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On the other hand, though, if we return to the republican ideal about the priority
and centrality of the common good, new and more suggestive avenues for thought
emerge. Rather than assuming that citizens are equal, we can instead postulate that the
creation of the conditions for citizens’ equal participation become part of the definition of
what citizens should pursue as the common good. Care about equality, understood in
terms of citizens’ abilities to participate, thus becomes a key element of public life.
This view means that public persons can no longer think of so-called private
concerns as having no public implications. The feminist claim that the personal is
political has to be understood in this way. For example, the notion that being independent
requires being free of all family obligations does not make sense (despite Rousseau).
Public commitments now extend in to private relations; private interests have to be
defined in terms of public concerns. This is not to say that there is no use in the
distinction between the public and the private; only that the distinction now has to be
drawn politically not sociologically. In short, the effect of categorical equality is the
politicization of the public/private boundary. With the erasure of the distinction between
public and private persons, private interests become potentially public matters.
The implications for public policy are immense if we transform the understanding
of the common good to include care for citizens to be able to participate as citizens. By
this reading, adequate capacities of families to care for their members, to provide them
with decent levels of education and health, become a collective concern even though they
are carried out in private households, since they affect the basic capacities of citizens.
Insofar as the economy is no longer simply commercial but capitalist, political life needs
to be concerned with how economic institutions affect the capacities of citizens to
Convention