Can the media make Americans care more than we do about the boring stuff that profoundly affects the commonweal?
When the data is in, Messrs Page and Bartels may surprise us and report that the richest of the rich are actually a band of saints concerned above all with the commonweal.
Finance capitalism has created a finance aristocracy totally separated from the commonweal, with no real customers and no social attachments to country or human being.
Moreover, individuals in a society of political equals are thought to be capable as well of discerning the commonweal and modulating their exercise of personal freedom accordingly.
The United States was founded as an experiment in eighteenth-century republicanism, in which it was understood that only men with property would vote, and publicly, since they were the only people who could be trusted to vote with the commonweal, and not private gain, in mind.
Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal.
The celebration of simulacra of old-style craft and the assertion of cinema's crucial value to the commonweal are at the same time assertions of the importance of critics.
Smith is arguing against a kind of ancient philosophical prejudice that saw balance, continuity, equilibrium as the signs of a well-ordered commonweal — that thought of the good life as one free from the anxiety of change.
Though never less than careful and clever, it's also a stunted and fiercely unhappy piece of work, straining hard to deliver home truths about a commonweal that has beaten itself out of shape.
Maybe it was a simple demurral to the critics, but the disarming of the Dark Knight reads like a concern about the commonweal, a deferral to an accepted and important idea about the division between civilian and military life.
A streak of implausibly glorious weather helped: if ever there was a moment to believe that the wedding would somehow advance the commonweal, it was during the week before the ceremony, as absconding office workers sneaked pints on the sunny pavements of flag-draped streets.
