The state, compartmentalization and the turn to local community: A critique of the political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre

Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre condemns modern politics, specifically liberalism and the institutions of the liberal state, as irredeemably fallen. His core argument is that the liberal state encourages a disempowering “compartmentalization” of people's everyday roles and activities that undermines the intersubjective conditions of human flourishing. MacIntyre's alternative is an Aristotelian politics centred on the notion of “practice.” Defined by justice and solidarity, this politics can only be realized, he claims, within local communities which oppose and resist the dictates of the administrative state and capitalist market. Here it is argued that MacIntyre's notion of “practice” represents a compelling ethical-political ideal. However, the belief that this ideal is best realized within local communities is rejected. In privileging local community, MacIntyre relies on a reductive view of modern states and overlooks the institutional conditions of a just polity. Against this, it is argued that a politics of human flourishing cannot succeed without an emancipatory transformation of large-scale, trans-communal institutions, in particular the state.

Notes

 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1985), 32, hereafter AV.

 Ibid., 8–7; Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” (1994), in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 223–34 at 223.

 By “emotivism” MacIntyre means the analytical metaethical theory of C. L. Stevenson, but also the ethical decisionism associated with Max Weber and Sartrean existentialism (AV, 12–5, 24).

 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 147–8.

 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral Agency,” Philosophy 74 (1999): 311–29 at 322. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, “Utilitarianism and the Presuppositions of Cost–Benefit Analysis,” in Values in the Electric Power Industry, ed. K. Sayre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 217–37; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988), 337, 397, hereafter WJ; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good” (1998), in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Knight, 235–52 at 236, hereafter PP.

 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority” (1979), in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Knight, 53–68 at 55, hereafter SS; AV, 26, 262.

 AV, 85; Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1971), 3–11, 260–79.

 SS, 55.

 AV, 96.

 Ibid., 75.

 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” in The Politics of Toleration: Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 133–55 at 140.

 SS, 56.

 AV, 252; WJ, 342–5; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 16, ed. Grethe Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 307–61 at 323.

 WJ, 392; Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 235, hereafter TRV.

 AV, 253.

 See PP, 242; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (New York: SUNY, 1995), 209–28 at 225; Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 94; and Mark Murphy, “MacIntyre's Political Philosophy,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Mark Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152–75 at 154–5.

 On this danger, which MacIntyre associates with contemporary communitarianism, see AV, 238; PP, 241; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats,” in On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, eds. Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988), 145–58; Alasdair MacIntyre, “An Interview with Giovanni Borradori” (1991), in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Knight, 255–66 at 265; Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 283–304 at 302; Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Spectre of Communitarianism,” Radical Philosophy 70 (1995): 34–5; Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), 132, hereafter DRA; and Kelvin Knight, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” in Contemporary Political Studies, vol. 3, eds. I. Hampsher-Monk and J. Stanyer (Belfast: Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, 1996), 885–896 at 891.

 AV, 87.

 Ibid., 190.

 Ibid., 107.

 Ibid., 196; MacIntyre, “The Theses on Feuerbach,” 225, 231.

 The aim of practices, as Marx saw, “is never only to catch fish, or to produce beef or milk, or to build houses. It is to do so in a manner consonant with the excellences of the craft, so that not only is there a good product, but the craftsman is perfected through and in her … activity” (MacIntyre, “A Partial Response,” 284).

 For the idea of “educated publics,” see TRV, 216–7; DRA, 156; Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of an Educated Public,” in Education and Values: The Richard Peters Lectures, ed. Graham Haydon (London: Institute of Education, 1987), 15–35; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas,” Journal of Medieval Studies 26 (1996): 61–83; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 245–64; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 36(1) (2002): 1–19; and Keith Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics of Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence,” Contemporary Political Theory 1(2) (2002): 181–201 at 186.

 AV, 262, 109; MacIntyre, “An Interview with Giovanni Borradori,” 265.

 PP, 241.

 AV, 194, my emphasis.

 PP, 248; DRA, 109; MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education,” 11.

 WJ, 374.

 Thus, “the economic basis of a society is not its tools, but the people co-operating using these particular tools in the manner necessary to their use.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (1958), in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Knight, 31–52 at 39, my emphasis.

 DRA, 135.

 PP, 252; DRA, 143.

 MacIntyre, “A Partial Response,” 303.

 MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” 144.

 DRA, 142.

 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930, 1904–5; London: Routledge, 1992), 123.

 See, for instance, the skewed interpretations offered by Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 93; Martha Nussbaum, “Recoiling from Reason,” New York Review of Books 19 (1989): 36–41; and Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 71.

 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, System and Lifeworld—A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 172, 258. Similar divisions are to be found, for example, in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958) and John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For an argument in line with that advanced here, see Thomas McCarthy, “Complexity and Democracy: Or the Seducements of Systems Theory,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action, eds. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 119–39.

 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” Monist 60 (1977): 453–72 at 458–9; AV, 218, 258; TRV, 196–7.

 DRA, 133, 142; MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education,” 19.

 PP, 237.

 AV, 255; MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” 147–8.

 MacIntyre does not, of course, think local communities voluntary, since for him we are as much what we inherit as what we choose. But his central idea of learning a craft, be it philosophy, chess, or farming, does suggest scenarios where actors voluntarily apprentice themselves to tradition-bound activities (TRV, 61). See Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics of Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence,” 197, for an earlier statement of this argument.

 AV, 255; Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Only Vote Worth Casting in November,” http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/macintyrevote.shtml (3 November 2004).

 DRA, 132–3; MacIntyre, “A Partial Response,” 303.

 PP, 249; MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education,” 14.

 Here MacIntyre confronts a quandary faced by libertarians, namely, how to reconcile a coercive state with a theory inimical to its very existence. Unlike libertarians, however, he desires an egalitarian social order, thus painting himself into the curious position of “libertarian welfarism.”

 Aristotle, The Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Bk. 1, 1252^a1–1253^b1.

 For related arguments, see Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, 106; Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 120–36 at 135; and Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 36–9. For a contrary view, see Peter McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), 39.

 PP, 250, 252.

 The “world being what it contingently is” the “cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often … bar us from being rich or famous or powerful” (AV, 196). See also his praise for the Spartans’ “aristocratic carelessness about consequences” (WJ, 113).

 MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” 139.

 MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education,” 13.

 PP, 248.

 DRA, 102.

 Ibid., 142.

 AV, 106.