Introduction

Summary

The idea of a ‘common good’ is so tightly woven into all thinking about politics that any change in its content can be investigated as the manifestation of a significant shift in the conceptual foundations of political life. This book tells the story of just such a moment of fundamental change. In later eighteenth–century Britain the cluster of ideas which constituted the substance of what contemporaries meant when they talked of a ‘common good’, and which had taken its characteristic shape since the sixteenth century, was rearranged by those who felt it no longer of use in addressing the central issue of the relation of individuals to community. That the security of the community was the basic justification for government action was an ancient idea given its most systematic treatment by the philosophers and political theorists of the late middle ages; its specific early modern form reflected the needs of the states that emerged from the era of Reformation and Counter–Reformation. These were no longer found to be identical with the needs of eighteenth–century Great Britain. There was a pronounced discontinuity between the changed reality of imperial governance, and continuing justifications in terms of the ‘common good’. The crisis of relations with the North American colonies and the renewed demand for wider religious toleration at home struck at the theoretical foundations of that type of state. The consolidation of territorial power through force and the ideological suasion of a state religion both depended on a notion of community. Distance, dissatisfaction and dissent shattered this crucial support.