Try to Define "The Good of the People" and See What You Get

Every political speech invokes the good of the people. Every constitution claims to serve it. I have used the phrase myself, repeatedly, in arguing for direct democracy, and at some point it occurred to me that I had never tried to say what it meant. This post is that attempt. The result is less obvious than the phrase, and it changes what I think the phrase is for.

Personal Good Is Clear and Does Not Transfer

Start where the ground is firm. What is good for an individual is, biologically, not mysterious. Food, safety, health, status, mates, children who survive, the company of people who will not betray you. Evolution built the wanting and we can read the list off the wanting. Whether any of it is attainable emotionally is a separate matter and probably the answer is no; the wanting was built to be unsatisfied. But the content is clear.

The temptation is to define the good of a society as the sum of these. Add up everyone's personal good and maximise the total.

It does not work, and the reason is structural rather than technical. What is good for A is frequently bad for B. A's security is B's confinement; A's status is B's subordination; A's land is not B's land. You cannot sum quantities that are defined against each other. There is no unit in which A's gain and B's loss can be added, and every attempt to invent one, from utility to GDP, ends up privileging whoever is doing the adding.

So a definition of social good has to be built at the social level, not derived from the personal one.

What the Successful Solutions Have in Common

If you cannot define it from first principles, look at the cases.

Every arrangement that people across cultures agree made a society better, the end of slavery, the rule of law, property rights that hold against the powerful, universal schooling, the vote, has one property in common: it increased the range of people who could cooperate with each other without being cheated. Each one converted a relationship of extraction into a relationship of exchange, or protected an exchange that extraction had been preventing.

That is not a coincidence. Nature already tells us cooperation is where the surplus lives; the whole of biology above the single cell is a record of it. Human societies are no different. The wealth, the safety, and the knowledge we have exist because large numbers of strangers can rely on one another, and every historical gain in the good of a people is a gain in the scope of that reliance.

A Definition

So here is a definition, offered as a working proposal rather than a discovery.

The good of a people is the most just achievable compromise between its subgroups, where "just" means the compromise that maximises cooperation across the whole and minimises the sense of injustice that inhibits it.

Three things are packed into that sentence and each is doing work.

Compromise, because the subgroups' interests conflict and no arrangement satisfies all of them. The good is not a state in which nobody loses. It is a state in which the losses are ones people will accept and continue cooperating under.

Across the whole, because human groups organise readily into subgroups that cooperate beautifully within themselves and against everyone else. A cartel is cooperation. A caste is cooperation. A lobby that captures its regulator is cooperation. The definition has to count cooperation that serves the whole and discount cooperation that extracts from it, or it will bless exactly the arrangements it should condemn.

Sense of injustice, because that is the mechanism by which extraction destroys cooperation. People who believe the arrangement cheats them stop contributing to it: they evade, they shirk, they defect, and eventually they revolt. Injustice is not only wrong. It is expensive, and the expense is paid in the currency the definition is trying to maximise.

What Follows for the Design of a State

If this is roughly right, then the job of a political system is not to find the good and impose it. It is to be the mechanism by which the compromises are made, and to be a mechanism that resists capture by the subgroups whose cooperation is against the whole.

That is a testable standard, and I think it explains a pattern in history that is otherwise hard to explain: regimes that made juster compromises between their subgroups flourished, and the ones that let a subgroup extract did not, regardless of how clever or well-intentioned their rulers were. The surplus follows the cooperation, and the cooperation follows the justice of the terms.

It also says what is wrong with representative government, in a form I find clearer than the usual complaints. It is a mechanism in which a small subgroup, the political class and those who fund it, makes the compromises on everyone's behalf. Whatever the virtue of the people in it, the shape guarantees that the subgroup's own cooperation, with itself and with its patrons, will be counted as the good of the whole. That is the failure mode the definition warns against, built into the design.

Why Bother Defining It

Because a phrase that everyone uses and nobody defines is a phrase that can be used to justify anything, and "the good of the people" has been used to justify nearly everything. Pinning it down does not settle any argument by itself. It does mean that when someone invokes it you can ask which subgroups are compromising, on what terms, and who is being counted as the whole. Those questions have answers, and the answers are usually the whole argument.