14 - Modern Economic Thought and the “Good Society”

Summary

In liberal economic thought, debating the “good society” was particularly prominent in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a period in which, as John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) put it, people were “unusually expectant of a more fundamental diagnosis.” Good society here describes a normative horizon against which arguments are legitimized and toward which societies should strive. The term itself is mentioned rarely by economists. Mostly, they shared the notion that what is “good” cannot be defined in detail beyond the fact that it entails more than individual happiness and thus more than the hedonistic utilitarianism attached to the liberal tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.