Zohran Mamdani let his socialist flag fly at his inaugural address as New York City Mayor yesterday. One line in particular has drawn a great deal of attention online. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism,” he declared, “with the warmth of collectivism.”

Cue the conservative critics suggesting (not incorrectly) that Mamdani sounded like a fictional villain here: think of Star Trek’s Borg, or a character from one of Ayn Rand’s terrible novels. Cue, too, the progressives defending his rhetoric. Yet Mamdani’s binary — “individualism” versus “collectivism” — attests to the impoverished political vocabulary of the modern world. Picking one side or the other is a fool’s gambit.

The better framework — one consonant with the classical political tradition of the West — is the common good. Upholding our collective wellbeing without destroying individuality, the common good transcends this mental division. The division itself is a product of modern conditions which trap people between the twin horns of a merciless individualistic market and a suffocating state bureaucracy.

To see why, it helps to go back to the beginning. Pre-modern sages such as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas insisted that human beings are naturally social and political. That is, we are primed by nature to come together to solve collective problems. Beyond the family, there are larger aims of the city which call upon man’s political instincts. These are common goods: ones which only the community can secure, as Cicero defined them, and which aren’t diminished by being shared. Classic examples are peace, social stability, justice or defence.

The key point, in the classical telling, is that the common good doesn’t trample individuality, even as it demands individual sacrifice. On the contrary, we become more rational, more able to develop our individual capacities, the more we partake of and contribute to the common good, because it is also our good as individuals.

A more peaceful and abundant society leaves more time and energy for goods such family and friendship and, yes, philosophy. A society in which the classes get along — instead of being arrayed against each other in inequality and antagonism — means individuals can devote less in the way of personal resources and liberty to security in the form of gated communities and all-pervasive surveillance.

Modernity — both as a way of life and a philosophy beginning with the likes of Machiavelli and Hobbes — denied this classical model. It framed human beings as naturally brutal and selfish. Politics, in the Enlightenment telling, became something imposed on unruly human nature, rather than an extension of who we are.

One side of this modern coin is individualism — most radically expressed in the Thatcherite formula that “there is no such thing as society.” Here, the individual confronts the market alone and finds himself dramatically outmatched in coercive power by large concentrations of capital — which, by the way, don’t act according to individualism; internally, the corporation is not unlike an authoritarian state.

The other half of the coin is collectivism. Because market individualism leaves the lone person so powerless, he must turn to the all-powerful state and the collective for protection. But that protection comes at a huge price, not least the diminishment of the smaller communities in which people were once able to act for the common good, such as family, church and local clubs.

In practice, this looks like the working poor, including 50% of US fast-food workers, having to rely on public welfare to make ends meet. In the individualistic marketplace, they are subject to the coercive power of the low-wage employer. In the collectivist welfare state, they are subject to the power of the administrator, who determines what they can and can’t buy with their food stamps, and who constantly means-tests their meagre Medicaid benefits.

Both forms of impoverished politics, individualism and collectivism, act simultaneously and together on the poor. Both formations, almost always acting together, distance us from our deeper capacities as political animals. It’s a shame that Mamdani thinks collectivism is the answer — and a shame that his opponents fail to see individualism as collectivism’s handmaiden.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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