Hennadii Khrystokin, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor

There is a well-known observation that aptly describes our situation: people who use the same words often mean entirely different things. “Dignity,” “justice,” and “unity” are part of the vocabulary of virtually every public discussion about Ukraine’s future. Yet as soon as the conversation becomes concrete, it becomes clear that everyone invests these concepts with their own meaning. Declared values do not, by themselves, become a shared project. The problem is not ill will, but the fact that we are asking the wrong question.

Public intellectuals and politicians usually seek the foundations upon which Ukraine’s future can be built. At different times, these have taken the form of various formulations of a national idea, particular ideologies, an awareness of the need for a new social contract, discourse about Ukraine’s civilizational identity, and so forth. In our view, however, the discussion must move to the meta-level of reflecting on the common good for Ukraine. For us, this is neither an idea nor a ready-made project, but rather a search for the fundamental principles on which all citizens can agree.

We often ask, “What is our common good?” and offer countless different answers. Instead, we propose asking, “How do we create it together?” In the first question, the good exists somewhere and must be found or proclaimed. In the second, it emerges through the process of our common efforts; it must be discovered.

The entire tradition, from Aristotle to contemporary communitarian thinkers, confirms that the common good is neither the sum of private interests nor a declaration of correct values, but rather a quality of shared existence. Yet this immediately raises another question: what preconditions must exist for the common good to emerge and endure at all? It is precisely these preconditions that we will discuss: common action, the social imaginary, and the social contract. In our view, without these preconditions it is impossible even to begin a meaningful conversation about the common good.

Common Action and Its Distinctive Nature

Let us begin with what appears to be the most obvious point. Common action is not merely the coordination of individual efforts. There is a fundamental difference between several people lifting a heavy object together and a group of people jointly solving a complex common problem. In the first case, the result is a mechanical sum of individual efforts. In the second, something emerges that did not exist before the action began and that cannot be reduced to the sum of each participant’s contribution.

Hannah Arendt called this second type of activity simply action, distinguishing it from labor and work. She argued that action is inherently unpredictable because, in the space between people acting together, something new always emerges, sometimes unexpectedly. For this reason, the outcome of common action can never be completely planned or predicted. And for this same reason, the common good, as the outcome of common action, cannot be manufactured and stored for the future. It exists only so long as there is a living community that sustains it and continually renews it through its action.

What took place in Ukraine during the first weeks following the full-scale invasion in February 2022 provides a vivid illustration of this. Volunteer networks, the self-organization of communities, and the willingness to help complete strangers were neither planned nor coordinated from above. They emerged between people who suddenly found themselves facing a common challenge, within the field of common action. In that space between them, something arose spontaneously that we may call the primary experience of the genuine common good. We all experienced this, yet after some time we also began to lose that sense of it.

This happened because common action under conditions of an acute challenge arises relatively easily. Far more difficult is common action when the challenge is less obvious, the response is less urgent, and competing alternatives exist. It is precisely then that it becomes clear that the will to act together alone is insufficient.

Here it is necessary to make an important clarification. Not every form of collective activity constitutes action in the sense that we mean. Manipulative mobilization may involve masses of people, but it is not a common undertaking. An army carrying out orders acts in a coordinated manner, but not within the space between equals. A corporation maximizing profit is coordinated, but it is not a community. Genuine common action presupposes that participants are equal with respect to determining what the outcome will be, that the outcome is genuinely open, and that it truly depends upon what occurs between them. It is precisely this openness of the outcome that distinguishes common action from administration.

Elinor Ostrom, in her analysis of the related problem of governing common resources, demonstrated that sustainable collective action requires specific institutional conditions: clearly defined community boundaries, rules appropriate to local conditions, participation in modifying those rules, effective monitoring, and proportional sanctions. Yet Ostrom describes the conditions for the sustainability of already existing common action, rather than the conditions for its emergence. Between the emergence and the sustainability of common action lies a gap that is filled by the social imaginary.

The Social Imaginary and Why It Is Constitutive

The American philosopher John Dewey demonstrated that there is no ready-made group of people in nature who are already aware of a common problem and prepared to act together to solve it. Such a group comes into being only when its members already possess an image of a possible alternative state of affairs. It is important to understand that, in the vision of the future that creates a community, action and imagination operate together, simultaneously. The vision of the community itself becomes a kind of shared practice of that community.

The French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis developed this insight in a highly significant direction. According to him, society is an act of “self-institution,” or, in other words, society comes into being through the shared projective imagination of its own past and future. This means that every society lives within a particular imagined system of images, meanings, and significances, without which its practices and institutions simply lose their meaning. In other words, there exists a systemic narrative that constitutes what Castoriadis called the “social imaginary.”

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes between what theorists and public intellectuals formulate and the way ordinary people actually experience and understand their social existence. The social imaginary belongs to the latter. It consists of the images, narratives, legends, and traditions through which society understands itself and gives meaning to its practices. It is invisible, functioning as a social background rather than as an object of reflection. What thinkers discuss is no longer the spontaneous social imaginary itself but reflective thought, expressed in theories and concepts.

Between the social imaginary and the concrete practices of a community lies an intermediate element that deserves separate attention. This is the narrative: the shared story through which society organizes its experience and transmits it across time. Human beings do not live within abstract principles. They live within stories. Through these stories, society learns to perceive its past, present, and future. The narrative is the mechanism through which the social imaginary takes on a concrete form that is recognizable and transmissible.

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated that narrative identity is not a monologue but a dialogue with “other voices” within one’s own narrative. A society that silences certain voices in the name of a “single” narrative undermines the very social imaginary that it seeks to strengthen. The competition of narratives is not a pathology but a condition of a living social imaginary, provided that this competition takes place within a space of mutual recognition rather than mutual destruction.

Ricoeur also added a temporal dimension to this analysis. The social imaginary operates in two modes: the ideological mode, in which it justifies and legitimizes the existing order, making it appear natural and inevitable; and the utopian mode, in which it opens a horizon of alternative possibilities. Here, “utopia” does not mean naïve dreams but rather the capacity to perceive the existing order as contingent, as something that could be otherwise. A society that has lost this capacity is one that reproduces itself without change, even when change is necessary.

What preliminary conclusion can we draw from this? The common good is impossible without a social imaginary that creates a vision of a possible and attainable reality. If a society’s imagination is trapped solely in survival or struggle, it becomes capable only of reacting to threats rather than creating something new. Under conditions of prolonged war, the social imaginary naturally narrows to the anticipation of victory. Yet if society fails to preserve, alongside this, a horizon of what it wishes to become after victory, then when the war ends it may find itself facing a void. This is a very real risk that Ukraine has encountered.

The Problem of the Social Contract

The concept of the social contract is one of the most problematic in political philosophy. Its classical version, from Thomas Hobbes through John Locke to John Rawls, assumes that a legitimate social order is one to which rational individuals, reasoning from a neutral position, would agree. In other words, classical social contract theory begins from an abstract situation that Rawls expressed through the metaphor of the “veil of ignorance”: an ideal situation in which we are asked to choose the principles according to which all people should live, without knowing when, where, or as whom we ourselves might be born.

This construction, which became the foundation of many democratic procedures, is undoubtedly useful, but it is detached from real life. Michael Sandel and the communitarian critique convincingly demonstrated that the so-called “neutral subject,” who supposedly always chooses the just solution, does not actually exist. A real human being is always already rooted in a particular tradition, possesses historical memory, and bears social obligations that precede any rational choice. This means that liberal philosophers begin from a situation that is, in principle, impossible. Consequently, the social contract so cherished by liberals itself becomes open to question.

Oleksii Panych, in his critical analysis of Hobbes, pointed to another fundamental limitation of the classical theory. Hobbes grounded the social contract in the human need for security, while Abraham Maslow later placed security on the second level of his hierarchy of needs. Yet Ukraine’s experience has revealed that, for a critical mass of people, dignity is a more fundamental value than security. This is precisely why they are capable of collectively risking their security in defense of their dignity. Hobbes’s Leviathan cannot explain the voluntary choice of sacrifice, nor can it provide a moral justification for it. This constitutes a fundamental weakness of a security-centered approach to the social contract.

How can this problem be overcome? The concept of the social contract becomes productive if we understand it not as an act but as a process. It is not a one-time agreement among neutral, atomized individuals but a living system of mutual obligations among communities, continually renewed through concrete practices of mutual recognition.

The American philosopher John Dewey described something similar when he spoke about the “public.” For him, the public is not something given; it comes into being around shared problems and is always plural and situational. Different problems constitute different publics, and none of them is identical with “society as a whole.” This frees us from the temptation to identify a particular “public” with the entire people and to speak on behalf of all in its name. Within Dewey’s logic, the social contract is not a document but a living process of mutual recognition that either takes place—or fails to take place—through real practices of jointly addressing common problems.

It is important to note here that the social contract, understood in this living, processual sense, presupposes not only rights but also obligations. Moreover, these are obligations to which people remain faithful even when doing so requires effort. Paul Ricoeur spoke of ipse-identity—the self as faithfulness to one’s commitments—in contrast to idem-identity, or identity as the permanence of substance. A society preserves itself not because it always remains the same, but because it remains faithful to certain commitments. The Heavenly Hundred and Azovstal are not merely symbols of resilience; they are figures of memory that constitute obligations. The real question is not whether we remember them, but what we do with them: whether we use them to justify the present order or accept them as a challenge to build a new and more just society.

Trust as the Precondition of All Preconditions

Between the social imaginary and the actual social contract stands one more element, without which the transition from one to the other is impossible: trust. Trust is not an independent precondition alongside the other three, but it is the necessary condition that enables all three preconditions to function together.

In his studies of regional development in Italy, Robert Putnam demonstrated that the difference between successful and unsuccessful regions is explained not by resources or formal institutions, but by the level of interpersonal trust. Trust constitutes “social capital”—a resource generated by horizontal relationships among people that reduces the transaction costs of coordination. Where trust exists, people are capable of more complex and more enduring forms of collective action. Where it does not, collective action either fails to emerge or remains situational and fragile.

There is, however, one fundamental nuance that is often overlooked. Trust is not a precondition that exists before common action; it is both its product and its condition. People do not begin acting together because they already trust one another—they begin trusting one another through the experience of acting together. This means that trust is not an input parameter of the social process but the result of concrete institutional conditions that allow common action to occur and to be repeated. Ostrom demonstrated this through the example of governing common resources: sustainable practices of collective governance generate trust, rather than trust generating them.

For Ukraine, these reflections have a very concrete implication. The deficit of trust in institutions, which is structural within Ukrainian society, cannot be overcome through declarations or changes in rhetoric. It can be overcome only through concrete experience showing that institutions fulfill their obligations. Every instance in which a court renders a just decision, an official is held genuinely accountable, or a promise is fulfilled is not merely an isolated event. It is a building block of public trust and, through that trust, of a living social contract.

Where These Three Elements Converge

In conclusion, it is worth demonstrating the unity of the mechanisms of common action, the social imaginary, and the social contract as three dimensions of a single process. Common action is impossible without an imagination capable of perceiving what is possible and opening a new horizon. Imagination, in turn, is empty without concrete practices of common action in which it is realized. And both require a system of mutual obligations that holds the community together both in moments of acute challenge and over the long term.

It is also important to emphasize that the common good is not the sum of private goods. Nor is it the general interest of the majority. Nor is it a set of declarative values. In reality, the common good is that which emerges between people who genuinely act together around shared problems, carry within themselves an open horizon of possibility, and remain faithful to their mutual obligations. Without any one of these three elements—action, imagination, and commitment—the common good either fails to emerge or remains unstable. It is precisely between these three elements that trust arises—not as a fourth precondition, but as the bond that holds them together. Trust is simultaneously the product of common action, the condition of the social imaginary, and the substance of a living social contract.

Here it is useful to distinguish between the thin and the thick layers of social consensus. The thin layer is relatively small but consists of principles genuinely shared by almost everyone: human dignity, justice understood as fairness, responsibility, and solidarity in times of hardship. It is upon this layer that the social contract, understood as a process, is built. The thick layer is the space of substantive, culturally embedded answers: whom we consider a hero, which tradition we claim as our own, how we understand our duty to the state. Consensus here is neither possible nor necessary. What exists instead is a continual conversation that is never finally resolved. Common action and the social imaginary operate at both levels, but in different ways. Common action remains possible despite disagreements within the thick layer—provided that the thin layer holds. A social imaginary that attempts to impose unity within the thick layer ultimately destroys the very commonality it seeks to strengthen.

To this we should add the insight of Emmanuel Levinas. He demonstrated that every genuine common action presupposes the capacity to recognize the other as a subject rather than an object. The “face of the Other” is not merely a metaphor but a description of a primary moral experience: an encounter with another human being is an encounter with something that cannot be contained within my own system of categories and that places a demand upon me. This capacity is culturally cultivated. A society in which the prevailing image of the other is that of a threat or a resource is incapable of genuine common action. Such a mobilized society is capable only of strategic cooperation, which disintegrates as soon as shared interests disappear.

What This Means for Ukraine

The common good in Ukraine cannot be proclaimed or imposed from above. It can emerge only through real practices of common action at the level of communities, cities, and regions. What took place during the Maidan movements and in the first months after 2022 demonstrated that Ukraine possesses the capacity for such action. The question is whether this capacity will endure and take institutional forms capable of making it sustainable.

This is a more concrete question than it may initially appear. The volunteer networks that emerged in 2022 reveal a clear tendency: the smaller the community and the more specific the common problem, the more sustainable the common action. A condominium association that assumed responsibility for maintaining the shelter in its building, or a church community that organized ongoing support for the families of those who were killed, are more enduring forms than large-scale one-time campaigns. This confirms Ostrom’s conclusion that sustainable collective action requires clearly defined community boundaries, concrete tasks, and mechanisms of mutual accountability. The implication for reconstruction is straightforward: supporting small- and medium-scale forms of common action at the local level is a more effective strategy than searching for the “correct” nationwide narrative.

The Social Imaginary Requires Conscious Cultivation

The social imaginary requires deliberate cultivation, especially under conditions of prolonged conflict. This does not mean distracting ourselves from real tasks; rather, it means simultaneously preserving the horizon of the kind of society we aspire to become. Without such a horizon, reconstruction will merely reproduce pre-war structures instead of creating new ones.

There is a specific risk here that should be addressed openly. During a prolonged war, there is a temptation to subordinate the entire social imaginary to a single goal—victory. This is an understandable and justified response to an existential threat. However, there is an important difference between a mobilizational imagination that subordinates everything to one objective and an imagination capable of sustaining multiple horizons simultaneously: both that of tactical survival and that of strategic construction. Societies that lost the capacity for the latter often reproduced pre-war patterns once the conflict had ended: the same inequalities, the same mechanisms for reproducing power, and the same gap between declarations and practices. Ukrainian society is already asking itself what kind of country it is building, not merely what kind of country it is defending. This is the right instinct, and it deserves institutional support through education, public discourse, and the encouragement of cultural and civic initiatives that shape an image of the future.

A living social contract, understood as a system of mutual obligations, is more important than any document or declaration. It either emerges or fails to emerge in concrete situations where people decide whether or not to fulfill their obligations. Every such decision either strengthens or undermines the contract upon which the community rests.

This has a fundamental implication for the discussion about a “new social contract” in Ukraine, which has become prominent among public intellectuals. This discussion often takes the form of a search for the correct principles or the correct text. Yet a social contract, in the living sense, is not a text—it is a practice. The primary problem is not that Ukraine lacks the right principles, but that the mechanisms for implementing them are weak or absent. The contract between citizens and the state is alive when courts protect the weak against the strong, when public officials are accountable to voters, and when promises are fulfilled. These concrete mechanisms are more important for a genuine social contract than even the best-formulated document. Therefore, the reconstruction of Ukraine is not only material and not only narrative—it is, above all, institutional.

Conclusions

The three preconditions of the common good that we have examined—common action, the social imaginary, and the social contract—describe what either does or does not occur in real social processes. Clarifying their structure is important because a mistaken understanding of the nature of the common good inevitably leads to mistaken practical conclusions.

If the common good is not an aggregate but rather a quality of the space between people, then attempts to “distribute” or “provide” it through administrative means are fundamentally inadequate. The state can create the conditions for common action, but it cannot replace it. Whenever the state attempts to define the content of the common good centrally and secure it “from above,” it usually produces not the common good itself but only its imitation—a declaration that bears little relation to actual social practices.

If the social imaginary is a constitutive dimension of shared existence, then working with it is not manipulation but a necessary component of every genuine social process. Yet such work is effective only when it is honest and open, when it offers an image of what is possible rather than imposing an image of what is supposedly “correct.” The difference between these two approaches is fundamental and has practical consequences.

If the social contract is a process rather than an act, then the key question is not, “What have we signed?” but rather, “To which commitments do we remain faithful?” This question is more demanding and more concrete than any constitutional declaration. It requires genuine accountability for one’s commitments in every specific situation.

Finally, if trust is not a precondition of common action but its product, then the question of trust is fundamentally a question of institutional design. A society with low levels of trust will not become a society of high trust simply through appeals to unity. It will become such a society through the accumulated experience that obligations are fulfilled, that rules are applied equally to everyone, and that the weak are protected from the strong.

Taken together, all these conclusions describe not a program but the logic of why certain social practices lead to the genuine common good while others do not. This logic is more important than any particular substantive content because it is the condition that allows any particular content to become genuinely common rather than merely particular while claiming universality.

Thus, our reflections have not focused on the specific content of the common good itself, for it is still in the process of formation. Rather, we have outlined the necessary preconditions that make it possible to approach an adequate understanding of it. Ukraine is still in the process of shaping its own future, and what that future will become depends on us.