Defend Us From Ideology

Some object that referencing “the common good” is vague—that it is a way of hiding political judgments behind the veneer of philosophy. They suspect that what is “common” merely represents the private interests of the few pursuing the lowest goods, and that the way to resist ideology is to opt out of any public philosophy of the common good. But what if the opposite is true? What if the weaker your notion of the common good, the more vulnerable you are to ideology? If Charles De Koninck is right, and I think he is, it is precisely our false, aggregate notions of the common good that make us most vulnerable to ideology. Read Full Article »