Our Conviction

The Gift and the Common Good 

The principle of legitimation of the modern secular state was defined by Immanuel Kant as the principle of republicanism: Rulers contract with those whom they rule, being ultimately responsible to the citizens by whom they are elected. Their purpose is to promote the welfare of the people whom they represent and to protect the same from harm. The concept “people” in this context does not denote a collective entity, rather it affirms the understanding that political power is responsible to all citizens equally. It is therefore clear that it is to citizens and their rights, and not collective instances or universal “values”, that the bearer of state power is responsible.

The concept bonum commune gains its meaning precisely in the context of the insight that government is responsible for the entirety of those whom are ruled by it and for the common concerns of the same. This meaning, common and not collective, was incorporated by the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council into its definition of the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment (perfectio)”. This means concretely that it is never only private goods that the state must safeguard, but always also public goods, such as the protection of natural resources, the guarantee of public security, the amelioration of corruption, and the provision and maintenance of functioning systems of education, healthcare and social security. This means in particular that the state must also care for the performance and the competitiveness of its own national economy upon which the prosperity of the nation ultimately reposes.

Republicanism and the common good: When the historically grounded interdependence of both principles is recognized, then we rapidly encounter the basic problem and the task of politics which, in the social situation of the present, is essential for survival. The state may only assume the mantle of custodian of the common good credibly when this responsibility is conferred upon it by its citizens. Citizens themselves must therefore take an interest in a common answer to the questions:

• How do we wish to live?
• What are we working toward?
• What holds us together?

In the tradition of political thought from which the concept bonum commune originates, there existed a topos which is for the orientation toward this question of crucial significance: patria, the political home with which citizens identify themselves. Patria is the authentic object of the sensus communis that connects citizens to a societas perfecta, i.e. to living together in a common society which is ontologically self-sufficient and which owes its identity and its legitimacy to the will of its members. In the tradition of European political thought, the paradigm of such a society rooted in the common will was the polis and not the imperium: Republicanism arose essentially from the overcoming of imperial ideas of political legitimation.

Nevertheless, the idea of the societas perfecta itself was subject to certain historical conditions; conditions which today in many essential respects are omitted or at least substantially relativized. That is to say, the culturally and also religiously consolidated homogeneity that earlier lay at the foundation of the sensus communis no longer exists.  Should we conclude therefore that the idea of the common good has itself become obsolete? Must the place of patria in the consciousness of the citizen be replaced by an orientation toward the “global society”, toward global governance and multilateral governmental organizations? Has political legitimation become the provenance of technocratic elites who need to establish themselves all over the globe in order to coordinate and to satisfy the interests of the millions of human individuals who are rapidly becoming rootless? In the place of a civil sensus communis, has there not emerged in almost everyone a readiness and an ability to leave his home for the sake of his own standard of living and that of his family, and to go there where the mechanism of technologically organized mass society requires him? Some things in the present appear to speak to the inescapability of this particular state of affairs. But we must observe that if this is truly so, it means an enormous historical step backward from republicanism and toward empire. And this also would mean that in the long run the possible answer to the questions “How do we wish to live?”, “What are we working towards?”, “What holds us together?” is no longer to emanate from the individual, but from supranational administrators of universal welfare.

Can Republicanism find a new historical foundation under the conditions of world-wide economic interdependence and increasing cultural inhomogeneity in the space of existing and developing societies? Does what has become the virulent critique of global economism and “liberal universalism” provide constructive alternatives to the threat of a return to the imperium? Is the concept of the bonum commune even still comprehensible in the horizon of “national economies” and historically developed nations? Can the common good still be the key principle of social solidarity or is the negation of all political borders in support of an imperial, global society an inescapable given? With our conference on “The Gift and the Common Good” and the corresponding blog we seek to face these questions. Based on an economic and political analysis of the problem we will deliberate upon a radically innovative anthropological concept as the possible alternative to traditional conceptions which in their substance remain crucial, but which nevertheless must be tempered owing to their perhaps too Eurocentric, historically one-sided background.

As the innovative fundamental principle of the same we wish to thematize the concept of the gift (le don, la donation, die Gabe); a concept that today has become a systematic link in the reflections of the most impassioned philosophical endeavors (phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism). The gift denotes the original factor inherent to all social and economic exchange as the principle that both guides it and is absent from it. In this way, the basic framework of our conference will take the form of contributions from Chinese, American and European perspectives on questions such as the following: Is the “gift” a conceptual key only to the structure of social exchange or also to normative principles like communal identity, solidarity and subsidiarity? Is it able to encapsulate the content of what in the traditional formulas was called the striving for “perfection” of individuals and groups?  Is the term philosophically rich enough to lay the groundwork for an intercultural reflection on the problem of a republican and not imperial turn toward the topos of the common good? Or can the “gift” serve perhaps at least as a bridge toward even more radical or more innovative ways of intercultural political thinking? Are there concrete elements of economic behavior (relational goods, gratuity, non-profit institutions, transitivity of goods etc.) which can be grounded on the principle of the “gift”? How is the term “civil society” related to this principle? Is there an intrinsically religious and yet interculturally acceptable component of the term “gift”? Can the “gift” play a role in the context of a philosophically grounded criticism of what we now call “liberal universalism”? What role could the term “gift” play in order to understand and meet the challenges of present populism? Might it help us to arrive at a deeper understanding of what we refer to in German as “Heimat” (home), i.e. an integrative, not exclusive, factor of identification with the place of one’s communal life? Our enterprise rests on the conviction that these and many more questions in the field will profit categorically from an intercultural discourse which we seek to work toward in a truly philosophical spirit.