Senator Chris Murphy Announces New Book Crisis of the Common Good 

Senator Chris Murphy will publish a new book this spring.

On Jan. 29, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan Publishers, announced that the Connecticut senator, 52, will release Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America in May.

According to the book’s synopsis, Crisis of the Common Good examines a set of modern “ills” — including new technologies, the pursuit of profit and a “winner-takes-all” mindset — that Murphy argues have reshaped American life and helped fuel the nation’s current crises.

Murphy, who has represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate since 2013, contends these forces have stripped many Americans of a “sense of daily purpose and connection,” a problem he says has been heightened under President Donald Trump’s administration. Drawing on political philosophy and history, he also argues that “cults” of profit, globalism, technology, consumption, credentialism and corruption have taken hold of American life.

“I want to win the 2026 and 2028 elections as much as anyone. But if we believe an election alone can fix what’s broken in America, we are dangerously deluding ourselves,” Murphy said in a statement.

“This book is about the underlying spiritual sickness in our nation that gave rise to Trump: a ‘me-first’ culture that worships profit over character, consumption over citizenship and globalization over community — and a corrupt politics that papers over this sickness rather than curing it.”

In the book, Murphy also outlines what he calls the “politics of the common good,” a framework he describes as rooted in America’s past and designed to build support across party lines.

“‘If America is to worship anything, it should be the common good: a shared prosperity in which we care as deeply about the health of our communities and neighbors as we do about ourselves,’” Murphy continued. “This book is about how we lost that ethic, how Trump exploited its absence to tear us apart and how we rebuild a society that can never be so easily broken again.”

FSG President and Publisher Mitzi Angel said the book “is galvanizing and visionary and provides essential context on the world we inhabit.”

“Senator Murphy has distinguished himself as both a principled fighter in a time of peril and a searching thinker in a time of confusion,” added FSG Vice President and Executive Editor Alex Star. “In Crisis of the Common Good, he tells a new and searing story about the origins of our discontents — and offers a bold but astonishingly feasible path to setting them right.”

Murphy, a vocal advocate for gun control legislation, is also the author of The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy.

Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America will be published on May 26, 2026 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.