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This chapter discusses the concept of collective rationality. Collective rationality is rational cooperation guided by collective reasoning: ‘a cooperative effort, involving linguistic exchange, to answer a question or solve a problem confronting a group’. Debates concerning collective rationality reflect the divergent disciplinary backgrounds that influence its discussion. Two meanings of the concept of ‘collective rationality’ may be distinguished. The first is a collective decision, where ‘collective rationality’ records a form of group process to arrive at a decision. This may not reflect anything other than an aggregation of individual decisions (collective action). In the second, ‘collective rationality’ is a position or decision made by a collective entity. The ‘rationality’ reflects the position of a collective entity and is indicative of its collective agreement, however temporary (collective reasoning). At essence, both collective action and collective reasoning are debates about a collective good.

This chapter explores the question of what individuals or groups may have a right to. In particular, it considers the question of whether people can have a right to common goods, such as the flourishing of their culture or national heritage. It first explains the concept of a common good and its distinction from other, similar, concepts such as collective and public goods. It argues that individuals should not have a right to common goods, unless a particular distributive principle applies to the good in question, and then the individual's right is the right to a certain share in that common good. Finally, the chapter explores the question of how this analysis applies to group rights.

This chapter gives substance to the idea of a ‘communitarian value-driven epistemology’ by developing and combining ideas from Edward Craig's and Bernard Williams' ‘epistemic genealogy’ and Barry Barnes' and Steven Shapin's ‘sociology of knowledge’. In order to make transparent how this project might slot into more familiar, or more mainstream, projects, the paper maintains throughout a critical dialogue with Jon Kvanvig's position. The chapter is structured around an attempt to defend Craig's position against Kvanvig's criticisms: by treating the institution of testimony as a collective good underwritten by the intrinsic and interrelated values of accuracy and sincerity; by rendering protoknowledge attributions as ascriptions of honour; and by allowing attributions of protoknowledge to be intertwined with attributions of freedom. The view that emerges is that the core of our knowledge practices comprises institutions of testimony, and that these practices are a collective good.

Despite the considerable growth in FDI and capital mobility compared to the 1950s, most markets remain semi-globalized and governed by predominantly national legal systems and other institutions regulating economic activities. As a result, the degree and scope of corporate and institutional authority over economic activity within and between national economies seem likely to continue to vary considerably. Additionally, the more that MNCs seek to improve their organizational capabilities and competitive competences through accessing knowledge, skills and collective competition goods in foreign locations by adapting to local business partners and institutions, the more limited becomes their ability to impose central control over subsidiary strategies and procedures. Furthermore, increasing exposure to foreign markets and learning from abroad need not always, or indeed very often, imply a rejection of domestic institutions and interests. However, the diversity of leading companies’ governance, growth strategies, and competitive behaviour within national borders does seems likely to grow in the twenty-first century as long as most markets remain open, especially between firms in different industrial sectors and with different degrees of investment in foreign locations.

This chapter examines the decline of the machine-tool industry in the UK. This decline is partially attributed to globalization and the British tradition of a low-cost strategy, short-term investment patterns, and general neglect of manufacturing. It argues that the institutions that can support industrial networks remain weak, despite evidence to the contrary.

The question is answered by introducing an ideal, the ideal of well‐ordered science In well‐ordered science the inquiries pursued are those that would have been selected by a well‐informed group of deliberators dedicated to working cooperatively with one another. Well‐ordered science is contrasted with vulgar democracy and with elitism. The chapter suggests various ways in which our current practice of the sciences falls short of the ideal.

This chapter suggests that there is something uncomfortable about democracy as we live in it today, where the majority is considered as the righteous ruler. Thus, if the majority wants electricity, and if providing that service requires a few people to give up their land or health, then the few should sacrifice for the whole. How did American democracy get to the point where standing up for one's personal rights became understood as an affront to the broader collective good? The short answer is that the democratic state's rendering of most things and people into numbers has created such a state of affairs, which is referred to the “rule of numbers.” People, ecology, or really anything can be added or subtracted, and all that matters in the end is what comes out of the equation.

Usually, theories of collective action assume the existence of a collective good, but before a community can act collectively, its members must share a common interest in some end. Often, the task is to construct the collective good. Shared stories have such power: if stories can construct individual interests, commonly held stories can create common interests. The question is what determines when a single story will capture the minds of the community. That depends on several factors, among them alignment with self-interest, trust in the storyteller, and frequency of the telling, but also resonance with those widely held narratives a community already holds in mind, the narratives of culture.

This chapter discusses how the social value of collective good can be explained within the economic model. It focuses on the attempts of the social capital theory to elucidate the beneficial effects of certain social contexts — that social networks have value to those who participate in them. The purpose of this chapter is to show why social capital theory falls short of its declared aims. However, it also seeks to clarify why it is difficult to reinterpret welfare without challenging the basis of the economic model in more fundamental ways that social capital theory can muster. Among the topics discussed herein include: incorporating social capital; social capital and well-being; groups, clubs and change.

There is broad agreement that it is better to have the Security Council with all its flaws than to have no such institution at all. It is difficult to envisage developments of the Security Council in the direction of an institution effectively promoting and sustaining a global community based on the values proclaimed by the UN Charter. Nevertheless, a set of fairly realistic measures can be suggested. Firstly, the Western members of the Council, especially the permanent members, should realize that their dominance is very fragile. Secondly, the Security Council should attach more importance to collective goods and interests of all peoples inhabiting the earth than to the individual goods and interests of the states represented on the Council. Thirdly, the Council should have at its disposal more information from independent sources, gathered and evaluated in the Secretariat, instead of being dependent on information provided by member states, especially the permanent members, on the basis of the work of their secret services. The role of the Office of Legal Affairs in advising the Security Council in matters of international law should also be strengthened. Fourthly, action taken by the Council (in particular in the form of economic and military sanctions) needs to be more reliable and consistent, and less arbitrary. The Security Council should try to build a precedential case law which makes it possible to predict in general terms its course of action. Finally, sanctions imposed on individuals not belonging to a small circle of members of a government, military command, or the leadership of a non-state party to a conflict should remain an exception.

The recent and growing literature concerning the birth and history of neoliberalism stresses the importance of supranational economic governance and institutions for the neoliberal project. Sometimes this international order is allegedly supposed to be based on a federal structure. The crucial point is that the division of power and competences among different layers of government may be instrumental to decreasing the room for maneuver in the provision of collective goods, basically the core of the welfare state. This is the approach to supranational federalism that has proved successful in the last few decades, defeating the more heterogeneous and pluralistic attitude toward the trade-off between national and supranational public goods of its origins. The aim of this chapter is to enquire into the evolution of neoliberal thought as concerns the use of different layers of government as an instrument to provide relevant public goods for citizens’ welfare.

This chapter addresses the following questions: what contribution can criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the public value of criminology? What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote? What modes of intervention — and what institutional arrangements — can best realize that good? To answer these questions a new figure, or perhaps more accurately, a revived and updated old one, is introduced. This character, following and extending John Locke (1690/1975), is called the democratic under-labourer. The figure is used to elaborate and defend the idea that we can best give coherence to criminology's public purpose by understanding its role as one of seeking to foster and sustain a better politics of crime and its regulation. This figure — the hero or heroine of the drama that follows — emerges from an effort to revisit and revise an earlier treatment of these issues by Garland and Sparks.

This chapter compares the impact of public opinion and interest groups on policy making in American states. It proposes a new measure of state public policy and identifies measures of state policy priorities. It argues that public opinion indirectly affects both collective goods and particularistic policy through the impact of public opinion on interest group formation. This chapter also contends that the conventional view that public opinion and interest groups compete in the policy-making process is too simplistic.

In this chapter a normative, comparative institutional analysis of police officers and regular soldiers is provided. The roles of police officer and regular soldier are defined by recourse to normatively specified, empirically anchored, organizational roles. Two key theoretical notions employed are those of multilayered structures of joint action and collective goods. The moral rights and duties constitutive of institutional roles are derived in part from the collective goods that are the raison d’être of police and military organizations. These institutional moral rights and duties are special rights and duties.The institutional roles of police officers and regular soldiers are importantly different from one another.. For example, military forces, unlike police forces, do not have as a primary and overriding role to enforce the law, and soldiers use lethal force with less legal and moral constraints than police officers.

The New Silk Road strategy and the rise of China in higher education raises the stakes in the engagement between China’s universities and their Western counterparts, including Anglo-American universities. The chapter focuses on the similarities and differences between Sinic and Anglo-American political and educational cultures (state, society, family, individual) and in collectivism and individualism, and the implications for higher education. The state in China is a comprehensive state rather than an Anglo-American limited liberal state. China has greater potential for collective ties, shared goods, and state intervention in higher education. These are long-standing differences. Since 1949, both state power and indigenous individualism have been enhanced in China, while Anglo-American higher education has moved toward a more exclusively individualized approach to outcomes. There is closer convergence between China and Anglo-American in universities than in the configuration of society, suggesting ongoing potential for divergence in higher education.

Where Chapter 12 established that property belonging to those with reasonable wealth cannot be ‘natural’ rights grounded for the right-holder’s sake, Chapter 13 argues that such property is, rather, groundable on the common good, as outlined by classical liberals like Hayek, Hume, and Smith. Surprisingly, this approach gives us reason to stop seeing most property as an individual right, but rather as duties-owed-to-the-community, duties that individuals control. This is because property—unlike many other rights that are not ‘for the right-holder’s sake’—does not wear on its face its ground in the common good. Owners’ rights are not like those of a teacher, say: rights clearly protecting an other-serving role. Conceiving property as a right therefore carries a major risk that it will be seen as ‘natural’, grounded by the right-holder’s own good. To avoid this, the chapter argues that we should start conceiving free markets as involving ‘controllership’, in which duties-not-to-trespass are owed to the community rather than to particular owners.