The Common Good, Page 3

Inevitably the conversation about the common good will engage and manage differences of opinion (Tam, 1998). That is the work—airing, engaging, and negotiating differences—that constructs and revises the common good.

A classical sociologist (Ferdinand Tönnies, 2001, p. 52) made a trenchant observation about how the common good creates a community: “At the national level, as a whole society, people remain separate despite everything that unites them, whereas in community they remain together despite what separates them.”

One might conclude, on the basis of such an insight, that public schools are well positioned to cultivate the common good wherever (as in Ohio) they are embedded in the local community. Indeed, Ohio communities have succeeded in retaining local schools and preserving over 600 locally governed districts. This legacy is an important asset for public engagement that some states have entirely lost.

Finally, some participants in (and beneficiaries of) contemporary republics repudiate the construct of the common good. For instance, some (e.g., Friedman, 2001; Hayek, 1944; Rand & Branden, 1986) argue that, with respect to “the good,” only actual individual persons exist. Hence, the only real good is private, and the common good is a dangerous illusion. Rand and Branden (1986) argued as follows:

There is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships. (p. 20)

The active and evolving conversation about the common good, it seems, is the opportunity for anyone to make reasoned arguments of any sort, even against the common good itself.