THE COMMON GOOD FOR ECONOMISTS

The common good is [not] the mere collection of private goods,... it is the good human life of the multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. —Jacques Maritain (1948) The essence of the social question is that society has defined itself away—it is no longer anything beyond the sum of its individuals. —Franz Mueller (1984) o almost anyone trained as an economist, the above statements about the common good seem problematic; one suspects that there must be some flaw in the speaker’s thinking. How can society be anything more than the sum of its parts, as Mueller asserts? How can we evalu-ate the welfare of society based on anything other than the sum of individual goods, as Maritain asserts