The Founders and the Common Good

The dominant public philosophy among American elites is modern liberalism, often referred to merely as “liberalism.” Two beliefs make up liberalism’s core: first, that freedom is, in the words of Justice Anthony ­Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”; and second, that to secure this understanding of freedom, the state must remain “neutral” toward competing comprehensive conceptions of the “good.” Liberalism so understood is both relativistic and, ultimately, nihilistic. It makes the individual’s will sovereign over reality. It denies the existence of a common good because it holds that there are no rational intrinsic goods that human beings hold in common. The essence of man, in the liberal view, is willful individual choice—­asserting one’s view of oneself and of reality and then shaping one’s life in light of that posited worldview.