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126-484: Common good is a political and philosophical concept. Common Good may also refer to: Common good The concept of common good developed through the work of political theorists, moral philosophers, and public economists, including Thomas Aquinas , Niccolò Machiavelli , John Locke , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , James Madison , Adam Smith , Karl Marx , John Stuart Mill , John Maynard Keynes , John Rawls , and many other thinkers. In contemporary economic theory,

252-614: A cognitivist account of the common good. One of the earliest references in Christian literature to the concept of the common good is found in the Epistle of Barnabas : "Do not live entirely isolated, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were already [fully] justified, but gather instead to seek together the common good." The concept is strongly present in Augustine of Hippo 's magnum opus City of God . Book XIX of this,

378-451: A common good is any good which is rivalrous yet non-excludable , while the common good, by contrast, arises in the subfield of welfare economics and refers to the outcome of a social welfare function . Such a social welfare function, in turn, would be rooted in a moral theory of the good (such as utilitarianism ). Social choice theory aims to understand processes by which the common good may or may not be realized in societies through

504-591: A free content work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0 ( license statement/permission ). Text taken from Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good?​ , 80–81, UNESCO. UNESCO. Polis#The polis in Ancient Greek philosophy Polis ( pl. : poleis) means 'city' in Ancient Greek . The Modern Greek word πόλη ( polē ) is a direct descendant of the ancient word and roughly means 'city' or an urban place. However,

630-527: A genos , "family"; the Italics, a gens . Corresponding to Greek phratry , a group of families, was the Italic curia . Corresponding to Greek phyle , a tribe of multiple phratries, was the tribus . The comparison of IE cultures is a solid technique, but it is not enough to develop a solid model of "the ancient city", which must take historical disparities into consideration. From the analogy Coulanges weaves

756-473: A sovereign state . As a strict rule, the definition fails on its exceptions. A polis may not be urban at all, as was pointed out by Thucydides regarding the "polis of the Lacedaemonians", that it was "composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas". Moreover, around the five villages of Lacedaemon, which had been placed in formerly Achaean land, were the villages of the former Achaeans, called

882-500: A "cohesion and unity" that "result[s] from the common feelings of pleasure and pain which you get when all members of a society are glad or sorry for the same successes and failures." Plato's student Aristotle , considered by many to be the father of the idea of a common good, uses the concept of "the common interest" ( to koinei sympheron in Greek ) as the basis for his distinction between his three "right" constitutions, which are in

1008-484: A city nor an acropolis, but all the historiographers referred to it as a polis. The rule of the city-state persisted until late in the 20th century, when the accumulation of mass data and sponsored databases made possible searches and comparisons of multiple sources not previously possible, a few of which are mentioned in this article. Hansen reports that the Copenhagen Centre found it necessary to "dissociate

1134-458: A common good plays a role in Confucian political philosophy , which on most interpretations stresses the importance of the subordination of individual interests to group or collective interests, or at the very least, the mutual dependence between the flourishing of the individual and the flourishing of the group. In Islamic political thought , many modern thinkers have identified conceptions of

1260-590: A community politically or to enlarge the buildings in which it resides. Finally in the Classical Period and later, the -z-/-s- extension began to be used, as evidenced in Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch: sunoik-izein, "combine or join into one city", with its nouns sunoik-isis and sunoik-ismos, "founding a city", from which the English scholarly term synoecism derives. All poleis looked back to

1386-489: A different polis. These are three. A polis has a particular location, population, and constitution ( politeia ). For example, if a polis moves en masse, receives a different form of government, or an influx of new population, it is not the same polis. Aristotle expresses two main definitions of polis, neither of which is possible as stated. In the second (see below for the first) a polis is "a collection of citizens...." (Book III I 2). If they already are citizens, then there

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1512-514: A federation with binding membership, etc. The Perioeci were included in this category. When the models are set aside as primary sources (which they never were) it is clear that historiography must be founded on what the authors and inscriptions say. Moreover, there is a time window for the active polis. The fact that polis was used in the Middle Ages to translate civitas does not make these civitates into poleis. The Copenhagen Study uses quite

1638-521: A few evidential indications of a probable polis, in addition to the manuscripts and inscriptions, some of which are victory in the Panhellenic Games, participation in the games, having an official agent, or proxenos, in another polis, presence of civic subdivisions, presence of citizens and a Constitution (Laws). Modern theorists of the polis are theorizing under a major disadvantage: their topic has not been current for thousands of years. It

1764-613: A precedent of jumping over the wall in mockery of it. There were no families, no phratries, no tribes, except among the already settled Latins, Greeks, and Etruscans. The warriors acquired a social structure by kidnapping the nearby Italic Sabines (" the Rape of the Sabine Women ") and settling the matter by agreeing on a synoecism with the Sabines also, who were Latins. Alba Longa was ignored, later subdued. The first four tribes were not

1890-518: A priori assumptions as though they were substantiated facts and were not the pure speculations they actually are. One of the most influential of these translative models was the French La Cite antique , translated again into English "the ancient city", by Coulanges. Only to read the title gives credibility to the idea that there is a model type inclusive of all ancient cities, and that the author need only present it without proving it. This type

2016-519: A public-interest perspective on policymaking, public choice analysis adopts a private-interest perspective in order to identify how the objectives of policymakers affect policy outcomes. Public choice analysis thus diagnoses deviations from the common good resulting from activities such as rent-seeking . In The Logic of Collective Action , Mancur Olson argues that public goods will tend to be underprovided due to individuals' incentives to free-ride . Anthony Downs provided an application of this logic to

2142-425: A set of minimal normative criteria of rationality and fairness. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem further demonstrates that non-dictatorial voting systems are inevitably subject to strategic manipulation of outcomes. William H. Riker articulates the standard public choice interpretation of social choice theory, arguing that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem "forces us to doubt that the content of 'social welfare' or

2268-431: A similar liberty for others". The Second Principle of Justice provides that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged such that "(a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle" ( the difference principle ); and "(b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of 'fair equality of opportunity ' ". The idea of

2394-409: A single dimension ensures a Condorcet winner . Moreover, many of Riker's empirical claims have been refuted. Public choice theory (sometimes called "positive political theory") applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests inform political activities. Whereas welfare economics, in line with classical political economy, typically assumes

2520-500: A single site, and the single city belongs to its citizens in common." Aristotle's description fits the landscape archaeology of the poleis in the Copenhagen Study well. The study defines settlement patterns of first-, second-, and third-order. The third, dispersed , is individual oikiai distributed more or less evenly throughout the countryside. The other two orders are nucleated, or clustered. 2nd-order settlements are

2646-456: A social welfare function. The choice of a social welfare function is rooted in an ethical theory. A utilitarian social welfare function weights the well-being of each individual equally, while a Rawlsian social welfare function only considers the welfare of the least well-off individual. Neoclassical economic theory provides two conflicting lenses for thinking about the genesis of the common good, two distinct sets of microfoundations. On one view,

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2772-486: A societal level". In a non-economic sense, the term is often used to describe something that is useful for the public generally, such as education, although this is not a "public good" in the economic sense. However, services like education exhibit jointness of supply , i.e. the situation in which the cost of supplying a good to many users is the same, or nearly the same, as supplying it to one user. Public goods also exhibit jointness of supply, albeit with no diminishment of

2898-446: A synoecism under any name as their source of politeia . Not all settlements were poleis; for example, an emporion, or "market reserved for foreign trade", might be part of a polis or out on its own. In any particular synoecism recorded by either ancient or modern epigraphists a major problem has been to fit the model credibly to the instance. For example, Thucydides refers to Spartan lack of urbanity as "not synoecised", where synoecism

3024-422: A tale of imaginary history. Families, he asserts, originally lived dispersed and alone (a presumption of Aristotle as well). When the population grew to a certain point, families joined into phratries. Further growth caused phratries to join into tribes, and then tribes into a city. In the city the ancient tribes remained sacrosanct. The city was actually a confederacy of ancient tribes. Coulange's tale, based on

3150-456: Is a core element of his appeal for greater care for "our common home". In contemporary American politics , language of the common good (or public wealth) is sometimes adopted by political actors on the progressive left to describe their values. Jonathan Dolhenty argues that one should distinguish in American politics between the common good, which may "be shared wholly by each individual in

3276-429: Is actually a lessening of unity and would destroy the state. The individual is actually most united and effective; the polis the least. To take away the property and therefore the powers of the individual diminishes the state to nothing, as it is composed of citizens, and those citizens have been rendered null and void by the removal of their effectiveness. As an example Aristotle gives a plot of land, which owned by one man

3402-512: Is also optimal for society. On the other hand, economic theory typically points to social gains from competition as a rationale for the use of markets. Thus, Smith described the " invisible hand ," whereby the mechanism of the market converts individuals' self-interested activity into gains for society. This insight is formalized in the First Theorem of Welfare Economics . However, economic theory also points to market failures , including

3528-640: Is based on the ancient practice of translating polis in Greek literature to civitas (early form of city) in Latin literature and vice versa. Coulanges' confidence that the Greek and Italic cities were the same model was based on the then newly discovered Indo-European language : "Go back as far as we may in the history of the Indo-European race, of which the Greeks and Italians are branches,...." The Greeks had

3654-414: Is carefully tended, but owned by the whole community belongs to no one and is untended. The ideal state therefore is impossible, a mere logical construct accounting for some of the factors, but failing of others, which Aristotle's examples suffice to demonstrate. For example, in some hypothetical place of no polis, a buyer would apply to an individual builder for a house. In an ideal polis, he would apply to

3780-574: Is highly critical. The Theory of the State is not so much political by today's definition. The politics are covered by the New Plan. The topic of the Old Plan is rather society , and is generally presented today in sociology and cultural anthropology . At the end of Book III, however, Aristotle encounters certain problems of definition that he cannot reconcile through theorization and has to abandon

3906-399: Is likely not going to privilege any one class of people, but rather develop a scheme of justice that treats all fairly. In particular, Rawls claims that those in the original position would all adopt a "maximin" strategy which would maximize the prospects of the least well-off individual or group. In this sense, Rawls's understanding of the common good is intimately tied with the well-being of

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4032-434: Is no need for anyone to collect to create a polis, as it already exists. If they are not citizens then they cannot be defined as a polis and cannot act as such. Aristotle's only consistent meaning is that at the moment of collecting together a population creates a polis of which they are now citizens. This moment of creation, however long it might be, is a logical necessity; otherwise, the citizenship recedes indefinitely into

4158-409: Is not left to the moderns to redefine polis as though it were a living institution. All that remains to ask is how the ancients defined it. It is not to be redefined now; for example, a polis is not a list of architectural features based on ruins. Any community might have those. Moderns can only ask, what did the ancient Greeks think a polis is. Whatever they thought must per force be so, as they invented

4284-445: Is not whether poleis can be found to fit a particular model (some usually can), but whether the model covers all the poleis, which, apparently, no model ever has, even the ancient ones. The re-defining process continues. The Copenhagen study rejects either model and proposes instead the microstate. Some few scholars have become totally cynical, rejecting the idea that any solution has been or can be found. This argument places polis in

4410-406: Is the creation of common living quarters (see above). Here apparently it means only the building of a central urban area. The reader of Plutarch knows that another synoecism existed, one instituted by Lycurgus, founder of the military state. The single overall synoecism is apparently double, one for the facilities, missing in this story, and one for the constitution. He uses the same word to describe

4536-463: Is the same as the goal for a flourishing human being, namely, to be a philosopher king , ruled by the highest good, Reason , rather than one of Plato's four lesser goods: honor-seeking, money-making, pleasure-seeking, or empassioned addiction. For Plato, the best political order is one in which the entire society submits to the dictates of the leaders' faculty of Reason, even communistically holding possessions, wives, and children in common, creating

4662-440: Is to know what information to select for a model and what to neglect as probably irrelevant. Classical studies of the last few hundred years have been relatively stable in their views of the polis, relying basically on just a few models: the concept of a city-state, and Fustel de Coulange's model of the ancient city. However, no model ever seems to resolve all the paradoxes or provide for every newly considered instance. The question

4788-475: The end goal of human life. " [T]he common good [is] the good of all people and of the whole person... The human person cannot find fulfilment in himself, that is, apart from the fact that he exists "with" others and "for" others " (#165; italics original). "The goal of life in society is in fact the historically attainable common good" (#168). The Roman Catholic International Theological Commission drew attention to these two partly different understandings of

4914-531: The Ancient Greeks , the Common Good was the flourishing of the hierarchical network of people, known as the polis (one's city, or state). The phrase "common good" then, does not appear in texts of Plato , but instead the phrase "the good of a city". In The Republic , Plato's character Socrates contends repeatedly that a particular common goal exists in politics and society, and that that goal

5040-527: The Center for American Progress , the American political understanding of the common good has grown in recent times. The liberal magazine The Nation and the Rockridge Institute , among others, have identified the common good as a salient political message for progressive candidates. In addition, non-partisan advocacy groups like Common Good are championing political reform efforts to support

5166-540: The Perioeci ("dwellers round"). They had been left as supposedly free poleis by the invaders, but they were subject to and served the interests of the Dorian poleis. They were not city-states, failing the criterion of sovereignty. Lacedaemon by the city-state rule thus falls short of being a polis. The earlier Achaean acropolis stood at the edge of the valley and was decrepit and totally unused. Lacedaemon had neither

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5292-540: The original position , Rawls defends two particular principles of justice by arguing that these are the positions reasonable persons would choose were they to choose principles from behind a veil of ignorance. Such a "veil" is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves so they cannot tailor principles to their own advantage. According to Rawls, ignorance of these details about oneself will lead to principles that are fair to all. If an individual does not know how he will end up in his own conceived society, he

5418-497: The "public", "common", or "general" good as closely tied with justice and declared that justice is the end of government and civil society; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood "the common good" ( le bien commun , in French ) to be the object of a society's general will and the highest end pursued by government. Though these thinkers differed significantly in their views of what the common good consists in, as well as over what

5544-490: The 'public interest' can ever be discovered by amalgamating individual value judgments. It even leads us to suspect that no such thing as the 'public interest' exists, aside from the subjective (and hence dubious) claims of self-proclaimed saviors." Thus, Riker defends a "liberal" conception of democracy, which centers on the role of constitutional checks on government. Public choice theorists have tended to share this approach. Buchanan and Tullock pursued this program in developing

5670-622: The Aegean for a few thousand years prior to the Dorian invasions , forming an "aggregate, the pre-Doric city". This type of city is not to be regarded as "the Hellenic type of the polis". The Greeks set adrift by the Dorian invasions countered by joining ( synoecism ) to form the Hellenic poleis. The polis can thus be dated to this defensive resettlement period (the Dark Age). Quite a few poleis fit

5796-400: The Ancient Greek term that specifically meant the totality of urban buildings and spaces was asty ( ἄστυ ), rather than polis. The ancient word polis had socio-political connotations not possessed by the modern. For example, today's πόλη is located within a χώρα ( khôra ), "country", which is a πατρίδα (patrida) or "native land" for its citizens. In ancient Greece, the polis was

5922-792: The Copenhagen Polis Centre from 1993 to 2003 classified about 1,500 settlements of the Archaic and Classical ancient-Greek-speaking population as poleis. These ranged from the Caucasus to southern Spain, and from southern Russia to northern Egypt, spread over the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They have been termed a network of micro-states. Many of the settlements still exist; e.g., Marseille , Syracuse , Alexandria , but they are no longer Greek or micro-states, belonging to other countries. The ancient Greek world

6048-419: The Greek conception ... but this was rather owing to their less vivid mental powers than to the absence of the phenomenon." Polis is thus often translated as ' city-state '. The model, however, fares no better than any other. City-states no doubt existed, but so also did many poleis that were not city-states. The minimum semantic load of this hyphenated neologism is that the referent must be a city and must be

6174-528: The Greek mainland. Each gave an ethnic or "racial" name to its population and poleis. Acarnania , for example was the location of the Acarnanian people and poleis. A colony from there would then be considered Acarnanian, no matter how far away from Acarnania it was. Colonization was thus the main method of spreading Greek poleis and culture. Ancient Greeks did not reserve the term polis solely for Greek-speaking settlements. For example, Aristotle's study of

6300-415: The Hellenic poleis and was continuous with the pre-Doric city phase, then pre-Doric Athens must have been a Hellenic polis even then. The model fails in its chief instance. A second approach to the modelling of the polis is not to use the word polis at all, but to translate it into the language of the historiographer. The model is thus inherent in the translation, which has the disadvantage of incorporating

6426-454: The Newer were united with a political synoecism. The first sentence of Politics asserts that a polis is a community ( koinonia ). This is Aristotle's first definition of polis (for the second, see above). The community is compared to a game of chess. The man without community is like an isolated piece (I.9). Other animals form communities, but those of men are more advantageous because men have

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6552-513: The Trojan War and had placed a polis (Livy's urbs) on one of the hills named Pallantium , later becoming Palatine . He had actually raised the Trojan boys and supported them now. When the band of marauders became populous enough Romulus got them to agree to a synoecism of settlements in the hills to form a new city, Rome, to be walled in immediately. Remus had to be sacrificed because he had set

6678-420: The argument there is "For it is by proportionate requital that the city holds together .... and if they cannot do so there is no exchange, but it is by exchange that they hold together." In short Aristotle had stated two systems of property, one in which the polis holds everything, distributing it equally, and one in which some property is held in common but the rest is privately owned. As the former only leads to

6804-576: The basis of two conditions. The first condition is contribution in economic progress and health. The second condition includes emphasis on public or common goods and large social externalities with clear economic foundation for health interventions based on market failures. The common goods for health must produce enormous health benefits to communities and not financed through market forces. Examples of common goods for health are risk surveillance, disease control policies and strategies, vector control and public health emergency operation response services. In

6930-439: The benefits with increased consumption. Social choice theory studies collective decision rules. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem , an important result in social choice theory, states that no aggregative mechanism of collective choice (restricted to ordinal inputs) can consistently transform individual preferences into a collective preference-ordering, across the universal domain of possible preference profiles, while also satisfying

7056-402: The characteristics and virtues that political leadership should require, which are truthfulness , honesty, fairness, temperance and solidarity (as described in paragraph 98 to 100), given that truth extends from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular. In Laudato si' , Pope Francis links the "common good" to the "integral ecology" which

7182-400: The citizens and simultaneously a collection of some of the citizens. Similarly property shared by all cannot be shared by men who do not own it. These fictions led to endless conflict between and within poleis as the participants fought for citizenship they did not have and shares they did not own. A village (kome) is a community of several families (I.2). Aristotle suggests that they came from

7308-451: The common good indicates 'the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily ' " (#164, quoting Gaudium et spes , #26; italics original). The Compendium later gives statements that communicate what can be seen as a partly different, more classical, sense of the concept – as not only "social conditions" that enable persons to reach fulfilment, but as

7434-640: The common good and some form of property and family life are also implied. Furthermore, the common good brought by freedom includes wealth, economic prosperity, security, enjoyment and good life. However, though Machiavelli speaks of an instrumental relationship between freedom and common good, the general well-being is not precisely identical with political freedom: elsewhere in the Discourses, Machiavelli argues that an impressive level of common good can be achieved by sufficiently autocratic rulers. Nevertheless, Machiavelli's common good can be viewed as acting for

7560-454: The common good arises due to social gains from cooperation. Such a view might appeal to the Prisoner's dilemma to illustrate how cooperation can result in superior welfare outcomes. Moreover, a cooperative equilibrium is stable in an iterated Prisoner's dilemma that is played for an indefinite period of time. Under these conditions, an individual does best by pursuing the course of action that

7686-625: The common good became standard in Roman Catholic moral theology. Against that background, the common good became a central concept in the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching , beginning with the foundational document, Rerum novarum , a papal encyclical by Pope Leo XIII , issued in 1891. This addressed the crisis of the conditions of industrial workers in Europe and argued for a position different from both laissez-faire capitalism and socialism . In this letter, Pope Leo guarantees

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7812-520: The common good has been a recurring theme throughout the history of political philosophy. As one contemporary scholar observes, Aristotle used the idea of "the common interest" ( to koinei sympheron , in Greek ) as the basis for his distinction between "right" constitutions, which are in the common interest, and "wrong" constitutions, which are in the interest of rulers; Saint Thomas Aquinas held "the common good" ( bonum commune , in Latin ) to be

7938-563: The common good in its 2009 publication, In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law . It referred to them as "two levels" of the common good. Other relevant documents are Veritatis Splendor , a papal encyclical by Pope John Paul II , issued in 1993 to combat the relaxation of moral norms and the political corruption (see paragraph 98) that affects millions of persons, and Pope Francis ' 2015 encyclical, Laudato si' . In Veritatis Splendor , Pope John Paul describes

8064-479: The common good is that which is shared by and beneficial to all or most members of a given community: particular substantive conceptions will specify precisely what factors or values are beneficial and shared. According to procedural formulations, by contrast, the common good consists of the outcome that is achieved through collective participation in the formation of a shared will. It is when one another respects others' dignity and rights. Under one name or another,

8190-433: The common good while endeavoring to ascertain the fundamental or universal principles underlying divine shari‘a law . These fundamentals or universal principles have been largely identified with the "objectives" of the shari‘a ( maqāṣid al-sharī‘a ), including concepts of the common good or public interest ( maṣlaḥa ‘āmma , in modern terminology). A notion of the common good arises in contemporary Islamic discussions of

8316-503: The common good. Given the central concern for sustainable development in an increasingly interdependent world, education and knowledge should thus be considered global common goods. This means that the creation of knowledge, its control, acquisition, validation, and use, are common to all people as a collective social endeavour. Common goods for health (CGH) can be defined as population-related interventions or activities that require cumulative finances from either donors or government on

8442-404: The common good. In economics, the terms public good and common good have technical definitions. A public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable . A common good is simply non-excludable. A simple typology illustrates the differences between various kinds of goods: The field of welfare economics studies social well-being. The approach begins with the specification of

8568-473: The common good. The pursuit of the common good, then, enables the state to act as a moral community. John Rawls defines the common good as "certain general conditions that are ... equally to everyone's advantage". In his Theory of Justice , Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality, applied to the basic structure of a well-ordered society, which will specify exactly such general conditions. Starting with an artificial device he calls

8694-460: The common interest, and "wrong" constitutions, which are in the interest of rulers. To Aristotle, Plato is wrong about the desire to simply impose top-down unity; for Aristotle, a common good is synthesized upwardly/ teleologically from the lesser goods of individuals, and their various kinds of larger-and-larger partnerships: marital couple, or parent-over-child, or master-over-slave; household; then village; then state. In this teleological view,

8820-531: The community, yet individually shared in, by its members." During the 15th and 16th centuries, the common good was one of several important themes of political thought in Renaissance Florence. The thought goes back to Thomas Aquinas theory of common good being widespread in whole premodern Europe. In a later work, Niccolò Machiavelli speaks of the bene commune ( ' common good ' ) or comune utilità ( ' common utility ' ), which refers to

8946-449: The concept of polis from the concepts of independence and autonomia". They were able to define a class of "dependent poleis" to consist of 15 types, all of which the ancient sources call poleis, but were not entirely sovereign, such as cities that had been independent, but were later synoecized into a larger polis, new colonies of other poleis, forts, ports, or trading posts some distance removed from their mother poleis, poleis that had joined

9072-458: The distinction between the fixed and the flexible ( al-thābit wa-l-mutaghayyir ), especially as it relates to modern Islamic conceptions of tolerance, equality, and citizenship: according to some, for instance, universal principles carry greater weight than specific injunctions of the Qur'an , and in case of conflict, can even supersede or suspend explicit textual injunctions ( naṣṣ ) if this serves

9198-421: The end goal of any state is the realization of the common good. He further posits that the common good can be identified and implemented only by heeding the general will of a political community, specifically as expressed by that community's sovereign. Rousseau maintains that the general will always tends toward the common good, though he concedes that democratic deliberations of individuals will not always express

9324-482: The family without its becoming a private good for any individual family member", and the collective good, which, "though possessed by all as a group, is not really participated in by the members of a group. It is actually divided up into several private goods when apportioned to the different individual members." First described by Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect magazine and John Halpin at

9450-487: The field of "constitutional political economy" in their book The Calculus of Consent . More recent work in social choice theory, however, has demonstrated that Arrow's impossibility result can be obviated at little or no normative cost. Amartya Sen , for instance, argues that a range of social choice mechanisms emerge unscathed given certain reasonable restrictions on the domain of admissible preference profiles. In particular, requiring that preferences are single-peaked on

9576-404: The fragmentary history of priesthoods, does not much resemble the history of cities such as it survives. For example, there was no familial and tribal development of Rome. Livy (Book I), the grandest of the historians of early Rome, portrays a city formed under competitive duress by a collaboration of warriors, some of whom were from among the neighboring Etruscans , led by Romulus and Remus ,

9702-472: The general well-being of a community as a whole; however, he mentions this term only 19 times throughout his works. In key passages of the Discourses on Livy , he indicates that "the common good ( comune utilità ) . . . is drawn from a free way of life ( vivere libero )" but is not identical with it. Elsewhere in the Discourses, freedom, safety and dignity are explicitly stated to be elements of

9828-419: The general will. Furthermore, Rousseau distinguished between the general will and the will of all, stressing that while the latter is simply the sum total of each individual's desires, the former is the "one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being." Political authority, to Rousseau, should be understood as legitimate only if it exists according to the general will and toward

9954-412: The goal of law and government; John Locke declared that "the peace, safety, and public good of the people" are the goals of political society, and further argued that "the well being of the people shall be the supreme law"; David Hume contended that "social conventions" are adopted and given moral support in virtue of the fact that they serve the "public" or "common" interest; James Madison wrote of

10080-443: The good of the majority, even if that means to oppress others through the endeavor. Machiavelli's common good is viewed by some scholars as not as "common", as he frequently states that the end of republics is to crush their neighbors. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract , composed in the mid-18th century, Rousseau argues that society can function only to the extent that individuals have interests in common, and that

10206-460: The good stems from objective facts about human life and purpose, which may vary, depending upon peoples' occupations, virtue-levels, etc. However, noting that only citizens have the salvation (common good) of the city at heart, Aristotle argues that, regardless of form of government, those who have more of a rational understanding of the needs of the state's salvation, are entitled to a greater share in administering and determining justice, within

10332-433: The holding relationship implies. In Book II Aristotle begins to face the problem. The "polis men", politai , translated as 'citizens', must logically hold everything there is to hold, nothing, or some things but not others (II.I.2). In this sociological context politai can only be all the householders sharing in the polis, free or slave, male or female, child or adult. The sum total of all the specific holdings mentioned in

10458-422: The ideal state incapable of sustaining itself. Aristotle says, "A collection of persons all alike does not constitute a state." He means that such a collection is not self-sufficient (II.1.4). He alleges the opposite: "components which are to make up a unity must differ in kind .... Hence reciprocal equality is the preservative of states, as has been said before in (Nichomachean) Ethics (1132b, 1133a)." In summary

10584-454: The individual. Families are bound by three relationships: husband to wife, owner to slave, and father to children. Thus slaves and women are members of the polis. The proper function of a family is the acquisition and management of wealth . The oikia is the primary land-holder. The koinonia, then, applied to property, including people. As such it is just as impossible as the collection of citizens mentioned previously, which cannot be both all

10710-467: The komai, while the 1st order is the poleis. Approaching the polis from the outside of an aerial photograph one would pass successivle orders 3, 2, and 1. By the end of Book I of Politics Aristotle (or one of the other unknown authors) finishes defining the polis according to one scheme and spends the next two books trying to tie up loose ends. It is generally agreed that the work is an accumulation of surviving treatises written at different times, and that

10836-479: The language of the historiographer. For example, Eric Voegelin wrote a work in English entitled "The World of the Polis". In works such as this the author intends to define polis himself; i.e., to present a model of society from one or more of a list of ancient Greek cities (poleis) culled from ancient Greek literature and inscriptions. For example, Voegelin describes a model in which "town settlements" existed in

10962-400: The least advantaged. Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would adopt two governing principles, which would then regulate the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society. The First Principle of Justice states that "First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with

11088-440: The legal incorporation of the settlements around Athens into the city by King Theseus , although no special building was required. The central polis already existed. In this story also there is a duality of synoecism with an absent change of physical facilities. Apparently a synoecism can be of different types, the selection of which depends on the requirements of the sunoikisteres. Lippman applies two concepts previously current,

11214-471: The light of its common good, than those who have less, or no such understanding or concern for it, such as selfish despots and political factions, as well as uneducated artisans and freedmen, women and children, slaves, etc. More than this, Aristotle argues that rational discourse itself is what the state's Common Good relies upon, identifying those who lack it as "slaves by nature", while those who excel in it are nearly divine, possessing in themselves

11340-452: The main locus of Augustine's normative political thought, is focused on the question, 'Is the good life social?' In other words, 'Is human wellbeing found in the good of the whole society, the common good?' Chapters 5–17 of Book XIX address this question. Augustine's emphatic answer is yes (see start of chap. 5). Augustine's understanding was taken up and, under the influence of Aristotle , developed by Thomas Aquinas . Aquinas's conception of

11466-488: The main logical break is the end of Book III. Books I, II, and III, dubbed "Theory of the State" by Rackham in the Loeb Edition , each represents an incomplete trial of the "Old Plan". Books !V, V, and VI, "Practical Politics", are the "New Plan". Books VII and VIII, "Ideal Politics", contains Aristotle's replacement of Plato's ideology, openly called "communist" by modern translators and theoreticians, of which Aristotle

11592-417: The makeup of an ideal polis. In The Republic , Socrates is concerned with the two underlying principles of any society: mutual needs and differences in aptitude. Starting from these two principles, Socrates deals with the economic structure of an ideal polis. According to Plato there are five main economic classes of any polis: producers, merchants, sailors/shipowners, retail traders and wage earners. Along with

11718-453: The many one-castle principates that abounded at the time. The name was applied to the polis by Herder in 1765. Fowler anglicised it: "It is, then, a city-state that we have to deal with in Greek and Roman history; a state in which the whole life and energy of the people, political, intellectual, religious, is focused at one point, and that point a city." He applied the word polis to it, explaining that, "The Latin race, indeed, never realised

11844-515: The mid-20th century, the elites displayed a motivation for the common goods that was intended for health, and decisions were based on the elite rather than the public, since there was no public interest in the issue. After the 1950s, the government increasingly began to see the concept of addressing mutual issues for the benefit of the citizens, but it has yet to be completely adopted and will be much more compatible with appropriate expenditure. [REDACTED]  This article incorporates text from

11970-400: The model, no doubt, which was widely promulgated in the 20th century. Classical Athens , however, is a paradox in this model, to which Voegelin has no answer. He says, "in the most important instance, that of Athens, the continuity between the Aegean settlement and the later polis seems to have been unbroken." It seems a matter of simple logic that if Athens was a Hellenic polis in the time of

12096-434: The native land; there was no other. It had a constitution and demanded the supreme loyalty of its citizens. χώρα was only the countryside, not a country. Ancient Greece was not a sovereign country, but was a territory occupied by Hellenes , people who claimed as their native language some dialect of Ancient Greek. Poleis did not only exist within the area of the modern Republic of Greece . A collaborative study carried by

12222-466: The polis extends as far back as the beginning of Greek literature, when the works of Homer and Hesiod in places attempt to portray an ideal state. The study took a great leap forward when Plato and the academy in general undertook to define what is meant by the good, or ideal, polis. Plato analyzes the polis in the Republic , the Greek title of which, Πολιτεία ( politeia ), itself derives from

12348-551: The polis names also Carthage , comparing its constitution to that of Sparta. Carthage was a Phoenician -speaking city. Many nominally Greek colonies also included municipalities of non-Greek speakers, such as Syracuse. The word polis is used in the first known work of Greek literature, the Iliad , a maximum of 350 times. The few hundred ancient Greek classical works on line at the Perseus Digital Library use

12474-531: The political synoecism and the physical synoecism, to events at the polis of Pleuron (Aetolia) described by Strabo . Pleuron, in danger of being sacked by the Macedonians, was officially moved up the slope of a nearby mountain, walled in, and named Newer Pleuron. This act was a physical synoecism. After the Macedonian threat vanished the former location was reinhabited and called Old Pleuron. The old and

12600-448: The power of speech as well as a sense of right and wrong, and can communicate judgements of good or bad to the community (I.10). A second metaphor compares a community to a human body: no part can function without the whole functioning (I.11). Men belong to communities because they have an instinct to do so (I.12). The polis is a hierarchy of community. At the most subordinate level is the family ( oikia ), which has priority of loyalty over

12726-451: The realization of the common good. This feature distinguishes deliberative democracy from aggregative conceptions of democracy, which focus solely on the aggregation of preferences. In contrast to aggregative conceptions, deliberative democracy emphasizes the processes by which agents justify political claims on the basis of judgments about the common good. Epistemic democracy , a leading contemporary approach to deliberative democracy, advances

12852-461: The regulation of common property resources resulted in the discovery of mechanisms for overcoming the tragedy of the commons . In many countries of the Commonwealth , charitable organizations must demonstrate that they provide a public benefit . In deliberative democracy , the common good is taken to be a regulative ideal. In other words, participants in democratic deliberation aim at

12978-504: The relinquishing of property to form the polis is advantageous, and the maximum advantage is maximum possession of common property by a polis. The principle of advantage is unity. The more united, the more advantageous (compare the action of a lever, which concentrates advantage). The ideal commun-ity would be commun-ism, the possession of all property by the community. Personal property, such as wives and children, are included (II.1). Aristotle argues that this eminent domain of all property

13104-410: The result of any previous social evolution. They were the first municipal division of the city manufactured for the purpose. They were no sort of confederacy. Rome initially was ruled by Etruscan kings. Coulanges work was followed by the innovation of the English city-state by W. Warde Fowler in 1893. The Germans had already invented the word in their own language: Stadtstaat, "city-state", referring to

13230-603: The right to private property while insisting on the role of collective bargaining to establish a living wage . Contemporary Catholic social teaching on the common good is summarised in the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church , chapter 4, part II. Quoting the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et spes (1965), this says, "According to its primary and broadly accepted sense,

13356-427: The same category of Plato's indefinable abstracts, such as freedom and justice. However, there is a practical freedom and a practical justice, although not theoretically definable, and the ancient authors must mean something consistent when they use the word polis . The problem is to find it. In modern historiography of the ancient world πόλις is often transliterated to polis without any attempt to translate it into

13482-478: The same or similar. It is a figure of speech, the most general instance being sunoik-eioun, "to be associated with", its noun being sunoik-eiosis, the act of association. A second verb, sunoik-ein, "to live together," can mean individuals, as in marriage, or conjointly, as in a community. The community meaning appears in Herodotus. A closely related meaning, "to colonize jointly with", is found there also, and in

13608-480: The society in which they lived, the polis. Plato was more interested in the ideal; Aristotle, the real. Both had a certain view of what the polis was; that is, a conceptual model. All models must be tested, by definition. Aristotle, of course, could send direct observers. The only way to know a polis now is through study of the ancient literature (philology), and to some extent archaeology. There are thousands of pages of writing and certainly thousands of sites. The problem

13734-399: The sociology in favor of the New Plan, conclusions resulting from research on real constitutions. The difficulties with the Old Plan begin with the meaning of koinonizein, "to hold in common". Typically the authors of the Old Plan use the verb in such expressions as "those holding in common", "A holding in common", "the partnership", and the like, without specifying who is holding what or what

13860-420: The splitting (apoikia, "colonization") of families; that is, one village contains one or more extended families , or clans . A polis is a community of villages, but there must be enough of them to achieve or nearly achieve self-sufficiency. At this point of his theorization, Aristotle turns the "common" noun stem (koino-) into a verb, koinonizein, "to share" or "to own in common". He says: "A single city occupies

13986-424: The state should do to promote it, they nonetheless agreed that the common good is the end of government, that it is a good of all the citizens, and that no government should become the "perverted servant of special interests", whether these special interests be understood as Aristotle's "interest of the rulers", Locke's "private good", Hume's and Madison's "interested factions", or Rousseau's "particular wills". For

14112-408: The state, which would send other members of the united polis to do the work. They would also be sent for any other task: plumbing, farming, herding, etc., as any task could be performed by any member. This view is contrary, as Aristotle points out, to the principle of division of labor . The output of one professional building crew far exceeds the efforts any number of amateur ideal statists, rendering

14238-462: The study of collective decision rules . Public choice theory applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests affect political activities and outcomes. The term common good has been used in many disparate ways and escapes a single definition. Most philosophical conceptions of the common good fall into one of two families: substantive and procedural. According to substantive conceptions,

14364-488: The term. There were no doubt many ancient experts on the polis, but time has done its work. The one surviving expert, Aristotle, is thus an indispensable resource. A polis is identified as such by its standing as polis among the community of poleis. Poleis have ambassadors, can join or host the Hellenic Games, etc. According to Aristotle, their most essential characteristics are those that, if changed, would result in

14490-406: The theory of voting, identifying the paradox of voting whereby rational individuals prefer to abstain from voting, because the marginal cost exceeds the private marginal benefit. Downs argues further that voters generally prefer to remain uninformed due to " rational ignorance ". Public choice scholarship can have more constructive applications. For instance, Elinor Ostrom 's study of schemes for

14616-428: The treatise amount to the anthropological sense of property : land, animals, houses, wives, children, anything to which the right of access or disposition is reserved to the owner. This also happens to be Plato's concept of property, not an accident, as Aristotle was a renegade Platonist. The polis, then, is communal property. The theory of its tenancy is where Aristotle and Plato differ sharply. Plato had argued that

14742-521: The true descendants of the Trojans who with the aborigines had earlier formed the Latin people. They were not welcome among the Latins of Alba Longa, and so they had turned to raiding from their base in their seven hills. The myth supposes they had been nourished by a she-wolf and lived a wild life camping in the country. They were, however, supported by an ally. Evander had led a colony from Arcadia before

14868-463: The two principles and five economic classes, there are four virtues. The four virtues of a "just city" are wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. With all of these principles, classes and virtues, it was believed that a "just city" (polis) would exist. Breaking away from Plato and the academy, a professor there, Aristotle, founded his own school, the Lyceum, a university. One of its strongest curricula

14994-501: The underprovision of public goods by markets and the failure of self-interested individuals to internalize externalities . Because of these factors, purely self-interested behaviour often detracts from the common good. There is an important conceptual difference between the sense of "a" public good, or public "goods" in economics , and the more generalized idea of "the public good" (in the sense of common good, public benefit, or public interest ), "a shorthand signal for shared benefit at

15120-408: The unknown past. All current citizenships must have had their first moments, typically when the law-maker had gotten his laws ratified, or the colony had broken with the metropolis. The ancient writers referred to these initial moments under any of several words produced with the same prefix, sunoik- (Latinized synoec-), "same house", meaning objects that are from now on to be grouped together as being

15246-401: The whole gamut of historical writers, Xenophon, Plato, Strabo, Plutarch; i.e., more or less continuously through all periods from Archaic to Roman. Associated nouns are sunoik-ia, sunoik-esion, sunoik-idion, sunoik-eses, sunoik-isis, a multiplication to be expected over centuries of a single language. These can all mean community in general, but they have two main secondary meanings, to institute

15372-610: The whole purpose for which states exist, namely, the perfectly complete good/blessed life. In his Nicomachean Ethics then, Aristotle ties up the Common Good of the state, with that of friendship, implying by this, that friendly, rational discourse is the primary activity by which citizens and rulers bring about the Common Good, both amongst themselves, and so far as it involves their inferiors. According to one common contemporary usage, rooted in Aristotle's philosophy, common good then refers to "a good proper to, and attainable, only by

15498-520: The word polis . The best form of government of the polis for Plato is the one that leads to the common good. The philosopher king is the best ruler because, as a philosopher, he is acquainted with the Form of the Good . In Plato's analogy of the ship of state , the philosopher king steers the polis, as if it were a ship, in the best direction. Books II–IV of The Republic are concerned with Plato addressing

15624-466: The word thousands of times. The most frequent use is Dionysius of Halicarnassus , an ancient historian, with a maximum of 2,943. A study of inscriptions found 1,450 that use polis prior to 300 BC, 425 Athenian and 1,025 from the rest of the range of poleis. There was no difference in meaning between literary and inscriptional usages. Polis became loaded with many incidental meanings. The major meanings are 'state' and 'community'. The theoretical study of

15750-497: Was political science, which Aristotle invented. He dispatched students over the world of the polis to study the society and government of individual poleis, and bring the information back to document, placing the document in a political science section of the library. Only two documents have survived, Politics and Athenian Constitution . These are a part of any political science curriculum today. Both major ancient Greek philosophers were concerned with elucidating an existing aspect of

15876-468: Was split between homeland regions and colonies. A colony was generally sent out by a single polis to relieve the population or some social crisis or seek out more advantageous country. It was called a metropolis or "mother city". The Greeks were careful to identify the homeland region and the metropolis of a colony. Typically a metropolis could count on the socio-economic and military support of its colonies, but not always. The homeland regions were located on

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