For a long time our most heated public and academic debates have been almost uniformly characterized by false dichotomies. We are supposed to choose between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign affairs and ethical theory; John Rawls’s excessively egalitarian “theory of justice” and Robert Nozick’s untenable “minimal state”; post-liberal dogmatism and a decayed liberalism that is increasingly oblivious to the moral foundations of democracy.

I often ask myself: What of a tough-minded, morally serious politics that unites principle and prudence, and advocates a broadly secular state but is not neutral between religion and irreligion? What about a project that defends liberty and equality without succumbing to the illusion of human autonomy, or an indiscriminate egalitarianism that levels and homogenizes? How about “liberty under God and the laws,” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s memorable formulation, that is in equal measure liberal and conservative? Why can’t we think more deeply and dialectically and move beyond dichotomies that distort much more than they illuminate?

In his final lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, the great French political thinker Raymond Aron said that for many of our contemporaries “liberty essentially means the liberation of the desires,” marked by a concerted effort to tear down “all the prohibitions and all the institutions which, in effect, limit the liberty of the individual as a being of desire.” Aron wisely added that while individuals must be broadly free to choose their own “path in life,” this should not be confused with the right to choose one’s own “conception of good and evil.” But as Justice Kennedy’s famous dictum in Planned Parenthood v. Casey indicates, this is what liberty too often means today.

The honorable path, however, is to be neither a postliberal (a misnomer since many reject liberalism tout court, even of Aron’s noble kind) nor an advocate of liberalism without soul. Nor should one summarily cast aside, as the more dogmatic postliberals do, the principles of the American Founding, viewing them as a poison pill that inexorably leads to moral degradation and the dissolution of the common good. There is nothing remotely conservative about such a massive display of ingratitude toward our forebears.

These thoughts come to mind as we face yet another heated debate in intellectual circles involving the venerable, if largely forgotten, idea of the common good. A group of liberals, libertarians, and “Freedom Conservatives” treat it as an alien notion introduced into American political discourse by postliberals and integralists. Some of the former recently cited Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of the common good in his speeches and writings as evidence of his alleged authoritarianism.

But this facile dismissal of the common good reveals a good deal of ignorance, as Vincent Phillip Muñoz points out in a thoughtful reflection in First Things. It is true that many postliberals falsely identify the common good with a kind of Platonic Idea to be imposed on the political order from above. And some of its champions are truly insouciant about the tyrannical potential of some of those invoking the phrase. But Aristotle recognized that the ongoing articulation of the common good, which he memorably defined as “putting reasons and actions in common” in the Nicomachean Ethics, was essential to a free politics. The exercise of political liberty and the articulation of a dynamic notion of the common good are and will always remain inseparable.

In Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, Bertrand de Jouvenel argued that free political life is both unthinkable and unsustainable without reference to “some conception of the good” that the citizen or magistrate “hopes to achieve by the exercise of power which is his.” Once again, we are very far from the tyrannical imposition of an a priori idea on the public against its will. Anyone with even the smallest degree of political authority, according to Jouvenel, must ask whether he will use it “despotically by making the good sought only his own good,” or use it “properly in the interest of a good which is in some way common.” Jouvenel then cites the lapidary formulation of Aristotle that “The despot is he who pursues his own good,” and only his own good.

As usual, in his pellucid good sense, Aristotle deepens what we should already know. Indeed, without a plausible conception of the common good one cannot distinguish between rule in the common interest and capricious, distorted rule in the interest of the rulers. A full critique of tyranny necessarily must invoke both political liberty and the common good.

Elsewhere in his book, Jouvenel provides an admirable model for how to bring such old and enduring wisdom to a dynamic society (or a “productivist city,” as he suggestively called it) that has been radically transformed by modern commerce and democratic individualism. The old notions of the common good and social friendship remain as relevant as ever. Without bonds of civic affection and those “mystic chords of memory” of which Lincoln so eloquently spoke, a free political community ceases to be a political community.

But the indispensable notion of the common good must not be identified with those traditional corollaries—immobility, immutability, smallness, homogeneity, hostility to everything alien or foreign, and to innovation as such—with which it had previously been associated. Rousseau’s admiration for ancient Sparta immediately comes to mind. The “moral harmony” of a cohesive political community, while still an admirable ideal, should not be confused with nostalgia for the ancient city or with a romanticized conception of the Middle Ages.

But it must be remembered, Jouvenel tellingly added, that the disruptions that inevitably accompany a modern, dynamic society and economy need to be “repaired” from time to time. Limitless immigration, for example, undermines the sense of a community with a common history and shared civic and moral purposes. The widespread innovation and entrepreneurship fostered by the market economy should never be unduly stymied. Nor can the creative destruction that regularly disrupts the social and economic spheres of life be treated as an unqualified good. We want and need neither obsolete “industrial museums,” as Pierre Manent once called them, that have lost any economic viability, nor towns and regions ravaged by unimpeded globalization.

Without prudent efforts at repairing some of the dislocations that accompany economic progress, the well-being of men, women, and communities risks being sacrificed to abstractions such as “efficiency” or “economic growth.” Rejecting the identification of the common good with collectivism, Jouvenel understands “state action” properly conceived as a necessary “companion to individual initiative.” Classical liberals were not wrong to notice that “men in authority have a tendency to stifle or supersede individual initiatives”—a tendency that needs to be resisted. When the government monopolizes initiatives or substitutes itself for a vigorous and independent civil society, the social and economic order quickly reaches a dead end.

The progressive and conservative sides of a free society must both be acknowledged and respected. As Jouvenel wrote,

The activity of the sovereign is necessary…to foster the conditions under which initiative will flower; and as these initiatives generate change, disturbance and conflict, it seems logical that the greater their dynamism and variety, the greater the problems of adjustment which the sovereign must meet.

This requires prudent statesmanship more than doctrinaire politics or an excessive reliance on “general rules.” It will entail a sustained effort to cultivate the common good within the framework of a modern liberal order, avoiding both libertarian and collectivist extremes.

On the contemporary Left, the tendency is to identify the common good with statist and collectivist premises and solutions. A partial exception is Senator Chris Murphy’s recent book, Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Although he is hard-pressed to find any public-spirited aspects of the MAGA agenda, and mistakenly claims that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher believed the market alone would “deliver” the common good, Murphy is nonetheless sensitive to some of the limits of collectivism and the need for a reinvigoration of a politics of the common good. But he remains unduly suspicious of the profit motive and somewhat troublingly speaks of a need for a “cult of the common good” to counter the materialism of contemporary American life. Still, his book is far from a thoughtless, leftist screed.

Let us conclude with a nod to the American Founding. Our founders and framers were beneficiaries of an improved science of politics in their constitutional design. The mechanisms to limit arbitrary power and diminish the threat of “majority faction,” laid out so exquisitely in Federalist 10 and 51, however, did not create a merely “procedural republic.” No, the founders aimed to approximate “justice and the general good,” albeit via other means.

Our contemporary categories too often simplify and even estrange us from our political inheritance, and from moral and political reality. On the theme of liberty and the common good, the best of political philosophy and the wisdom of the founders readily concur, providing precious resources for navigating the present and future.