The Common Good

Reich served as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, has taught public policy at Berkeley for decades, and has spent his career watching the shift he describes in this book happen in real time: the moment in the late 1970s when Americans began talking less about what we owe each other and more about what we can extract for ourselves, from 'we're all in it together' to 'you're on your own.' The Common Good is his moral argument for recovery — that a functioning society requires shared values about mutual obligation, that the erosion of those values produces the vicious cycles of inequality, distrust, and democratic dysfunction we are currently living through, and that the reversal requires a new ethic of leadership, civic education, and a willingness to apply honor and shame to those who exploit the rules rather than abide by them. Reich is a reformist rather than a radical — he believes the system is recoverable rather than requiring replacement — which puts this book at the more accessible end of the Make Something Better arc. Read it as the bridge between civic-minded liberalism and the more structurally radical arguments in Mutual Aid, The Dawn of Everything, and Rules for Radicals. For readers who feel the loss of something without yet having the language for what that something was — this book names it.