Description: Michael Walzer tells us why we should care.

Question: What is the common good?

Transcript: I have always been suspicious of terms in that that come in the singular. Maybe there are, maybe we should think of common goods. We want citizens, we want our children to grow up in a world where there is physical security which terrorism calls into question. Physical security is one common good. Freedom, political liberty, is another common good. A much greater degree of social equality is another common good. Those are, to my mind, the crucial common goods, and, referring back to our last question, a culture in which larger percentage of the population is engaged at a higher level, that's also a common good.

Question: Why should citizens care?

Transcript: Well, because it is imagine a society. Switch to works of art. Imagine a society, which once existed, where Shakespeare’s plays were the ordinary entertainment of average Londoners. That seems to me to be something quite wonderful, so why shouldn’t, why shouldn’t the discourse of professors be of everyday interest to ordinary people? It produces something more lively, more interesting, more tense than commercial culture.

Recorded on: 2/27/08