Chris Dillow sets out three objections to Gordon Brown's calling for a national purpose. The third of them - that it won't 'defuse Muslim fundamentalism' - I leave to one side. I'm interested in the first two.
The second says, essentially, that there shouldn't be national purposes, because these would be illiberal, preventing people from pursuing their own individual purposes. That seems to me to go too far: any particular common purpose will surely leave room for the pursuit of many, though not all, individual purposes. If it is a national purpose to provide a good standard of health care to everyone, that doesn't prevent individuals from leading lives that are very different from one another - just within the framing context of good health care. Some national purposes may, of course, be more stifling than others.
Chris's first objection is, in part, making the same point as his second one: that there shouldn't be national purposes. But he seems to come close to saying that states can't have common purposes. And I think that's also wrong. Any collectivity can, in principle, have a common purpose - if, for instance, a majority of its members share some particular objective. Such purposes may be authoritarian, but they don't have to be. It depends on what they are, how they are decided upon, and how much room they leave those who don't share them to do their own thing.
To forestall possible misunderstanding: this post isn't about Gordon Brown; it's about collectivities and purposes.