What is the meaning and significance of public goods for politics and social life? How can they foster rather than disable individual and collective agency? At Justitia Amplificata, I work on a book manuscript »The Primacy of Public Goods.« The underlying motive for writing this book is that an orientation on objects, and on public goods in particular, does not block our sight of (in)justice in social relationships, but instead helps us to illuminate and criticize it in unforeseen ways. The book argues that public goods do not only constitute the currency of real politics, but compose the crucial texture social life in general.

More specifically, it articulates the primacy of public goods in two senses. First, an infrastructure of public goods and social services, which is backed up by governmental coordination and compulsion, is constitutive of just and orderly social life, including private and common modes of providing and enjoying goods. The first sense of the primacy of public goods thus captures a very simple idea, namely, that both market mediation for private goods and the radical democratic governance of the commons is not as self-sustaining as their advocates claim them to be. Second, an abundant diversity of public goods has primacy over, and should not be reduced to, monist and potentially exclusionary conceptions of the common good. My book argues that if the authoritative provision and enjoyment of public goods are to enable rather than to impede individual and collective agency in pluralistic societies, it is crucial to appreciate their phenomenological diversity and political contestability. (Maurits de Jongh)