Cutting to the Chase: The Good Life Via Liberal Education

Writing for Commonweal, Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting examines, via essay review, Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s *How Much Is Enough?*. Along the way Gutting brings in Aristotle, Marx, Pope Leo XIII, Robert Nozick, the utilitarians, Richard Easterlin, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, and John Maynard Keynes. I love these kinds of essays. In the end, Gutting sounds a lot like Mortimer J. Adler: there’s no way to impose even a highly ethical, flexible vision of the good life in a liberal capitalist state, so you have to teach people how to achieve it via a liberal education. Adler argued for this approach in both The Time of Our Lives (1970) and The Common Sense of Politics (1971). – TL