, somewhat uncritical, and insulated from conflict (both within and without the Church) over such fundamental matters as protection of innocent life, marriage and family life, and (to a lesser extent) religious liberty.

This has all changed since the mid-1960s. For the first time in the Church’s pilgrimage on these shores, controversial questions about the basic moral requirements of the political common good are front and center for America’s Catholics. These questions require Catholics to confront matters which heretofore they either took for granted, read off from the background culture, or which they left to the bishops to handle. But the Council Fathers rightly recognized that Jesus calls upon a formed and informed laity to act as leaven in the public realm, to bring Gospel values to the temporal sphere. In this book of essays touching upon Catholic social doctrine, the truth about human equality and political liberty, and religious faith as it bears upon public life and the public engagement of lay Catholics, Gerard Bradley supplies indispensable aid to those seeking to answer Jesus’ call.

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Walking On Sand

The Story of an Immigrant Son and the Forgotten Art of Public Service

Rocco C Siciliano

University of Utah Press, 2004

Rocco C. Siciliano broke new ground as the first Italian-American to serve in the White House as an assistant to the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. At 31, "Ike’s Youngest" attained a prominence not suggested in his humble beginnings in Salt Lake City, Utah. But his upbringing in the Mormon-dominated community, where he balanced the heritage of his striving immigrant parents with his own aspirations for success, prepared him for a wide variety of service. This service includes leading a special weapons platoon in the 10th Mountain Division in World War II, bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to meet with President Eisenhower, and becoming a recognized business leader in California.

Siciliano used his expertise in labor, personnel management, and business to contribute substantively to the J. Paul Getty Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the "Volcker" Commission on Public Service, among others.

The variety of Siciliano’s experiences reinvigorates our understanding of the forgotten art of public service. Walking on Sand emphasizes the role that public service can play for corporations, communities, states, and the nation. This story is a gift from the Greatest Generation to the many people who serve America today and will serve her tomorrow.

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