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Alasdair MacIntyre’s Rejection of Liberal Modernity as a Political Theory of Negation

Jan Joseph Herchold The Catholic University of America

Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark After Virtue delivered a withering critique of both modern philosophy and modern politics. The former is characterized in terms of the rise of an emotivist individualism that abandons the life of the virtues and the latter is said to institutionally embody and encourage this individualism. The implication of this analysis is a rejection of modern “systematic politics” in its institutional forms (whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist) as inimical to the tradition and practice of the virtues. The legitimacy of the modern state, and hence its claims on our allegiance, is radically called into question because it is incapable of being the locus of a moral community. After Virtue’s philosophical ethics proposes an Aristotelian ethics of the virtues as an alternative to Nietzschean emotivism, but its political theory offers no such positive program: it counsels an internal exile from liberal modernity into local communities of virtue. In the thirty years since After Virtue, MacIntyre’s philosophical ethics has developed in interesting and substantive ways, but the political theory remains fundamentally a political theory of negation. I argue in this paper that MacIntyre’s critique of modernity in fact exemplifies certain permanent tensions in political life – in particular, the tension between the perspective of individualism and that of the common good. MacIntyre’s philosophical ethics proposes a choice between Nietzsche and Aristotle; I suggest that his social science is not Nietzschean enough in its account of pre-modern politics and indeed not Aristotelian enough in regards to modern politics.

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I. The penultimate chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark After Virtue (“Justice as a

Virtue: Changing Conceptions”) includes the book’s most explicit commentary on the

relationship between our modern condition (one that is “after virtue”) and political life. If the

practice of virtue is needed to give our lives meaning and direction, and hence the possibility of

satisfaction and happiness; and the modern economic and political order is unremittingly hostile

to the practice and the life of virtue; then, MacIntyre is clear, that economic and political order

must be rejected. The good regime must be in accordance with virtue, for MacIntyre as for

Aristotle, and MacIntyre’s assessment is that the modern order is inherently incapable of this.

There are still “tasks … to be performed” that may only be “possible through the use of

governmental institutions,” but “[m]odern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative,

radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to

the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a

systematic rejection of that tradition” (AV 255).1

The reader may well ask whether this categorical rejection requires, or ought to require

for MacIntyre, the construction of an alternative economic and political order, whether in theory

or practice. The brief final chapter of the book – “After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky

and St Benedict” – indicates to the contrary that MacIntyre has left his revolutionary aspirations,

whether Communist or otherwise, behind. For here we read of the “exhaustion” of not just the

Marxist tradition but “every other political tradition within our culture”; what MacIntyre means

by this is that “no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures … could be

brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism” (AV 262).

1 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984 [1981]). Henceforward references to this text will be made parenthetically by “AV.”

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The idea that there are no fundamental alternatives to the contemporary order is, in nuce,

the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s best-selling 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man

(although MacIntyre’s name is not found in Fukuyama’s index). It is worth considering the

differences between the two “end of history” theses. The first half of Fukuyama’s title indicates

a Hegelian rational necessity to this development, and hence a condition to which we ought to

reconcile ourselves; the second half of the title points to a Nietzschean melancholy or perhaps

nausea that this condition implies the foreclosure of the possibilities of meaningful human action.

Like both Marx and Nietzsche, and unlike Fukuyama, MacIntyre rejects a Hegelian

reconciliation with the contemporary order, yet at this stage in his intellectual trajectory he has

also rejected any Marxist supersession of this order; on the other hand he cannot acquiesce to a

resigned Nietzschean melancholy à la Fukuyama (avant la lettre), nor can he embrace the

positive Nietzschean alternative to Last-Man-ism, the life of the Übermensch (for reasons I will

not get into here).2 And so it is that for MacIntyre, while the contemporary order cannot be

transformed, a meaningful life of virtue along the Aristotelian lines developed in After Virtue

may still be possible, but only tenuously so; and achieving such a life may well require not just a

philosophical rejection of contemporary modes but an actual physical exile from those modes –

the historical model recommended, at least by analogy, is that of the monastic communities of

the early Middle Ages, communities that indeed “ceased to identify the continuation of civility

and moral community with the maintenance of [the Roman] imperium” (AV 263). Because an

Aristotelian virtuous life (unlike the Nietzschean) requires a community, “[w]hat matters at this

stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual

and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (AV 263).

2 For a discussion of the latter rejection, see AV 258-9.

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It must be said that a directive to exile is a difficult teaching, because it denies the

possibility of transformation; internal exile even more so, because it denies the possibility of

starting over.3 To the extent that After Virtue has a “political theory”, it is a political theory of

negation. Quite aside from the existential problem of alienation that this poses, such a theory

also raises serious practical problems for the citizen and statesman: how far and how deeply

should my obligations and commitments to my political and legal order extend? MacIntyre

himself insists that his negation and rejection of the modern political order is not to be confused

with an “anarchist critique of the state” as such, but After Virtue does explicitly call into question

the legitimacy of the modern state in specific: “Nothing in my argument suggests, let alone

implies, any good grounds for rejecting certain forms of government as necessary and legitimate;

what the argument does entail is that the modern state is not such a form of government” (AV

254).4 And in an essay published soon after After Virtue, MacIntyre offers the following

observation, which if not explicitly self-referential is surely a self-assessment: “It may well be ...

that in a particular period the political landscape is such and the predicament of political agents

within it is such that the honest, rational, and well-informed agent can only locate himself within

the political landscape by means of a series of denials.”5

What is striking about the subsequent path of MacIntyre’s thought in the period after

After Virtue is the following disjunction. The philosophical project, which may be characterized

as a revival of Aristotelianism, developed in important ways (without, it should be said,

3 Cf. the introduction of Mendus and Horton to After MacIntyre (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1992): “… one of the deepest difficulties with the argument of After Virtue is that the very extent of its critique of the modern world seems to cast doubt on the possibility of any realistic revival under the conditions of modernity of the Aristotelianism which MacIntyre advocates” (3); “given the importance which MacIntyre attaches to the social embeddedness of thought and enquiry, his largely negative view of modernity continually threatens to undermine any attempt to root his positive proposals in the contemporary world of advanced industrial societies” (13-14). 4 Emphasis added. 5 “The Indispensability of Political Theory.” pp. 17-34 in The Nature of Political Theory, eds. David Miller & Larry Siedentop (Oxford: Claendon,1983), at p. 33; emphasis added.

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repudiating the central insights and theses of After Virtue): most significantly, MacIntyre would

come to affirm a specifically Thomist Aristotelianism in such works as Whose Justice? Which

Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990); he would also reclaim

the sort of “metaphysical biology” rejected by After Virtue in such works as Dependent Rational

Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999). On the other hand, while MacIntyre

certainly developed and expanded his political thought in later publications (as well as

interviews), the fundamentally negative quality remains. In what is probably the most cogent

statement of his political thought (or what might be better described as the implications of his

philosophy for political thought, given that he does not write systematically about politics),

“Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good” (originally published 1997), MacIntyre asserts

that “we now inhabit a social order whose institutional heterogeneity and diversity of interests is

such that no place is left any longer for a politics of the common good”6 – evoking both the

moral chaos of the opening pages of After Virtue and the sense of political exhaustion of its

closing passages. Here too MacIntyre does not shy away from the implications of this

assessment for an understanding of political obligation: “[M]odern states cannot advance any

justifiable claim to the allegiance of their members, and this because they are the political

expression of societies of deformed and fragmented practical rationality.”7 Again, the upshot of

all of this is what I would describe as internal exile, given that the revolutionary option has been

rejected – in a 1991 interview he suggests that “to unfit our students for the contemporary world

ought in any case to be one of our educational aims.”8

6 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good.” pp. 235-54 in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1998), at p. 239. 7 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good”, p. 243. 8 Interview conducted postally for Cogito 5:2 (1991), at p. 275 in The MacIntyre Reader.

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My aim in what follows is to account for why MacIntyre thinks that while an Aristotelian

life in accordance with virtue may be possible at the personal or local level, Aristotelianism is

not compatible with the chief features of the “contemporary political and economic order of

advanced modernity.” MacIntyre’s argument for the incompatibility is wide-ranging and richly

textured, but can be summarized reasonably simply. A politics of the common good in the

Aristotelian sense requires a “moral community” with a shared view of this good; in Aristotle,

the analogous idea is that “friendship” [philia] is the basis for the polis. Such moral

communities were diverse and widespread among pre-modern societies, though they were not

universal or ubiquitous; like Aristotle, MacIntyre excludes imperial forms from the class of

moral communities. The rise and eventual victory in modern societies of liberal individualism as

the dominant mode of thought regarding the relation between the individual and the political

community destroys the possibility of such moral community. This is because liberal

individualism is opposed in both theory and practice to the very possibility of a common good.

The hegemony of liberal individualism as a mode of thought is a contingent historical

development (as described in After Virtue), but the social, political, and economic structures of

modernity that have grown up alongside liberal individualism serve to entrench and inscribe this

mode of thought into the fabric of everyday life (-- this latter theme is alluded to in After Virtue

but more fully developed in the later writings). In “modern” societies, therefore, it is a social

fact that a community’s coming to agreement about the common good will not be based on the

acceptance of tradition or authority: it can only be achieved via the interaction and discussion of

individuals engaged in cooperative “practices.” Because this type, and degree, of interaction and

rational discussion is simply not possible at the level of the nation-state and in the context of a

market economy that prevents such interaction, such communities can only be local ones of

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small producers – this is the conclusion of “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good.”

(Benedict Anderson has famously characterized modern nation-states as “imagined

communities”; MacIntyre might say that the “imagined” part of this construction makes the

“community” part simply illusory, except at the level of positive law.9) Such local communities

may engage in a kind of practice of politics (one thinks of New England town meetings) with

regard to their own communities, but they cannot be modern sovereign states. And so the advice

of After Virtue to construct local communities of internal exile from the dominant order is

affirmed in the later writings – there is no new political teaching. Ultimately, I argue that

MacIntyre’s critique of modernity is a critique of certain tensions in political life that have

always been with us – in particular, the tension between the perspective of individualism and that

of the common good. This tension is highlighted by his own proposal that the fundamental

choice we are faced with is captured by the question: Nietzsche or Aristotle? What I suggest is

that MacIntyre is himself too Nietzschean and not Aristotelian enough in some parts of his

analysis, but that he is not Nietzschean enough in others; and that MacIntyre’s vision of “local

communities” is ultimately so thin because it tries to seal social life off from a tension that, even

if heightened by “modernity”, is fundamentally ineradicable and unavoidable.

II. What sort of state could, on MacIntyre’s view, advance a justifiable claim to the

allegiance of its members? What is the proper grounding for political obligation? MacIntyre’s

positive criterion for a community’s engaging in a politics of the common good is that it have an

existing moral consensus: “In any society where government does not express or represent the

moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a

9 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]).

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bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus” – which is MacIntyre’s

diagnosis of modern politics – “the nature of political obligation becomes systematically

unclear” (AV 254). Only with moral communities – that is to say, communities that share a view

of the good for man – do individuals identify their own good with that of the community. In

such communities justice rewards desert within a community constituted by allegiance to and a

common pursuit of shared goods (cf. AV 155-6). By contrast, a society based only on reciprocal

self-interest cannot command ultimate allegiance, because the interest of the individual is always

considered prior to the good of the community. – These observations are descriptions of the

nature of political community in general rather than pieces of advice for the statesman or citizen

wondering what type of political community is deserving of his allegiance. The latter question is

characteristic of modern political thought, whereas MacIntyre’s method is more akin to the

Aristotelian intermingling of the descriptive and “normative” perspectives: “In learning how to

describe social life one also learns how to evaluate it.”10

The fact that moral communities have shared moralities informed by a shared view of the

good for man does not mean that such communities do not have moral disputes; it does mean

that the common stock of shared principles incorporates enough in the way of determinate,

substantive norms to rationally resolve those disputes. This understanding of what it means to be

a moral community is grounded in MacIntyre’s view of rational argument in general: what is

required for an argument or dispute to be rational is that some criteria capable of resolving the

argument be shared by the participants.11 This does not mean that such debates will be resolved

in a straightforward manner through the use of a decision mechanism, because the way in which

10 A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. (2nd ed.) (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1998 [1966]), p. 90. 11 “If I treat any form of inquiry as rational, I presuppose that there is some criterion by which to determine whether the answers to its questions are correct or incorrect.” A Short History… p. 88.

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the principles are applied to new situations cannot be determined in advance; sometimes the new

situations confronted by the members of the community or the participants in an argument may

even induce a revision of those principles. In the absence of such shared criteria, or first

principles, argument is not totally futile inasmuch as it can reveal to the participants their

differences regarding first principles, but it is not capable of rational resolution. This conception

also implies that no formal procedure (e.g., majority vote) can substitute for the absence of such

first principles.

The content of such principles for communities that aspire to be political communities is

oriented by a determinate view of the good for man as such, what the Greeks called his telos. In

pre-modern societies this telos is viewed in light of not just the social order but the cosmic order:

the totality of order integrates cosmos, society, family, individual. The place of the individual

within each of the subordinate units is well understood by each of the members of the society,

and so what it is to be virtuous in such a society has an objective meaning corresponding to how

well one fulfills one’s role within the totality of order. MacIntyre does not discuss how pre-

modern societies came to develop such conceptions of order; those societies’ own self-

understandings generally saw them as being divinely ordained and communicated to them

directly by the god or gods, or through the gods’ intermediaries such as prophets or priests, or as

received by ancestors. (The correspondence of the social order with the cosmic or natural order

is what is originally meant by “natural law”, although communities, modern communities for

example, can arrive at such a mutual understanding of natural law through rational discussion, as

described in MacIntyre’s later essays.) Pre-modern heroic societies exemplify communities of a

shared view of man’s telos within a totality of order; so too do the polis city-state of ancient

Greece and the kingdoms of medieval Christendom.

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Concrete examples of moral communities are few and far between in After Virtue itself,

but in a 1979 essay MacIntyre provides a list of societies that have had “a total order which both

integrates diverse roles and subordinate orders … and whose polity is nothing but that total order

expressed in the relevant practical terms.” The list includes “ancient Greek city-states and

modern Greek highland villages, medieval Christian and Arab kingdoms and Scottish Highland

clans before 1600, the Sioux nation, the Bedouin of the Western desert, and the Irish of the

Blasket islands.”12 In communities such as these a politics of the common good could be

practiced because a shared conception of that common good undergirds the social order and an

individual’s understanding of his or her place within that order; such societies exemplify an

Aristotelian view of community, inasmuch as they are ordered with reference to a single if

complex telos (even if they have no acquaintance with the actual thought of Aristotle).

Challenges to the community as well as internal debates can, at least in principle, be resolved

with reference to the community’s first principles (rather than via some sort of pragmatic

compromise between heterogeneous and competing interests within the community). Notably,

not all pre-modern social orders are considered to be moral communities. This can be easily

forgotten in light of the denunciation of modern thought and political and social forms in the first

half of After Virtue, which might give the impression that pre-modern societies are simply good

and modern ones simply bad for MacIntyre. This list, on the other hand, is quite particular,

although MacIntyre did observe that it included “a surprising variety of institutional orders.”

Obviously excluded are imperial forms; in this context one might recall the passing reference, in

the discussion of Stoicism in After Virtue, to the replacement of the moral community that was

12 “Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgment: Are They Mutually Exclusive?” p. 132. This agenda-setting essay could almost be regarded as the dissertation proposal for After Virtue and is well worth reading.

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the Greek city-state by first the Macedonian kingdom and then the Roman imperium (AV 168-

70).13

According to After Virtue, the societies of advanced-Western-liberal modernity do not

possess such a shared vision of the good for man that could provide criteria for the rational

resolution of social questions. There is instead a plurality of views regarding that good, not just

among societies but within them. Lacking this vision, modern liberal societies lack the common

premises to rationally resolve debates about controversial moral issues, and appeals to

philosophies that are internally coherent but mutually incommensurable result in impasses that

can only be decided by power and interest. This is the situation dramatized (in chapter 17) in the

debate over the justice of redistributive taxation; even when both positions operate from within a

liberal conception, the Nozickian emphasis on the entitlements of the individual and the

Rawlsian emphasis on individuals’ needs represent incommensurable premises. “[W]e have all

too many disparate and rival moral concepts, in this case rival and disparate concepts of justice,

and … the moral resources of our culture allow us no way of settling the issue between them

rationally” (AV 252). Evidently, democratic procedure is no legitimate substitute for moral

consensus, and so “[m]odern politics is civil war carried on by other means” (AV 253). The

peace achieved by modern politics is not a just peace but a modus vivendi, a series of temporary

truces between conflicting and heterogeneous interest groups. In political, legal, economic and

social life, MacIntyre writes, “the fact that there is no rationally established and agreed

argumentative procedure for evaluating the claims of utility against rights or vice versa” has the

following significance: “[W]hat is unsettlable by argument is settlable by power and money; and,

13 Cf. A Short History of Ethics, p. 100: “The milieu of the moral life is transformed [with the rise of the large-scale state]: it now becomes a matter not of the evaluations of men living in the forms of immediate community in which the interrelated character of moral and political evaluation is a matter of daily experience, but of the evaluations of men often governed from far off, living private lives in communities which are politically powerless. … [T]he sharp antithesis between the individual and the state is inescapable.”

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in the social order at large, how rights are assigned and implemented, what weight is accorded to

this or that class of rights and what to the maximization of the utility of this individual or this

group or people in general … are questions answered by those who have the power and money to

make their answers effective.”14

MacIntyre’s view of “modern” political society has of course been recommended by

cynics down through the ages, for whom, like the Thrasymachus of the Republic, “justice” in any

political society is simply the interest of the stronger; on this view “moral consensus” is an

illusion foisted upon the ruled by the rulers. As we know MacIntyre does not take the strong

Thasymachian view insofar as he does think that there have been societies that practiced a

politics of the common good based on moral consensus; but “modern politics” in particular, he

asserts, “cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus” (AV 253) because “our society cannot

hope to achieve moral consensus” (AV 252).15 The political problem is therefore rooted in

societal moral heterogeneity. Here as elsewhere one wonders why regeneration of a moral

community seems to be foreclosed: after all, the medieval kingdoms of Christendom themselves

grew out of the Roman imperium that MacIntyre had earlier condemned; I will return to this

question below.

Why is it that modern societies in specific cannot achieve moral consensus? There are

two parts to MacIntyre’s answer. One aspect is the social structures of modernity, principally the

market economy and the bureaucratic state, which contribute to and enable an individualist

culture. These structures themselves “grew up”, so to speak, alongside the modes of thought

characteristic of modern liberal pluralistic cultures. But these features of the modern social and

political environment play minor parts in the story MacIntyre tells in After Virtue – they are

14 “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered” (1995), in Ethics and Politics at p. 182. 15 Emphases added.

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accomplices to the real culprit. (The ways in which these social structures enable an

individualist culture is explored more extensively in the later essays, which I will consider

below.) The real culprit in modern society’s inability to achieve moral consensus, indeed the

constitutive feature of modern society, is the rise to prominence and then dominance of an idea, a

mode of thought, a new consciousness. That idea is individualism, or, liberal individualism.

I should mention that MacIntyre himself warns against endowing ideas with “a falsely

independent life of their own” (AV 61). He also says that “the transition into modernity was a

transition both in theory and practice and a single transition at that” (AV 61).16 But while it may

be true that the life of individualism requires certain social supports – after all, there were

individualists, such as Thrasymachus, before the generalized rise of individualism – I want to

emphasize that the decisive event that marks the transition into modernity is a change in

consciousness, according to the narrative of the first part (i.e., chapters 1-9) of After Virtue. This

may be obscured somewhat inasmuch as that narrative is itself not straightforward, and proceeds

more or less in reverse chronological order. The social and cultural conditions for the existence

of the contemporary “emotivist” self that denies the possibility of a shared morality are traced

backward, from the social context of today (i.e., the “cultural climate of … bureaucratic

individualism”; AV 35), to the “predecessor culture” (of approximately 1630-1850) and the

failure of the “enlightenment project” to ground a rational shared morality on a purely

individualist basis, and ultimately to that project’s source in a consciousness of the “burdens” of

hierarchy and teleology.

It may be that ideas should not be endowed with a “falsely independent life of their own”,

but MacIntyre’s etiology of modernity is one, we should note, in which “the key episodes in the

social history which transformed, fragmented and, if my extreme view is correct, largely 16 Emphasis added.

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displaced morality – and so created the possibility of the emotivist self … were episodes in the

history of philosophy” (AV 36).17 Such a view can be kept consistent with MacIntyre’s views on

the necessarily social dimensions of ideas because 18th-century northern Europe, he argues, was

“a culture in which philosophy did [in fact] constitute a central form of social activity” (AV 36).

The Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century did not create the problem of establishing a

rational foundation for an individualistic morality, which of course they failed to solve: they

inherited the problem of rationally justifying morality from a culture that had already rejected

the idea of a human telos that could guide, and had guided, morality. As MacIntyre has

described the development in a contemporaneous lecture, liberal impersonal morality “invaded

post-Renaissance Western culture at a particular point in time as the moral counterpart to

political liberalism and social individualism and its polemical stances reflect its history of

emergence from the conflicts which those movements engendered and themselves presuppose

alternatives against which those polemical stances were and are directed.”18

The Enlightenment philosophers attempted to solve the conflicts engendered by the

individualist rejection of hierarchy and teleology, conflicts that may not have been foreseen (and

probably would not have been welcomed) by the leading exponents of the new mode of thought.

(One thinks, of course, of the so-called “wars of religion” of the 16th-17th centuries, although to

attribute the cause of these to “individualism” would be a very large claim indeed!) In fact, as

MacIntyre admits, the individualism that rejected a view of human life as ordered to a given end

is “celebrated historically for the most part not as loss, but as self-congratulatory gain, as the

emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining

hierarchies which the modern world rejected at its birth and on the other hand from what

17 Emphasis added. 18 “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, p. 290; emphasis added.

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modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology” (AV 34).19 The repudiation of pre-

modern notions of teleology had its champions in each of the main intellectual discourses of the

culture: theology, philosophy, natural science. The new conception of reason – one in which

“[r]eason can supply no genuine comprehension of man’s true end” – is “embodied” in theology

by Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism, each of which see the Fall as vitiating the power of

(natural) reason to discern this end (AV 53).20 (MacIntyre also refers here to the “late medieval

predecessors” of these movements, which I take to be an allusion to the nominalism and

voluntarism of such figures as William of Ockham.) The philosophers of individualism for their

part “understood that it was Aristotelianism that had to be overthrown” (AV 118); and “the most

innovative” seventeenth-century natural science “sets strict boundaries to the powers of reason”,

limiting its ability to comprehend essences and transforming it into a calculative faculty that can

“assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more” (AV 54).

To summarize the story thus far: there is an individualist “moment” in European culture,

due to a shared sense of “the burdens of traditional theism and the confusions of teleological

modes of thought” (AV 60). Whereas Thrasymachus is expelled from the Republic, the cause of

individualism is taken up by some of the leading intellectual lights of early-modern European

culture. In the vanguard, in the early sixteenth century, are such names as Luther and

Machiavelli: “The author who is the Luther of secular power is Machiavelli.”21 Figures such as

Hobbes, Diderot, and Hume take up the project of rejecting the teleological view of human

nature in favor of limited, modern ends defined in terms of non-rational individual interest or

19 Emphasis added. 20 Cf. AV 82: “When in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Aristotelian understanding of nature was repudiated, at the same time as Aristotle's influence had been expelled from both Protestant and Jansenist theology, the Aristotelian account of action was also rejected. ‘Man’ ceases ... to be ... a functional concept.” 21 A Short History of Ethics, p. 127. While the history of ethics presented in After Virtue differs from that of the earlier work in important ways, I take it that this quote is not inconsistent with the train of thought I am discussing here.

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preference; the Jansenist Pascal “stands at a peculiarly important point in the development of this

history” because he straddles both the theological and scientific debates, and recognizes their

connection. The counterparts of the leading philosophical exponents of modernity in the

political world include such names as the Medici princes, Henry VIII, and Thomas Cromwell,

because “[a]bstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events”

(AV 61). The loss of moral community oriented by a shared vision of the good for man (and the

best way for human beings to live) necessitates a moral philosophy of rules rather than virtues,

and rights rather than right; “virtue” has no objective meaning in a social world without a shared

vision of the good for man, except as a sort of disposition to follow rules. The Enlightenment

thinkers, operating in the wake of the anti-teleological rise of individualism, endeavor to found a

rules-based ethic based, fundamentally, on individualism; this effort results in such philosophies

as utilitarianism and Kantianism. Because such rules-based philosophies are premised on the

heterogeneity of incommensurable individual interests and desires, their attempt to develop a

rational morality for all is bound to fail, on MacIntyre’s view, and the character of moral debate

in modern societies is therefore one of essential incommensurability, resolved only by arbitrary

will and power. However, “in the course of the attempt … social as well as intellectual

transformations were accomplished” (AV 62), among them a generalized social acceptance of

the underlying premise that human desires cannot be morally evaluated and hence must be the

expression of preferences and/or emotions rather than the exercise of rational judgment.

Rationality is truncated from the fully practical Aristotelian version into the narrow,

instrumental, modern version.

The political correlate of this is the modern liberal state, which, in pragmatic recognition

of the existence of pluralistic moral diversity (or what John Rawls has called “the fact of

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reasonable pluralism”) “provid[es] an arena in which each individual seeks his or her own

private good” (AV 173) and is itself merely the referee among competing interests; again, this is

contrasted with the ancient polis and the medieval kingdom, which were “conceived as

communities in which men in company pursue the human good” (AV 173). Lacking a shared

view of the good for man and his place in the cosmos, political authority must be grounded in the

consent of the governed to a social contract; the contract exemplifies a view of political society

based on reciprocal self-interest. The theory and practice of liberal modernity are mutually

abetting and reinforcing, so that the fact that the modern state justifies its authority on the basis

of contractarian principles further encourages individuals to think of the point and purpose of

society in terms of reciprocal self-interest.

It seems to me that MacIntyre’s narrative history of modern Western society is not so

different from standard liberal versions of the story – except, obviously, in the respective

judgment about the merits of the transition. (Compare, for example, Charles Taylor’s description

of the transition from pre-modern orders of “hierarchical complementarity” to the modern order

of “mutual benefit” in his Modern Social Imaginaries.22) Probably there would be some

differences regarding the social history. And the respective heroes/villains would differ

somewhat: critics of modernity often emphasize figures such as Machiavelli and Hobbes as

being pivotal; defenders emphasize Locke (especially the Locke of the Letters on Toleration),

Kant, and Mill. For MacIntyre, liberalism is a philosophy that appeals to people who are already

individualists; it solves, or attempts to solve, the practical problems generated by individualism

and the rejection of communal standards of morality. Apologists for liberalism on the other hand

would argue that the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, et al. proved more convincing to modern

Europeans than pre-modern groundings of political morality in natural law or the claims of 22 Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004.

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tradition; and that this cannot be attributed to “individualism” simply, but rather to the rational

superiority of liberalism. In any event, this is surely a case where philosophical positions

influence the view of history: inasmuch as MacIntyre is opposed to the philosophy of “liberal

impersonal morality”, the fact that it did (or may have) appealed to many people could not be

due to its rational superiority; and vice versa, for the apologists of liberalism.23 And yet, because

the social and political environment is transformed in the process, individualism becomes the

default mode of thought, which does make liberal impersonal morality as such appear rationally

superior to many people. The result, for MacIntyre, is a society of individuals pursuing their

self-interest with the aid of a purely instrumental rationality exercised through and by the

bureaucratic state and the market economy:

The notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world … [F]rom an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage. That they lack the bond of friendship is of course bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms. (AV 156)

III. If I have characterized MacIntyre’s depiction of the dissolution of the moral communities

of pre-modern Christendom correctly, the story is much more contingent and underdetermined

than would be suggested by the lines quoted earlier about the sheer incapability of modern

societies to achieve moral consensus. But let us grant, for argument’s sake, MacIntyre’s

(essentializing) contention that the key feature of the modern world is its individualism and that

the default attitude toward the political community is the rational-choice, mutual-advantage

mode of thought. If the “modern liberal individualist world” is the product of such a specific

23 Cf. section III of “The Indispensability of Political Theory,” where MacIntyre discusses the rival interpretations of Marx, Tocqueville, Bagehot and Proudhon regarding the events of the 1848 Paris revolution. “There is no way of characterizing the historical facts which is both theoretically neutral and capable of rendering the events thus characterized intelligible.” (p. 31)

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history, in which philosophical thought played such a prominent role, why can’t a philosophic

effort restore or reconstitute the “moral unity of Aristotelianism” in Western societies? -- Just

such an effort has been undertaken by Leo Strauss, among others. For Strauss, modern political

culture is in large part the residue of developments in political philosophy (“modern natural

right”); notwithstanding MacIntyre’s statements to the effect that the transition into modernity

was a “single” transition both in theory and practice, such a diagnosis seems to have strong

affinities with MacIntyre’s own etiology of modern politics. For Strauss, the most important

weapon against the pernicious elements of that culture (egoism, hedonism, even totalitarianism

and nihilism) is philosophy: “Socratic dialectic” has to be used against the modern deteriorations

of modern natural right in order to effect a restoration of a decent politics that takes its bearings

by classical natural right, if not necessarily classical political forms per se. (The modern political

form of “liberal or constitutional democracy” may not gain his wholehearted endorsement, but it

does “come closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our

age.”24)

It is not that MacIntyre denies the importance or (relative) usefulness of the philosophic

critique of modern politics: the second half of After Virtue itself (with its development of the

concept of “practices”) together with much of the MacIntyrean corpus thereafter constitutes a

modern re-statement of Aristotelian philosophy (what Strauss would call “classical natural

right”, although the form such a restatement takes for MacIntyre is of course rather different

from Strauss’s). However, the philosophic remedy is not just incomplete but radically

insufficient for MacIntyre. This is because the error of modern politics, its fundamental

individualism, is “embodied in institutionalized social life. And it is therefore a mistake which

24 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny [revised and expanded edition] (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000 [1961]), p. 194.

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cannot be corrected merely by better theoretical analysis.”25 I have indicated above that this

counterpart to Macintyre’s generalized critique of the essentially individualistic nature of modern

politics is alluded to but underdeveloped in After Virtue itself; the critique of institutionalized

social life is however developed in some of the later essays, to which I will now turn. It is also in

the context of this critique that MacIntyre gestures toward the possibility of the reconstruction of

moral communities in the modern world.

Modern societies, as a result of the history described in After Virtue, are thoroughly

pluralistic and heterogeneous. This point of course is relatively uncontroversial. Because they

are not moral communities in MacIntyre’s terms, they cannot practice a politics of the common

good, and the states that represent them are less than legitimate. (Liberals, of course, will

welcome the exclusion of a politics of the common good, and blanch at the idea that this means

modern states cannot be considered legitimate.) What any political endeavors must confront are

these two brute facts about modern society: social individualism and pluralism; and an economic

system, capitalism, which is necessarily individualist and inherently instrumental in its

rationality.26 (Capitalism and the market economy also encourage and cultivate the vice of

pleonexia, the Greek term for the (unjust) desire to have more than one needs or deserves.27)

The fact of societal pluralism means that the virtues can only be exercised in the context of

small-scale “practices” rather than with reference to society as a whole; however, the fact of

capitalism means that wage labor is the norm rather than participation in the sort of practices that

would involve the identification of objective goods and the exercise of genuine virtues. In light

of this, politics is a matter for wary negotiation rather than active engagement.

25 “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” pp. 223-234 in Reader, at p. 228-9. 26 On the latter point, see esp. “Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995” in Ethics and Politics, pp. 145-158. 27 On this, see the discussion in After Virtue at 137, 227, 239, inter alia.

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Indeed, given the social fact of pluralism that results from the victory of individualism,

the political state should be liberal, rather than aspiring to be the sort of moral community

MacIntyre holds to be the prerequisite for a politics of the common good (recall that our society

“cannot” achieve a moral consensus): “The true lesson of the Jacobin Clubs” – of whom it could

be said (a bit coyly) that there was “something of Aristotle” – “is that you cannot hope to

reinvent morality on the scale of a whole nation when the very idiom of the morality which you

seek to re-invent is alien in one way to the vast mass of ordinary people and in another to the

intellectual elite” (AV 238). The implications of this are developed further in “Toleration and

the Goods of Conflict” (1999), where MacIntyre observes that “the contemporary state could not

adopt a view on the human good as its own without to a significant degree distorting, degrading

and discrediting that point of view.”28 In contemporary conditions, that is to say in a political

world of nation-states, the liberal state is to be preferred to one that attempts to embody

community or to favor one point of view exclusively; importantly, though, MacIntyre refuses to

agree that “neutrality” in relation to values is a possibility for the modern state. In an

observation reminiscent of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s meditations on the impersonality and

inexorability of the growth of modern state power,29 we read that “it is just because of the ways

in which the state is not evaluatively neutral that it cannot be trusted to promote any worthwhile

set of values, including those of autonomy and liberty…. It would put those values to the service

of its own political and economic power and so degrade and discredit them” (213-4). Why can’t

the modern state adopt a view of the human good without “degrading” and “discrediting” that

view? One reason is that the situation of modern moral chaos means that the interests of the

powerful often determine the values, such as they are, of the state: “Politically the societies of

28 “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” pp. 205-223 in Ethics and Politics, at p. 214. 29 For Jouvenel, see esp. his On Power: the Natural History of Its Growth [1945; English translation 1948 and now reprinted by the Liberty Fund, Indianapolis]

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advanced Western modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies.”30 And even

when the state is “other than a set of instrumental means to realize the purposes of those who had

achieved control of its mechanisms, it has become more and more a set of institutions which

have their own values” (210), often determined by those institutions’ “indissoluble” alliance with

the market economy that is intrinsically hostile to engagement in “practices.” -- Notwithstanding

all of this, MacIntyre concedes that though the state’s neutrality is “never real, it is an important

fiction” that helps to uphold “a certain range of civil liberties” (214).

The charge that modern states are beholden to powerful economic and commercial

interests is a familiar one from modern civic republicans, who, like MacIntyre, think that the

political community should not be viewed as an agreement between a-social individuals for their

mutual protection and advantage. Philip Pettit, a writer in the modern republican tradition (i.e.,

the sort that thinks you can have a republican politics without the civil religion and severe sense

of duty thought necessary by classical republicans), has asked whether MacIntyre has left out the

possibility of a “pre-liberal, republican politics” at the level of the modern nation-state.31 As in

the “Toleration” essay, MacIntyre’s response to Pettit is insistent that the modern nation-state

simply “cannot be the locus of community”, and that ignoring this can lead to attempts to

embody community that can only be “masquerades” or worse, the source of “totalitarian and

other evils.”32 It is worth considering why MacIntyre excludes the possibility of a republican

30 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good” p. 237. Cf. p. 245: “[T]here is no higher-order set of principles to which appeal can be made to resolve … conflicts. There are instead outcomes determined by shifting coalitions of interest and power within the limits set by and for those elites who determine – although not at all at will – the range of choices confronting governments.” 31 Philip Pettit, “Liberal/Communitarian: MacIntyre’s Mesmeric Dichotomy,” pp. 176-201 in After MacIntyre, eds. Horton and Mendus. 32 “A Partial Response…”, After MacIntyre, p. 303. Cf. Dependent Rational Animals, p. 132: “[T]he shared public goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of the common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both… In a modern large-scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the pretense that it is is

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politics for the nation-state, both because civic republicanism represents a significant alternative

school of thought to a regnant liberalism, and because MacIntyre’s response to this challenge

points to the kind of politics of the common good that he does envision.

Pettit proposes that “republican liberty – franchise – is a relatively neutral ideal around

which we can organize the politics of a pluralist society, without embracing the atomism and

instrumentalism that [MacIntyre] finds at the heart of the liberal project” (201). Franchise on

this account is a participatory citizenship whereby “we attain our individual and collective

liberty” but not (or not merely) in an instrumental fashion: “it is an internal good as well as a

social and interactive one” (201, 200). In other words, Pettit proposes that a republican politics

might be possible even in the context of modern individualist morality. – There is something of

the stipulative to Pettit’s proposal – it lacks concrete content – and so MacIntyre (rightly, it

seems to me) asks “in what kinds of institution can the republicanism which he advocates be

embodied?” (303) Fundamentally – and this is of course quite consistent with the closing pages

of After Virtue – MacIntyre holds (with the classical as opposed to modern republicans) that a

republican politics is not possible in a large state: the politics of “shared deliberation” that Pettit

proposes is simply not “open to those whose politics is the politics of the nation state” (303).

“Imagined communities” à la Anderson, or “public spheres” à la Habermas (and Charles Taylor),

etc. could not, I take it, be genuine types of community for MacIntyre, but can only be simulacra

of the latter. Genuine moral community under conditions of social pluralism and individualism

requires actual interaction through practice-based activity: “[W]hen practice-based forms of

Aristotelian community are generated in the modern world, they are always, and could not but

always an ideological disguise for sinister realities.” [quoted by Pinkard at 199n.5 in Murphy, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre.]

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be, small-scale and local” (302).33 This does not mean that small communities as such have any

particular merit for MacIntyre, if they do not actively engage in the kind of practice-based

practical rationality that seeks not just the goods of those practices, but also attempts to judge the

merits of those practices as ways of life and as parts of ongoing traditions.

This latter theme is developed more fully in “Politics, Philosophy and the Common

Good” (1997), where MacIntyre proposes that a community that engages in a politics of the

common good “is always, potentially or actually, a society of rational enquiry, of self-

scrutiny.”34 As before, the nation-state is understood to be incompatible with such a society of

rational enquiry, for “small size is necessary for deliberative debate in which no one is excluded”

(247). It is not altogether clear whether MacIntyre’s politics of the common good is one in

which no citizen is excluded from actual legislative activity (on the model of the Athenian

assembly, at times), or simply that citizens have the opportunity to participate in purposeful

political deliberation – he does not develop a theory of citizenship (or of representation for that

matter). In any event, the conditions of modernity are such that “local arenas are now the only

places where political community can be constructed, a political community very much at odds

with the politics of the nation-state” (248), because the nation-state cannot provide for the shared

deliberation of all citizens, which for MacIntyre means not just politicians and the media (not to

mention academics), but “plain persons.” Given the classical republican flavor of this line of

thought, one has to wonder why specifically it is only now that “local arenas” are the “only

places where political community can be constructed.” Were the medieval kingdoms

recommended in After Virtue really arenas for the shared deliberation, about political matters, of

“plain persons”?

33 “A Partial Response…” After MacIntyre, p. 302; emphasis added. 34 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” Reader p. 241.

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These considerations might suggest that the existence of a shared culture can provide

(and did provide, in pre-modern societies) a substitute for the rational enquiry and self-scrutiny

of MacIntyre’s political ideal – a view characteristic of modern-day “communitarians,” with

whom MacIntyre has often been grouped. MacIntyre himself dissociates himself from the label

“whenever [given] the opportunity to do so”35, chiefly because he sees communitarians as

identifying the primary political community with the nation-state. What is essential to a politics

of the common good is the possibility of rational enquiry, which is contrasted by MacIntyre with

the political society of a Volk, whose “essential bonds are the bonds of a shared cultural

tradition” and are “prerational and nonrational”.36

The large size of modern political communities is not the only structural feature which

prevents them from being societies of rational enquiry. Politics for MacIntyre is a second-order

practice that ought to inquire into and evaluate the worth of first-order practices and of ways of

life. But liberalism’s principled indifference or agnosticism to questions about the value of ways

of life means that those questions are excluded from political consideration and left to the

province of the individual. Again, MacIntyre denies that this exclusion of the question of first

principles from politics makes for a “neutral” state with regard to those questions: “Questions

about the value of ways of life, let alone the provision of practically effective answers to such

questions, are excluded from the arenas of political debate and decision-making, even though

answers to them are delivered by default” (238). This exclusion means that “politics has been

rendered unphilosophical” (236) while on the other hand “political philosophy in our culture is

35 “A Partial Response…” After MacIntyre, p. 302. 36 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” Reader p. 241.

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an academic and not a political activity” (243).37 And the way of life encouraged “by default” by

such a politics is one of hedonistic consumerism rather than the life in accordance with virtue.

The other reason politics is unphilosophical is because of the “peculiarly modern

phenomenon” he calls the “compartmentalization” of everyday life, in which political operatives

(politicians, media, academics and so on) are disconnected from even those practices that

somehow persist within a corporate, capitalist economic order.38 It is a phenomenon that applies

not just to the separation of politics from other spheres, but each sphere from all others:

“Compartmentalization goes beyond that differentiation of roles and institutional structures that

characterizes every social order and it does so by the extent to which each distinct sphere of

social activity comes to have its own role structure governed by its own specific norms in

relative independence of other such spheres.”39 Because the norms differ between spheres, the

standards for practical reasoning adopted by individuals acting in the context of these roles (such

as: family member, employee, sports club member, military reservist) differ as well. – And yet:

Does modern “compartmentalization” really go beyond the differentiation of roles found in any

social order? Would an Athenian not employ different norms of practical reasoning in carrying

out his activities as citizen, soldier, and head of household? Did not Aristotle himself insist that

“[i]t is an error to suppose, as some do, that the roles of a statesman [politikos], of a king, or a

37 Cf. “Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgment,” p. 128: “But of course the rulers of the modern liberal democratic state … were and are confronted … with deep underlying moral conflicts which our society possesses no means of resolving. Yet irresolvable conflict and effective modern government cannot coexist. It is crucial therefore that liberal democratic government suppress within its sphere all ultimate moral and metaphysical questions, all philosophy. It must become, what it often nowadays boasts of being, pragmatic.” 38 “Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral Agency” pp. 186-204 in Ethics and Politics, at p. 196. 39 “Social Structures…” p. 197. Cf. the preface to Ethics and Politics: “... the growing compartmentalization of each sphere of social activity, a compartmentalization such that each sphere increasingly has its own rules governed by its own norms, with little or no social space preserved for effective critical reflection on the overall ordering of social life” (x). Cf. also “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered”, esp. pp. 182-185.

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household-manager and of a master of slaves are the same, on the ground that they differ not in

kind but only in point of numbers of persons”?40

The issue for MacIntyre is that the Athenian citizen would have encountered the same

compatriots in the assembly or the agora and on the campaign, and this would have reinforced

the extent to which he viewed the relation of his actions in one circumscribed sphere to their

place within the entire social order; whereas “in contemporary advanced societies” it is more

likely that “individuals encountered in each particular sphere are often not the same as those

whom one meets elsewhere.”41 For many, this may be regarded as a brute fact about existence in

societies other than pre-modern villages or hunter-gatherer societies; it may even be a welcome

fact. But MacIntyre believes it is a phenomenon peculiar to contemporary “advanced” societies,

and one that leads to a “deformed and fragmented practical rationality.”42 In “Social Structures

and Their Threats to Moral Agency” (1999) this is illustrated by the different attitudes to a death

in an automobile accident displayed by: a family member (for whom it is a unique loss for which

nothing can compensate), an auto executive (for whom it is an acceptable trade-off for the

benefits of auto sales), and a lawyer (who can calculate the value of the auto-company’s liability

to the extent that it is liable). It is not just that society as a whole displays different forms of

practical rationality – indeed, individuals will do so within their own lives: the auto-company

executive will regard a death in his own family as a unique loss, not a trade-off.43 It is this

feature of our social existence that lends to modern life an “incoherence,” to use one of

MacIntyre’s favorite epithets. Compartmentalization in economic life ends up having invidious

40 Politics I.1: 1252a7-12. It is perhaps worth mentioning that a contrasting point of view on this issue in the ancient world would be that of Xenophon, for whom these types of rule differed in degree, not in kind; the virtues even of a Persian emperor such as Cyrus (Cyropaedia) are analogous to those of a household-manager (Oeconomicos). 41 “Social Structures…”, Ethics and Politics p. 197. 42 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” Reader p. 243. 43 Cf. “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered” pp. 183-4 in Ethics and Politics.

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effects on the political sphere, because it prevents us from viewing our actions in light of the

whole: “Within each sphere … individuals conform to the requirements imposed on their role

within that sphere and there is no milieu available to them in which they are able, together with

others, to step back from those roles and those requirements and to scrutinize themselves and the

structure of their society from some external standpoint with any practical effect.”44

IV.

The dominant social, political, and economic forces of modernity serve to obscure the

knowledge, recognition, and realization of common goods. The theoretical reformulation of

Aristotelianism (or “classical natural right”) can thus have little effect at the civilizational level;

for that matter, the philosophical exposure of the incoherence of the modern state can achieve

little on its own.45 The call made in After Virtue to construct local communities in internal exile

from that civilization in order to revive the life of the virtues is reaffirmed in the later writings, if

with a little more specificity. The form of social and political life that makes political authority

justifiable is one that has three main features: a general acknowledgment of the natural law (i.e.,

a large degree of shared understanding of goods, virtues and rules – this, not shared culture, is

what constitutes the “friendship” required by Aristotle for a polis); small enough size, so that

relationships are not deformed by the compartmentalization characteristic of the modern state

and the market economy, and so that deliberative debate about ways of life and other

fundamental questions is open to all; and an economy of small producers, so that the larger

44 “Social Structures…” p. 197; emphasis added. Cf p. 199: “… the absence of any sphere of activity in which practically effective reasoning might be used to evaluate the norms and values of each particular sphere from some external point of view.” 45 The former point is a common theme in the preface and various essays included in the Ethics and Politics volume. For the latter point, see especially the essay on Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” in the MacIntyre Reader. “The deep incoherence of the modern state is not a secret, but the fact that it is plain for everyone to see of itself does nothing at all to undermine the modern state. And Marx was perhaps the first to recognize how very little the exposure of incoherence generally achieves.” (p. 227)

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market economy’s undermining of social relationships can be avoided.46 There is no mention,

much less any systematic treatment, of how such communities are supposed to accommodate

themselves or interact with the larger political and economic order; nor, conversely, is there any

discussion of how the state should interact with them. Are we talking about a federal

arrangement? Could the principle of “subsidiarity” from Catholic social thought (in which

practical matters should be managed by the least centralized, most local competent authority)

apply here? The fact that MacIntyre does not address such practical questions of institutional

arrangements is indicative of his view that the modern state is simply at odds with the flourishing

of local communities, and so an ad hoc rather than systematic approach must be taken to these

questions: per the discussion acknowledging the necessity of governmental institutions at the

close of After Virtue, “each particular task, each particular responsibility has to be evaluated on

its own merit.”47 -- One wonders what the Leviathan would think about such an ad hoc

arrangement, not to mention the less than full-fledged allegiance recommended by MacIntyre to

his localists. What happens when the taxman cometh? Or the draft card?

This last question highlights the issue of allegiance most sharply. The modern political

order, MacIntyre often says, is “incoherent” because it lacks an orientation to the common good

that would enable it to rationally resolve moral questions. Lacking moral unity, these questions

are decided by powerful interests. (As noted above, MacIntyre does not contemplate the

possibility that democratic procedures, on their own, could render the modern state’s legal order

legitimate.) The relationship between the individual and such a state is a contractual one, viewed

46 “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good” pp. 247-249. 47 Cf. Mark Murphy’s discussion (at pp. 170-172) of whether the modern state “is as dismal a creature as MacIntyre makes it out to be” in his article “MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy”, where he suggests that local communities would need to invent something like the modern state, if it did not already exist, to provide such external goods as security and wealth. Such a state would have only a “thin theory of the good”, much like modern states. Cf. also Lewis’s contrast between the robust common good of the classical polis with a “necessarily thinner” one of “large, complex, and internally pluralistic political associations.” (Lewis, p. 376)

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in the light of the satisfaction of individual interests. The state’s “incoherence” is exemplified by

its “presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services … and on

the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s

life on its behalf. As I have remarked elsewhere, it is like being asked to die for the telephone

company.”48 The question MacIntyre does not seem to seriously confront is: why are people

willing to lay down their lives for their country? Are they merely dupes? For the fact that some

people are willing to do so belies the idea that they view their relationship to the political

community in terms of rational-choice, cost-benefit analysis. There is a small consideration of

such a question in MacIntyre’s reference to evils that can only be resisted by “ad hoc

participation in some particular enterprises of some nation-state” -- such as “resisting Hitler and

Stalin, most notably.”49 But the day-to-day enterprises of most nation-states do not involve

resistance to clearly defined evils, and yet for members of the armed forces (as well as police

officers, firefighters, and so on) their day-to-day lives still do involve the risk of loss of life.

For MacIntyre, social individualism is the cause of the moral pluralism that makes

impossible a politics of the common good. And yet those citizens that are willing to risk (and

thus sacrifice) their lives for their country clearly do not view their relationship to the community

in individualistic terms: in some sense they must value the ongoing life of the community more

highly than, or at least as highly as, their own lives – in this sense they identify their own good

with the common good. And while MacIntyre acknowledges that modern states need some

people to think this way, this does not seem to affect his characterization of modern society as

essentially individualistic. The example does not even need to be so dramatic (although of

course the life-threatening situation clarifies the issue most sharply): why, in countries without

48 “A Partial Response…” After MacIntyre p. 303. Cf. “Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats” (1998), pp. 159-171 in Ethics and Politics, at p. 163. 49 “A Partial Response…” After MacIntyre p. 303.

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mandatory voting laws, do people bother to vote when their vote is virtually guaranteed not to

matter in the final tally? Do such people, when taking the time to go to the polls and stand in

line, view their relation to the polity in cost-benefit terms? (This latter question has of course

been a rich vein of material for political sociologists and political psychologists, not to mention

rational-choice theorists themselves. Regarding the latter group, if you start with the assumption

that people apply cost-benefit analyses to everything they do, then everything can in fact be

framed in terms of costs and benefits.) In his well-known lecture on patriotism MacIntyre

observes that large-scale modern polities have to “exhibit… as liberal in many institutional

settings, but … also … engage the patriotic regard of enough… citizens… to continue

functioning effectively.”50 MacIntyre describes this as “the living out of a conceptual

confusion.” -- Perhaps so. But perhaps the alternation between patriotic and individualistic

attitudes is recognized by mature citizens as a practical, not to mention existential, necessity in

political societies other than the integrated totalities of classical republics. Perhaps the mature

citizen always regards his or her allegiance to the existing political order to be importantly

qualified.51

I observed earlier that MacIntyre takes the point of view of Thrasymachus toward

modern political society, in the same way that he endorses the Nietzschean judgment of the

“Enlightenment project.” After Virtue proposes that the ethical choice posed by modernity is

Nietzsche or Aristotle, and MacIntyre of course argues for an Aristotelian ethics. What I want to

suggest is that his social science is too Nietzschean and not Aristotelian enough. Like Nietzsche,

50 “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” p. 300. 51 V. Bradley Lewis advances similar critiques (to my previous two parargraphs) of MacIntyre’s characterization of the dilemmas of citizen allegiance in modern polities in Section II (pp. 364-8) of his “The Common Good against the Modern State? – On MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy.” For example: “[T]he citizens of modern liberal democracies do tend to see the state in largely instrumental terms, but they do not necessarily see their ‘country’ that way, nor, more abstractly, their association. … To identify the political community, even large-scale modern nations, with the state is for this reason a mistake, one that citizens rarely make themselves.” (p. 367)

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he seems to view the average citizen of modern political societies as something like Nietzsche’s

herd animal, while the elites practice the will to power; and everybody’s ethics is implicitly

emotivist, in the absence of shared criteria for moral judgments. But an Aristotelian social

science is one in which proper description requires entering into the normative judgments of the

principals. “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is

considered to aim at some good,” – we read in the first line of the Nicomachean Ethics. The

citizen voting and the soldier serving are clearly aiming at some good that they can’t but regard

as somehow connected to the good of the community. MacIntyre may well think that modern

societies don’t possess a coherent common good, but a key part of his critique of modernity is

that it is essentially individualist. Would not a properly Aristotelian, comprehensive social

science have to take into account the actions of citizens that resist being described in liberal

individualist terms? Let us grant, as well, that liberalism is the dominant mode of public

philosophy in modern Western societies, even as we insist that there have been residual

republican and natural-law elements that have survived in the politics of those societies. Does

“dominant” have to mean “definitive”?52

If MacIntyre is too ready to adopt the standpoint of Thrasymachus in relation to modern

politics, it also seems to me that his view of pre-modern politics (in After Virtue especially) is not

Thrasymachian enough. As we have seen, MacIntyre proposes that there was a moral unity to

non-imperial pre-modern political forms, especially the Greek polis and the medieval kingdoms

52 Cf. Charles Taylor’s “Justice After Virtue”, at pp. 22-3: “[MacIntyre] tends to take modern society at the face value of its own dominant theories, as heading for runaway atomism and break-up. … I think we are far more ‘Aristotelian’ than we allow, that hence our practice is in some significant way less based on pure disengaged freedom and atomism than we realize.”

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of Christendom, and that the politics of such societies was fundamentally oriented to a shared

conception of the common good.53 Let us consider an alternative perspective:

Both Plato and Aristotle take for granted, naturally enough, the social structure of the polis, with the slaves excluded from the political structure, the artisans and farmers coming out at the bottom, a richer class above them, and some kind of elite ruling. Because the questions they pose, and sometimes the concepts they employ, presuppose the polis and its social unity, neither of them faces up to the actual decline of the polis. Because they are spokesmen for its unity, they ignore or dislike the heterogeneity of Greek society. The concept of a common interest is taken for granted.54

-- Is this a critical theorist? A sophisticated college sophomore? -- In fact, it is Alasdair

MacIntyre, in the “Postscript to Greek Ethics” of his Short History of Ethics (originally

published in 1966 but reissued with a new preface in 1996). The “mature” MacIntyre of After

Virtue would probably argue that the “heterogeneity” described here is a heterogeneity within a

fundamental moral unity and so not opposed to it. -- Maybe so. But we find the following

observation a bit further along in the Short History: “The Aristotelian ideal of the leisured and

perfected life of abstract contemplation is only accessible to an elite; and it presupposes a class

structure which excluded the mass of ordinary men both from political power and from the moral

idea” (98). – Now, what MacIntyre actually says in After Virtue about the common good of his

ideal societies (which are “Aristotelian” but not simply a restatement of Aristotle’s prescriptions)

is that it is “complex” – so the relevant issue is not that abstract contemplation is only materially

accessible to an elite and spiritually desirable by the few (bearing in mind as well MacIntyre’s

own picture of a life in accordance with the virtues does not seem to require abstract

contemplation). A “complex” common good can surely accommodate a variegated, articulated

society. But this passage suggests that it is possible at least in principle to view the political life

53 MacIntyre doesn’t say this himself, but I want to suggest that what makes these societies so compelling as moral models – as opposed to heroic societies or tribal groups (such as the Bedouin and other examples listed in the Corporate Modernity essay) – is that their totality of order included an orientation to a specifically transcendent good (provided by philosophy in the Greek case and Christianity in the medieval kingdoms). 54 A Short History of Ethics, p. 97; emphasis added.

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of the polis as falling short in its instantiation of the Aristotelian ideal, at least as presented by

MacIntyre (-- for that matter, Aristotle himself did not claim that any of the poleis of his day

actually exemplified the best regime described in the Politics). That actual societies fall short of

theoretical ideals is not news to anyone; more importantly in terms of MacIntyre’s thought, this

passage calls into question the existence of the moral consensus that he deems necessary to a

politics of the common good, even in the best-case scenario. To this, MacIntyre would likely

respond that the public philosophy of modernity, liberalism, denies (or brackets) the possibility

of a common good, whereas the public philosophies of pre-modern societies at least aspire to one

– they take it for granted. And, as we have seen in abundance, the philosophical consciousness

of a society does matter, very much, for MacIntyre.

There is also this. MacIntyre’s “well-integrated traditional forms of society” in which

virtue and happiness are most firmly connected are all pre-capitalist. This point is made

explicitly in the “Corporate Modernity” essay. Pre-capitalist societies, to the extent they involve

any type of complex economy rather than the hunter-gatherer model or the simple, not to say

primitive, farming community, have generally involved some form of unfree labor. This was

certainly true of the Greek city-states, as well as the serfdom of medieval Christendom. It

therefore seems that “capitalism” is necessary to the existence of complex economy if unfree

labor of some sort is to be avoided. For MacIntyre, capitalism and wage labor are intimately

linked with, if not the direct cause of, the “compartmentalization” that undermines the philia

necessary for a healthy community. MacIntyre also takes it for granted that it is the societies in

which capitalism has been introduced that virtue and success are not “easily brought together,

and this because its competitive and acquisitive ideals are at odds with traditional rules of

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honesty and fairness.”55 (The concept of the honest businessman who cultivates the virtues of

prudence and foresight, not to mention teamwork and cooperation – rather than pretensions to

expert control and the participation in essentially manipulative social relations – is not exactly at

home in MacIntyre’s thought.) This is why the communities described in “Philosophy, Politics

and the Common Good” (as well as several of the essays in Ethics and Politics) must be societies

of “small producers” and must avoid enmeshment with the larger market economy and

“corporate modernity.” This is not to say that capitalism is the sole difference-maker between

well-integrated societies oriented towards the common good and the less happy, less virtuous

societies of fragmented rationality; for we have noted MacIntyre’s distinction between the Greek

polis and the Hellenistic kingdoms as well as the Roman empire.56 We can therefore conclude

that a capitalist economy, on MacIntyre’s account, is a sufficient but not necessary condition for

a society’s lacking moral consensus. MacIntyre himself does not explicitly make the connection,

but it would seem that the decisive change in consciousness in Western society described in After

Virtue – the growing sense of the traditional hierarchies and the teleological social vision as

burdens rather than comforts – was closely linked with the growth of cities, towns, bourgeois or

“civil” society. (This is a familiar tale of course from Marxist no less than other historians.)

And the fundamentally individualistic perspective of “civil society” (in the Marxist sense) is

what inevitably undermines cooperative social relations for MacIntyre and negates the possibility

of the moral consensus required for a politics of the common good. MacIntyre may no longer be

a full-fledged Marxist, but what emerges from these considerations is that MacIntyre’s critique

of modernity is inextricably linked with his critique of capitalism itself.

55 Cf. the discussion at pp. 102-3 of Short History of Ethics. 56 “In Greek society the focus of the moral life was the city-state; in the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman empire the sharp antithesis between the individual and the state is inescapable.” A Short History of Ethics, p. 100.

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This theme is somewhat in the background in After Virtue, but we can see it in his

discussion of the 19th-century English reformer William Cobbett, to whom MacIntyre ascribes

the following view: “The ‘something at work in the community’ which counteracts the tendency

to produce a virtuous and happy community is the all-pervasive influence of pleonexia (although

that is not Cobbett’s word) in the form of usury (that is Cobbett’s word) inflicted on society by

an individualistic economy and market in which land, labor and money itself have all been

transformed into commodities” (AV 239). MacIntyre goes on to say (following Marx) that

Cobbett possessed “a peculiar significance for English history” because he “looks back across

that great division in human history towards the past before individualism and the power of

markets.”57 Cobbett’s critique, if not his remedy, is surely MacIntyre’s own. Intriguingly,

MacIntyre does not explicitly pass judgment on the achievability of Cobbett’s program of

“chang[ing] society as a whole” back into one of “small working farmers”, in the same way that

he rejects the Jacobin Clubs’ project of re-inventing morality within a bourgeois environment.

Effectively though, Cobbett’s project is deemed no less possible than the Jacobins’ by the first

sentence of the succeeding discussion of Jane Austen, who according to MacIntyre “identifies

that social sphere within which the practice of the virtues is able to continue” (AV 239).58 And

that social sphere is one of “enclaves” within a fundamentally “incoherent” larger order.

MacIntyre’s recommendation is therefore Cobbett’s, but with the qualification that it is

only applicable within enclaves and cannot be expected to undo “that great division in human

history” wrought by the power of markets and the rise of individualism – it is the best we can do

under the circumstances. As noted above, we get very little from MacIntyre about how such

enclaves are to interact with the larger political and economic order; we do not even get much of

57 Emphasis added. 58 Emphasis added.

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a treatment of their own institutional features, beyond the three general requirements described in

“Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good.” MacIntyre’s local communities of small farmers

and producers living a life according to virtue are communities that remain virtuous only by

excluding capitalism; I have suggested earlier that a complex and articulated society seems to

require either capitalism, or some form of unfree labor. (A point of comparison here might be

Rousseau’s observation in Social Contract III.15: “As for you, modern peoples, you have no

slaves, but are yourselves slaves; you pay for their freedom with your own.”) MacIntyre does

not consider what the lack of a complex economy might mean for the cultural life of his

enclaves; perhaps he thinks that they might have the best of both worlds – small farmers who, if

they so choose, can and do move between the worlds of farming and high culture à la Wendell

Berry (who MacIntyre mentions with approval in “Philosophy, Politics, and the Common

Good”).

This question is of course one of the major themes of the Republic (not to mention of

Rousseau and Marx, who lamented the “idiocy” of village life), and is introduced in Book II at

the outset of the construction of the “city in words”. The first community described therein is the

city of “utmost necessity … of four or five men” (369d); what I want to suggest is that

MacIntyre’s local communities resemble nothing so much as the next state in Socrates’

construction, the “healthy city” of farmers, house-builders, weavers, shoemakers, carpenters,

smiths and other craftsmen (Republic II: 370). People in such communities “will have sweet

intercourse with one another… keeping an eye out against poverty or war” and “living out their

lives in peace with health” (372). Even this community, it should be noted, will have some need

of imports, and thus merchants and commerce; so there will also be “tradesmen” who sell things

in the marketplace so that the actual producers can spend their time producing rather than

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trading; as well will there be wage earners or servants, because some minds aren’t “quite up to

the level of partnership” (371; the latter reminds us of Aristotle’s “natural slaves” which

MacIntyre of course rejects). Socrates says that it is his opinion that this is the “true” or

“healthy” city (372e).

The fact that Glaucon calls the “true” or “healthy” polis a “city of sows” indicates that it

is unsatisfactory to humans, who have deeper and higher desires than feasting (even feasts with

relishes and desserts), and peace, and health. And so the “luxurious” city is introduced, one that

includes the arts, schools, philosophy, and in general “a bulky mass of things which are not in

cities because of necessity” (373); in addition, there must be a significant increase in “servants”

or wage earners to support the provision of such luxuries. It is the existence of these luxuries –

those things, Socrates admits, “whose presence in cities most of all produces evils both private

and public” (373e) and thus make the city “feverish” – that is the cause of the origin of war, and

all of the other classic issues of politics (such as who rules, and how, and through what

institutions) that go beyond the ordering of practices and the contemplation of the value of

different ways of life. The Republic would not have us remain in the city of sows, healthy

though it is: the kallipolis represents the attempt to retain the higher things while avoiding the

fevers that so often come with them. – The underlying reason, it seems to me, that MacIntyre

cannot move beyond the healthy city to a “best regime” on the Platonic or Aristotelian model is

because each of those regimes includes some form of unfree labor – and this latter feature will

therefore always be vulnerable to the MacIntyre’s own criticism in A Short History of Ethics that

some members of these societies are excluded not just from political power but from the “moral

idea.” My (not exactly original) suggestion has been that the modern substitute for unfree labor

is capitalism; the important point is that for MacIntyre, capitalism is inherently feverish. And so

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MacIntyre’s positive political program is a very thin gruel that hardly goes beyond what we read

of the “healthy” city in the Republic.

MacIntyre observed in A Short History of Ethics that “[w]hat is striking about Plato and

Aristotle is the unity of morals and politics in their writings” (97) and it is this unity that

MacIntyre’s ideal of social life corresponds to as well. -- Certainly Plato and Aristotle’s best

regimes, not to mention Rousseau’s Contrat Social, are ones that exemplify a unity of morals

and politics, although all three writers recognize that such a unity is not humanity’s standard lot,

even within the context of polis-life at its best. -- MacIntyre goes on to say that “this very unity

in the end betrays their ideals” because, he feels, they presuppose this unity in their own societies

and take for granted the concept of a common interest. MacIntyre himself refuses to betray his

own ideals, and because he presupposes the lack of a common good in the modern order, he can

propose no reforms of it. That Socrates himself testifies to the unlikelihood of the kallipolis

coming into existence is an analogue of the tensions MacIntyre sees in modern society (just as

the sophists faced by Socrates bear some resemblance to the emotivists taken on by MacIntyre).

MacIntyre’s critique of the fevers of modern society is penetrating and compelling. But the

ultimate meaning of his political theory of negation is that he has told us to stop at the city of

sows rather than given us a Republic. By comparison with Rousseau, he has given us, not a

“Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” but a “Discourse on the Origin of Unhappiness in

Modernity”; his rejection of the legitimacy of the modern order means that he denies the

possibility of a Social Contract. I would also add that his impressive development of the idea of

a virtuous life through the pursuit of practices is something like his Emile – a program for how to

be virtuous in an unvirtuous regime, a regime hostile to the life of the virtues. – These are no

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small achievements, however, and, as MacIntyre has said, perhaps the honest agent in a certain

political landscape will have to start with a denial – even if we can’t, ultimately, end with one.

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Works Cited Works by MacIntyre [listed chronologically] A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth

Century. (2nd ed.) Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1996 [1966]. "Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgment: Are They Mutually Exclusive?" pp. 122-38 in

Goodpaster and Sayre 1979. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. (2nd ed.) Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,

1984 [1981]. "The Indispensability of Political Theory." pp. 17-34 in Miller & Siedentop 1983. "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" pp. 286-300 in Matravers and Pike 2003 [1984]. "The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture." Review of Politics 52 (1990), pp. 344-61. "An Interview for Cogito." pp. 267-75 in Knight 1998 [1991]. "A Partial Response to my Critics." pp. 283-304 in Horton and Mendus 1994. "The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken." pp. 223-34 in Knight 1998 [1994]. "Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas." pp. 41-63 in MacIntyre 2006 [1995]. "Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered." pp. 172-185 in MacIntyre 2006 [1995]. "Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995." pp. 145-58 in MacIntyre 2006 [1995]. "Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good." pp. 235-54 in Knight 1998 [1997]. "Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral Agency." pp. 186-204 in MacIntyre 2006 [1999]. "Toleration and the Goods of Conflict." pp. 205-223 in MacIntyre 2006 [1999]. Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006.

Secondary Sources Goodpaster, K.E. and Sayre, K.M., eds. Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century. Notre Dame,

IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Horton, John and Mendus, Susan, eds. After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of

Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

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Knight, Kelvin, ed. The MacIntyre Reader. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Knight, Kelvin. "Introduction." pp. 1-27 in Knight 1998. Lewis, V. Bradley. “The Common Good against the Modern State? On MacIntyre’s Political

Philosophy.” Josephinum Journal of Theology 16 (2009): 357–78. Matravers, Derek and Pike, Johathan. Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An

Anthology. New York: Routledge, 2003. Miller, David and Siedentop, Larry, eds. The Nature of Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1983. Murphy, Mark C., ed. Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Alasdair MacIntyre. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003. Murphy, Mark C. "MacIntyre's Political Philosophy." pp. 152-175 in Murphy 2003. Pettit, Philip. "Liberal/Communitarian: MacIntyre's Mesmeric Dichotomy." pp. 176-204 in

Horton and Mendus 1994. Pinkard, Terry. "MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity." pp. 176-200 in Murphy 2003. Taylor, Charles. "Justice After Virtue." pp. 16-43 in Horton and Mendus 1994.