The rehabilitation of the concept of public good Seminar

In this presentation, Mark considers three 20th Century attacks on the idea of the public good, the first from Social Choice Theory; the second from Public Choice Theory, and the third from 20th Century political liberalism, starting with Rawls and including Robert Nozick, Bruce Ackerman, and Ronald Dworkin. Despite a prolonged attack from the liberal right, spanning the period from the 1930s to 2008, Mark argues that the concept of public good, as well as that of public interest, needs rehabilitating as a political concept. In this seminar, Mark traces the urgency of such rehabilitation in the light of emerging issues such as climate change and asses the implications for lifelong learning and the global politics of education.