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There is no good human life outside of a state, and the good state enables us to live well together – so says Constitutivism, the theory developed in this book. Reinvigorating Aristotelian ideas, the author asks in what sense citizens of modern, populous and pluralistic societies share a common good. While we can easily find examples of cooperation that benefit each member, such as insurances, the idea that persons could share a common good became puzzling with modernity – a puzzlement epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s ‘What is society? There is no such thing!’ This puzzlement, the author argues, results from our profoundly modern understanding of rational actions, which we see as means toward outcomes. If we allow that not only outcomes but also histories and identities can be good reasons for actions, then it makes sense to see a person’s good and the common good of their political community as constitutive of one another, as Aristotle thought. Building on this idea, the author argues that in designing our institutions, we also give ourselves an identity – in other words, we constitute ourselves as persons.
“The Good Life and the Good State figures out the consequences of an important body of work on practical reasoning for political theory. It develops the idea that political philosophy needs a conception of the common good that is an alternative both to the tradition of seeing the state as a device, one whose justification consists in serving the independently intelligible welfare of individuals, and to collectivist conceptions of the state, on which it is justified by appeal to a specifically collective good (e.g., of the nation or the race whose state it is). Those conceptions presuppose the instrumentalist conception of practical rationality, on which reasons for action are always tied to the further ends they serve. Nieswandt proposes instead that the political common good is to be spelled out on the model of the reasons that thoughtful parents give for having children. This is a hitherto unoccupied and promising position within political philosophy.” — Elijah Millgram, E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor, University of Utah