The Common Good and the Compound Republic​

What is the common good of a nation? The answer depends, in part, on the nature of the nation. The United States is a republic of a peculiar kind. As James Madison noted, we are a “compound republic,” not a simple one. America is too large and diverse to be a simply unified community. And that has very important implications for the nature of our common good. 

Classically speaking, a republic had to be small. In such a republic, the people shared a way of life in the robust sense of the term. Hence, republics shared a religion. Religious diversity might exist among republics, but not inside of one. To deny a given republic’s god was to be an outsider. In the Spartan republic, the people even shared a common mess. In other words, in a classical republic the mores were such that the common good was inseparable from the shared way of life in a robust sense. Classically speaking, as a shorthand, scholars like to say that in an ancient small republic, whatever the laws did not require, they forbade. The laws backed a robust shared way of life to support the common good.  

From the start, the United States has been different from a classical republic. Ours was to be, as Madison noted, a “compound republic.” It was not merely a confederation of small republics, nor was it a larger version of a classical republic. It was, instead, a different sort of thing. In our republic, whatever has not been prohibited is allowed. Similarly, we have no established religion. In the founding era, of course, some states had establishments of different sorts, but they didn’t last. Even Massachusetts, the old Puritan Commonwealth, guaranteed in its constitution liberty to members of all sects who “doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship.” By the 1830s, that guarantee made the state’s establishment untenable. Given the inevitable diversity of opinion in religious matters in a community of any significant size, such liberty is necessary if the republic is to be a free one.  

Consider the alternative. Suppose the Amish ran the government of Lancaster County as an Amish republic. It would be like an ancient republic in many ways — everyone sharing a common way of life. Community members would have the freedom to leave and live elsewhere, which means the government would not tyrannically impose Amish rules on people who had no desire to live that way. But that would not scale up. Our large, compound republic includes many communities with different, and sometimes incompatible ways of life. To impose any one such cultural order on everyone in a republic of 340 million people would be tyrannical. Madison argued that any significant consolidation would turn us into a monarchy,

It is equally important to note that in such an extended republic, if life is to be fulfilling, there must be real communities. Hence it will be a republic of republics, and a community of communities. Hence the common good must provide space for the communal diversity that inevitably will arise. The diversity is among shared ways of life, and not merely among the way individuals live. The common good enshrined in the laws, especially federal laws, has to leave a good deal of space for disagreement about some rather important things. That does not mean that there’s no underlying agreement. It only means that we allow disagreement about how one ought to live on a scale that would shock many people. There are underlying goods we recognize. But often there is serious disagreement about how they ought to be secured.  

Another way to say this is that the common good in the American republic ought to be understood from a classically liberal perspective. Madison’s political tag team partner, Thomas Jefferson, understood this quite well. Consider disestablishment. What did Jefferson call his bill ending Virginia’s religious establishment? It was “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.”  At first, the title seems paradoxical, or at least ironic. And yet there’s a deep truth in the idea that in America we “establish” religious freedom. The American community, the community of the compound and free republic, is, like all communities, ultimately grounded in certain shared beliefs. Among those beliefs is that, as Jefferson’s Virginia Statute puts it, “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” Perhaps one need not believe in a Providential God, but merely believe that men have a nature, and that we are equal by nature. Hence religious liberty would be our first freedom, even before freedom of speech and press in the 1st Amendment. Moreover, that includes the right of free and equal citizens to evangelize each other, and to change religions freely—rights which established religions have usually attacked. 

In the mid-19th century, the Party of Lincoln fought the “twin relics of barbarism,” polygamy and slavery, because both denied the equality humans have by nature. Ending slavery was, they knew, following Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and the others, important work necessary to complete the founding, and to provide the underlying unity that the compound republic would need. A Union that was half slave and half free was not a community in any serious sense of the term, even in the limited way a compound republic was a community. It was a confederacy more than a compound republic. America could never be great if it never ended slavery. Recognition of our common humanity, regardless of race, was every bit as foundational as recognizing that “Almighty God hath created the mind free.” The one was logically inseparable from the other. Even our compound republic must respect a baseline. That’s what Lincoln and the Party of Lincoln knew. But they also knew that the baseline was only a baseline. Democratic republicanism requires robust local government. 

Are the goods the federal government began addressing in the 20th Century beyond that baseline? Or is it the case that in what remains a large republic, goods such as relieving poverty, providing food, shelter, and medical care need to be addressed in diverse ways reflecting our diverse cultures? Similarly, to govern is to choose. It means setting a budget and selecting priorities. And there’s unlikely to be a single consensus across the republic.  

We see this in today’s politics. The postliberal turn, like the Progressive turn, rejects the founding. The Progressives thought history had moved on and that, therefore, new modes and orders were needed to preserve the republic after the industrial and Darwinian revolutions. The trouble is that they thought historical progress made possible what Madison recognized as impossible—combining the freedoms of the modern republic with the cultural unity of a small republic. On the other hand, nowadays, at least some of our postliberal intellectuals seem to think that is true, and they therefore turn to an idea of the common good that fits an early modern monarchy better than the American republic. The trouble is, or at least, one problem is, America is not Europe. We are a product of the Reformation as much as we are a product of the Enlightenment. The Progressives forget the former; the postliberals forget the latter. In our revolution, unlike the French Revolution, the pulpit fought the King alongside philosophers like Dr. Franklin.  Similarly, as Madison knew well, religious liberty and economic liberty are inseparable in our republic. What might work in a place like France can never work in the United States, and politics is the art of the possible. We cannot restore robust communal life unless we pay due regard to the compound element of our republic. There must be an underlying consensus, but we also are, and likely can only be, a republic of republics.  

In short, our crisis grows, in part, from the fact that many of the goods we have nationalized are themselves incompatible with the common good, rightly understood. If that is the case, then, however hard it might be to address this underlying problem, we cannot save the republic without reworking some very popular programs. Perhaps our growing debt, driven primarily by the programs we created over the past century, will force our hand, perhaps sooner than many expect.  

Richard Samuelson is an Associate Professor of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus.