The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

Overview

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership.

Powerful, urgent, and utterly vital, this is a heartfelt missive from one of our foremost political thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525436379
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	279,588
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations and has written fifteen books, including The Work of Nations, Saving Capitalism, Supercapitalism, and Locked in the Cabinet. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He is co-creator of the award-winning documentary Inequality for All and of the Netflix documentary Saving Capitalism, and is co-founder of Inequality Media. He lives in Berkeley and blogs at robertreich.org.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction I was at the impressionable age of fourteen when I heard John F. Kennedy urge us not to ask what America can do for us but what we can do for America. Seven years later I took a job as a summer intern in the Senate office of his brother Robert F. Kennedy. It was not a glamorous job, to say the least. I felt lucky when I was asked to run his signature machine. But I told myself that in a very tiny way I was doing something for the good of the country. That was a half century ago. I wish I could say America is a better place now than it was then. Surely our lives are more convenient. Fifty years ago there were no cash machines or smartphones, and I wrote my first book on a typewriter. As individuals, we are as kind and generous as ever. We volunteer in our communities, donate, and help one another. We pitch in during natural disasters and emergencies. We come to the aid of individuals in need. We are a more inclusive society, in that African Americans, women, and gays have legal rights they didn’t have a half century ago. Yet our civic life—as citizens in our democ­racy, participants in our economy, managers or employees of companies, and members or leaders of organizations—seems to have sharply deteriorated. What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Common Good"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Robert B. Reich.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Part I What Is the Common Good?

1 Shkreli 9

2 What Good Do We Have in Common? 18

3 The Origins of the Common Good 37

Part II What Happened to the Common Good?

4 Exploitation 49

5 Three Structural Breakdowns 65

6 The Decline of the Good in Common 90

Part III Can the Common Good Be Restored?

7 Leadership as Trusteeship 111

8 Honor and Shame 131

9 Resurrecting Truth 156

10 Civic Education for All 173

Acknowledgments 185

Recommended Reading 187

A Discussion Guide for The Common Good 191

Editorial Reviews

Against the grain of much liberal thinking . . . Reich’s proposals would make a good starting point for a new progressive political project.” —Michael J. Sandel, The New York Times Book Review

“Very timely . . . Reich’s work is an important call for reform that should appeal to a wide audience disaffected with the status quo.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Reich’s lucidly defining and empowering call for revitalized civic awareness—complete with an enticing list of recommended reading and discussion guide—is an ideal catalyst for book-group conversations.” —Booklist
 
“Clear-voiced and accessible.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brief but well-argued . . . a provocative essay.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher

In recent decades, American public discourse has become hollow and shrill. Instead of morally robust debates about the common good, we have shouting matches on talk radio and cable television, and partisan food fights in Congress. People argue past one another, without really listening or seeking to persuade. This condition has diminished the public's regard for political parties and politicians, and also given rise to a danger: A politics empty of moral argument creates a vacuum of meaning that is often filled by the vengeful certitudes of strident nationalism. This danger now hovers over American politics…Robert B. Reich's new book, The Common Good, is a welcome response to this challenge…Reich's proposals would make a good starting point for a new progressive political project.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael J. Sandel

03/19/2018
Americans have gotten into the habit of looking out for number one at an overall cost to economic and political well-being, argues professor and former labor secretary Reich (Saving Capitalism) in this disquieting meditation. He believes Americans have lost their sense of connectedness, to one another and to larger ideals, leading to political self-destruction in the form of the Trump administration. As to the question of how this all happened, Reich sees Americans as having fallen prey to a whatever-it-takes mentality—whether applied to winning elections, maximizing profits, or rigging the economy. As a remedy, Reich urges a return to the historical ideal of a shared, common good. Most people, he points out, are set up for some degree of cooperation and compassion. Yet society has ended up with self-interested disaster artists such as Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager recently convicted of fraud, who embody the steady erosion of a civic trust Reich sees being fully dismantled by President Trump. This manifesto is geared more toward describing the problem—if there is no common good, Reich points out, there is no society—than resolving it. When Reich asks whether the common good can be restored, he seems genuinely unsure, though he urges his audience to try. Clear-voiced and accessible, this is a provocative look at where the U.S. has failed, if not quite a map to future success. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

The title will tell you much of what you need to know about what this thoughtful audiobook has to say. Having served in three presidential administrations, the author, and narrator, Robert Reich has the knowledge and perspective to offer real solutions to why we are so divided as a nation. The United States was founded on the idea of the common good. Reich’s point is that we need to assess what that is and how we can rekindle it. His narration is just as interesting as his ideas. Reich has a dark, robust, compelling voice that commands the microphone and demands attention. He even tries character voices which are, well, interesting. Overall, he succeeds because he’s reading from the heart. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

The title will tell you much of what you need to know about what this thoughtful audiobook has to say. Having served in three presidential administrations, the author, and narrator, Robert Reich has the knowledge and perspective to offer real solutions to why we are so divided as a nation. The United States was founded on the idea of the common good. Reich’s point is that we need to assess what that is and how we can rekindle it. His narration is just as interesting as his ideas. Reich has a dark, robust, compelling voice that commands the microphone and demands attention. He even tries character voices which are, well, interesting. Overall, he succeeds because he’s reading from the heart. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

2018-01-09
Reich (Public Policy/Univ. of California; Saving Capitalism, 2015, etc.) takes a note from Adam Smith and runs with it in this spirited defense of the public sphere.The best economy may be one in which unrestrained trade occurs in keeping with the laws of supply and demand, but it is also one in which human needs are met and externalities such as environmental costs are taken into account. In this new gilded age, writes the author, the common good is often ignored, even if a few interesting things are happening. For one thing, Donald Trump "has at least brought us back to first principles….Trump has got us talking about democracy versus tyranny." The president and his ilk have also gotten us talking about whether there is such a thing as a social contract or a public domain after all. In this brief but well-argued treatise, Reich contrasts shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, the excesses of the former often explained away by the notion that the executive has a fiduciary obligation to increase returns to shareholders no matter what the cost. "The argument is tautological," writes the author. "It assumes that investors are the only people worthy of consideration. What about the common good?" The enemies of the common good are countless, from latter-day slumlords to deregulated megabanks and untrammeled hedge funds, all of which disregard the rules society has evolved to keep transactions fair, "tacit rules that can be exploited by people who view them as opportunities for selfish gain rather than as social constraints." Reich examines the rise of ruleless society as a function of declining trust in social institutions. Against all this, among other things—and now borrowing a page from Sandra Day O'Connor—the author urges a renewal of civic education to enable people "to work with others to separate facts and logic from values and beliefs," including, one assumes, the belief that it is acceptable to rob the public blind.Idealistic and stronger in description than prescription, but a provocative essay nonetheless.

Kirkus Reviews