CHAPTER 6 MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC … · complicity with capitalism, and the limited liberal...
Transcript of CHAPTER 6 MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC … · complicity with capitalism, and the limited liberal...
CHAPTER 6
MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC COMMUNITARIANISM
"We know what to do....It does not occur to us to do otherwise."
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (1957, 106)
Where the optimistic communitarians take for granted the unquestioned
status of liberal norms, suggesting that only the individualistic
understanding of these norms embedded in liberal ontology (Sandel,
Taylor) or epistemology (Walzer) stands in the way of their full
implementation, MacIntyre is not so sanguine. This is not, however, to
suggest that MacIntyre is any less complacent about the validity of
equal freedom, or any less committed to defending an epistemology that,
by overcoming individualism, will bring equal freedom into existence.
What makes MacIntyre a pessimist is that his alternative to
individualism requires not a change in people's attitudes, but in the
institutional context that shapes their character--a much more
formidable task than merely awakening Americans to the reality of their
"intersubjective being" or to the republican essence of their identity,
as Sandel would do; making Westerners conscious of the social
particularism involved in their nationalism, or of the hypergoods that
constrain their particularism, as Taylor would; or even fundamentally
altering the institutions of distribution, as Walzer would--since the
way Walzer would do so is to appeal to people's already existing
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"shared understandings." For MacIntyre, such solutions are
superficial; and to the extent that they would strengthen the power of
the state, they are steps in the wrong direction.
MacIntyre started out as a Marxist, and he retains the Marxist
de-emphasis, relative to other varieties of "liberal" (in the sense of
the term I have been using), on achieving income equality as a means to
the end of equal freedom. Whereas the point of Rawlsian "primary
goods" is that they are instrumental to whatever ends individuals may
have, and so should be distributed as equally as possible consistently
with increasing the quantity available to the worst off, MacIntyre has
always viewed equal freedom as something much less threatened by
poverty than by interpersonal coercion or manipulation. Therefore,
where the key to the political stratagems of Sandel, Walzer, and Taylor
is found in their critiques of Nozick--their uses of non-individualist
metaphysics to defend social democracy--MacIntyre is and always has
been interested in revolutionizing much more than economic
distribution. Empowering people to pursue their ends is less crucial to
him than ensuring that they do not treat each other as means.
Since the 1960s, MacIntyre believed that a non-coercive community
requires that its members have the same ends, so they need not
manipulate each other to get their way. MacIntyre met the need to
legitimate such a community with a succession of strategic claims
(rarely embroidered with non-strategic argument) for the normative
value of particularist communal ends. These claims are, themselves,
outgrowths of MacIntyre's entirely "political" critique of liberalism
Friedman 244
on the grounds that it makes universal claims that separate facts from
the values--freedom and equality--that he shares with liberals, but
that are, he maintains, ineffective sources of communal moral
authority. MacIntyre would substitute an is-ought bridge consisting of
those communally given ends in which he finds normative authority. Not
only in his intention of solving what he sees as the political weakness
of individualistic liberalism, but in his embrace of liberal values--
albeit with less emphasis on equal economic distribution--MacIntyre's
view is of a piece with those of Taylor, Walzer, and Sandel.
The similarities extend to the likeness of MacIntyre's
intellectual background to that of the other three communitarian
philosophers. Walzer's complacent communitarianism might very
plausibly be seen as a flower of the democratic, anti-Stalinist New
Left. He attended Brandeis University in its great early years of the
mid-1950s, where he studied under such New Left paragons as Irving
Howe, Lewis Coser, and Herbert Marcuse. In this milieu it would be
easy not only to take for granted the unchallengeable legitimacy of
equal freedom-cum-socialism, but to view the question as strategic, not
philosophical: should socialism be pursued in elitist or in democratic
fashion? Sandel, who is younger, received his education when the New
Left was in full bloom, presumably making its liberal normative
assumptions, and its democratic strategic approaches, seem even more
unquestionable. Most importantly, he was a student of Charles Taylor,
whose ideas Sandel would go on to apply to American philosophy and
political history. Taylor, in turn, was present at the creation of the
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British New Left at Oxford in the mid-1950s. There, he contributed to
Universities and Left Review, which in 1960 merged with The New
Reasoner to form New Left Review. Taylor then served on NLR's initial
board--alongside his Oxford friend Alasdair MacIntyre, who had
previously worked on The New Reasoner. MacIntyre had been "a member of
the International Socialists (IS), one of the more intellectually open
and creative of the Far Left groups" (McMylor 1994, 8). He, too, was
immersed from the beginning in a context that took the legitimacy of
equal freedom for granted, and in which the main questions were
strategic, not normative.
Reading Sandel, who cites neither Marx nor Hegel, it is easy to
forget the pivotal role played in the origins of the New Left by the
development of a humanist interpretation of Marx: an interpretation
that brought Marx closer to his Hegelian roots by making individual
freedom, not scientific prediction, the key to Marxism. Taylor was
deeply marked by this interpretation, which prompted him to turn back
to Hegel, whom he de-historicized. This is what renders Taylor's use
of communitarian means to achieve liberal ends incoherent as a truth-
claim, since it deprives his Hegelianism of the historical telos that
ratifies one form of community, the liberal one reached at the end of
history.1
MacIntyre encounters similar difficulties, but he reaches them
directly through Marx. MacIntyre's work has never stopped evolving;
but this renders all the more striking the stability, across the many
stages of his thought, of the liberal-communist ethical commitments
Friedman 246
that, as of After Virtue, stood exactly where they were when he first
found them in Marx.
MacIntyre begins and ends After Virtue with discussions of Marx.
Because these discussions are not uncritical, it is often assumed that
they represent a repudiation of MacIntyre's youthful Marxist
allegiances. But MacIntyre's Marxism was never uncritical. Does this
mean he was never a Marxist? I will not attempt to answer this
question by inquiring into the "essence" of Marxism. I will contend,
however, that the liberal values and the communist vision that animated
the young MacIntyre are intact in MacIntyre's mature communitarianism,
as is a "strategic" approach to justifying them that is just as
politically complacent as that of the optimistic communitarians. If
being a Marxist means accepting Marx's commitment to the proletariat as
the agent of the new society, then MacIntyre was a Marxist for only a
short time; if it means accepting Marx's philosophy of history, then he
was never entirely a Marxist. But if it means dedication to a society
embodying equal freedom by its rejection of capitalism, and to
justifying this society by rejecting "bourgeois philosophy," then
MacIntyre has always been a Marxist, and still was when he produced his
canonical works. The pessimism of these works stemmed from the radical
scope of his communist ambitions, not from any doubts about their
legitimacy.
In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre traces the themes of
the book to two of his preoccupations: first, the conflict between the
historical and the abstract, or in our terms, the particular and the
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universal; second, his ongoing attempt, "since the days when [he] was
privileged to be a contributor to that most remarkable journal The New
Reasoner" in the 1950s, simultaneously to reject both Stalinism and
"the principles of that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism
originated." MacIntyre adds that he "continue[s] to accept much of the
substance of that criticism" (1984a, ix).
This passage demands close attention, for Marx's critique of
liberalism had nothing to do with the liberal aspiration to achieve
freedom for all. Instead, Marx's complaints were that liberal
complicity with capitalism, and the limited liberal definition of
freedom, betrayed liberal normative aspirations. These criticisms,
like the liberal values on which they are based, are shared by
MacIntyre, who goes Marx one better by extending them to Marxism
itself. Although Marxism "is only a marginal preoccupation" of After
Virtue, MacIntyre allows that "the conclusion...embodied in" the book
"is that Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to
which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the
distinctively modern and modernizing world." The implication of these
prefatory remarks, arguably, is that MacIntyre has come to think that
both liberalism and Marxism betray what I have been calling liberal
values.
One indication of this is found in the conclusion of After
Virtue, where MacIntyre considers the "claim that by means of Marxism
the notion of human autonomy can be rescued from its original
individualist formulations and restored within the context of an appeal
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to a possible form of community in which alienation has been overcome,
false consciousness abolished and the values of equality and fraternity
realized." This formulation of the Marxist normative claim takes for
granted the legitimacy of the ideal of equal freedom. MacIntyre
questions only whether Marxism can rescue this ideal from
individualism, and he concludes that it cannot. For Marxism tends to
degenerate "into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or
utilitarianism," due to "a certain radical individualism" that is
"secreted within Marxism from the outset." This radical individualism
is illustrated by Marx's failure to tell us "on what basis" socialist
man "enters into his free association with others....At this key point
in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately
supplied" (1984a, 261).
In identifying the problem with Marxism as the inadequately
specified path to its ideal of free association, MacIntyre assumes the
overriding legitimacy of (MacIntyre quotes Marx) "'a community of free
individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of
the means of production and to various norms of production and
distribution (ibid.)." The defect in Marxism is not the end, but
Marx's failure to explain how to achieve it (ibid.).
MacIntyre concludes his discussion of Marxism by raising a
connected issue, Marx's assumption that capitalism contains the seeds
of its supersession by socialism:
However thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and
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bourgeois institutions may be, [Marxism] is committed
to asserting that within the society constituted by
those institutions, all the human and material
preconditions of a better future are being accumulated.
Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism
is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are
these resources for the future to be derived? (1984a,
262.)
Presumably it is Marx's naive neglect of this question that led him to
omit an explanation of the moral basis for the free association of
socialist man with man. So MacIntyre adds, to his claim that Marxism
degenerates into Kantianism (now dubbed "Weberian social democracy")
and utilitarianism (now labelled "crude tyranny") a third form of
degenerate Marxism: the "Nietzschean fantasy," entertained by Lenin and
Lukacs, that the deficiencies of advanced capitalism can be overcome by
a sort of socialist Ubermensch. The result of Lenin's experiment in
using Marxism as a guide to practice--the Soviet Union--was, according
to MacIntyre, not "in any sense a socialist country....The theory which
was to have illuminated the path to human liberation...in fact led to
darkness" (1984a, 262).
MacIntyre goes on to say that since he accepts the inevitability
of this unfortunate result--given the foundations of Marxian socialism
in capitalism--he is a pessimist. And a Marxist pessimist, MacIntyre
asserts, "would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For
Friedman 250
he would now see no tolerable set of political and economic structures
which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced
capitalism." Thus, although Marxism is "still one of the richest
sources of ideas about modern society," MacIntyre declares that it is
"exhausted as a political tradition" (1984a, emphasis original). From
MacIntyre's pessimism follows his famous conclusion that we are in a
period comparable to the decline of the Roman Empire, in which our task
is to construct "new forms of human community within which the moral
life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might
survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness" (ibid., 263).
There is a certain lack of clarity in MacIntyre's pessimism.
Conceivably, it may be global, such that he is not just claiming that
the moral poverty of capitalism makes it inconceivable that any
"tolerable...political and economic structures" could "replace the
structures of advanced capitalism" (1984a, 262), but that some inherent
unfeasibility of noncapitalist political economic structures makes
advanced capitalism inescapable. But MacIntyre offers no argument to
this effect; and the reasons he cites for his pessimism--the
indictments of Marxism I have just recounted--seem compatible with the
possibility that communism could, at some point in the future, emerge
from a different kind of society than that of advanced capitalism, and
thus gain MacIntyre's support.
Is communism an impossible dream under any circumstances, or
simply under present ones? The latter is much closer to MacIntyre's
view of the truth. MacIntyre's communitarianism is justified, and can
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only be coherently explained, by its role in "supplying the lacuna"
MacIntyre finds in Marxism: its failure to provide the foundation on
which to build a community of free individuals. MacIntyre's project
has always been, and remains, the identification of this foundation.
MacIntyre's Communism
MacIntyre's first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953), published
when he was 24, sets forth the Marxian normative framework that remains
essential to understanding his thought.
The governing ideal of Marxism, as described in this early book,
is of a society in which the freedom of each is compatible with that of
all, inasmuch as the free activity of each is not directed toward ends
that are antagonistic to the ends of his fellows. Each, then,
voluntarily treats his fellows as equals--ends in themselves rather
than means to one's own ends, as MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue
(1984a, 23). MacIntyre does not question the desirability of such a
society. The only question he addresses is how to bring it about. His
initial answer combines Christianity with Lukacs's Hegelian
resuscitation of "strains in Marx's thought whose fullest expression
had been in the Paris manuscripts of 1844" (MacIntyre 1994, 288).
The young MacIntyre follows the young Marx in objecting to
Hegel's rosy picture of the status quo. Hegel's unwarranted "optimism
about the outcome of history" stemmed from his blind acceptance of Adam
Smith's claim that the invisible hand of the market transforms self-
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interest into the public interest; "surely Hegel should have
seen...that rising capitalism did not in fact produce the common good,
but rather the misery of many" (1953, 27). Furthermore, by conceiving
of history as a dialectical progression of conceptual opposites, Hegel
overlooked the concrete sources of social alienation and convinced
himself that contemporary Prussia was the apex of freedom. Still,
MacIntyre endorses "the core of Hegel's thought," which Hegel "takes
from the Bible": "the distinction between man's essence"--freedom--"and
man's existence" (ibid., 28). The flaw in Hegel is his tendency toward
idealization--both of history and of freedom. Just as he comes close
to assuming that to live in Prussia is to be free, he believes that "to
be free...is to understand the laws that necessarily govern nature and
society," a belief with "grave consequences for practice" (ibid., 30).
In short, Hegel's historical metaphysics is to be condemned for
strategic reasons: instead of validating the kind of society MacIntyre
assumes is good, a communist society of true freedom, it indirectly
lays the groundwork for Stalinism.
Rectifying Hegel's metaphysical errors, MacIntyre continues, was
the task of the Left Hegelians, preeminently Ludwig Feuerbach, who put
aside enough of Hegel's scholasticism to return to the young Hegel's
essentially political concerns. Feuerbach accomplished this task by
bringing Hegel down to earth. Man and the universe are not
instantiations of abstract thought patterns; rather, "thinking is a
social activity," and its various forms are (MacIntyre quotes
Feuerbach) "'manifestations or revelations of the human essence.'
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It is worth pausing to notice that MacIntyre takes for granted
the equation of philosophical concreteness with the social, which in
turn reveals what is "normative"--the "human essence." Like Sandel
(1998a, 153 and passim), who equates moral cognitivism with the
cognition of socially constituted ends, MacIntyre gives no argument for
this claim. He simply assumes its truth.
What, then, is the human essence? 'The human essence can only be
found in the unity of man with man,'" or, in MacIntyre's words,
"freedom in community" (MacIntyre 1953, 36, emphasis added). Yet even
Feuerbach is too idealistic, since for him "love is the source of human
community" (ibid., 35). It was left to Marx to find a more realistic
strategy for bringing about communal freedom.
For Marx, too, "the ideal state was to be the expression of the
free society of men" (MacIntyre 1953, 41), but Marx recognized that
neither the Prussian state nor the British economy were realizations of
this ideal. "On the one hand Hegel and Feuerbach have reinterpreted
for him the Christian vision of human freedom in the free society; on
the other hand, he cannot but see the reality of work, degradation and
suffering which is the lot of the majority." Marxism answers two
questions: "How did this contrast arise? And, how is it to be ended?"
(ibid., 45). The answers to both questions revolve around labor.
Heretofore, as MacIntyre glosses Marx, labor has not been enjoyed as a
part of "man's essential humanity, but rather merely [as] an
opportunity to earn a living, a bare physical subsistence, which will
enable him to go on working" (ibid., 51, 50). We do not labor freely,
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but out of necessity; far from embodying equal freedom, the society
built on such labor is torn by antagonisms of interest. MacIntyre
quotes Marx: "'The estrangement of man from his own essential being
means that a man is estranged from others, just as each is estranged
from essential humanity'" (ibid., 51).
Implicit in Marx's view, MacIntyre claims, is Hegel's equation of
the human essence with individual freedom, and a recognition of the
egalitarian pressupositions of freedom. Individual liberty is possible
only where there is a community of interests--which is to say, where
there is communism. When interests are common, as among equals, my
freedom of action does not impede others, nor does theirs impede me:
equality enables freedom. Socialist equality is, in fact, an ethical
but not an economic return to the state of nature:
In the beginning there is simply the community of
men, producing to satisfy their basic needs...living
together in families and working together as need
demands. The bonds between them are the social bonds
of material need and of language. In its [sic]
earliest simplicity man is still largely animal in his
social life. But here the division of labour intervenes.
...It makes of each individual a hunter, a fisherman,
a shepherd and so on, who to maintain his livelihood
must fulfil the demands that the community makes upon
his calling rather than the demands of his own nature.
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Hence we find for the first time a clash between the
interest of the individual and that of the community:
it is the latter interest which takes political form
in the state, an instrument for the coercion of the
individual. (MacIntyre 1953, 62-63)
What communism means, then, is the abolition of the coercion that has
been brought about by the division of labor.
The early Marx saw human beings in their essence as free because
they had no antagonistic interests. Communist society will be natural
--true to the human essence--in that it will reinstate this freedom.
Communist man will not be compelled to labor; instead he will do so
freely, to meet his needs, and the abundance created by the previous
stage of history, capitalism, will make it possible to do so without
falling into a division of labor and of interests, with the attendant
hierarchical and inegalitarian power relationships. Under communism,
men will once again be able to "deal with other men, neither as with
capitalists nor as with proletarians, but as with men"--beings whose
freedom does not conflict with community because the latter embodies
concretely what was in Feuerbach only an idea: "philanthropy, love of
men" (MacIntyre 1953, 55).
What, then, is the young MacIntyre's criticism of Marx?
Marx, according to MacIntyre, failed to recognize that the
ethical imperative at the heart of his vision--the impetus to equal
freedom-- comes from Christian myth. Feuerbach, MacIntyre (1953, 36)
Friedman 256
noted, in positing man's essence as "freedom in community," had
"retain[ed] the biblical conception of human nature" as essentially
free. But in trying to "rid [Christianity] of myth," he had
sidestepped the question of what foundation could otherwise undergird
"the true community of Feuerbach's humanistic version of Christianity."
Marx's attempt to expel religion from his system similarly deprived it
of its foundations: how can he justify a free society simply by
describing historical progress toward it? The attempt to do so also
robbed Marxism of plausibility when its historical predictions were
falsified. This, in turn, transformed Marxism into a force for evil,
since it required Marxists to impose an oppressive orthodoxy on
themselves in order to keep on fighting for a future that was patently
failing to materialize. In short, like Hegel and then Feuerbach, Marx
had failed to provide an effective strategy for achieving freedom.
MacIntyre condemns Marx for writing, in The German Ideology, that
"'the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,
but real premises...verified in a purely empirical way'" (MacIntyre
1953, 69). To this, MacIntyre responds that morality
can never have the kind of certainty that scientific
method can give us. Morality is always to some degree
ambiguous, metaphysics a commitment that can never be
fully justified. The tragedy of Marxism is that it
wished to combine the scope of metaphysics with the
certainty of natural sciences. It was therefore forced
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on the one hand to reject religion...and on the other
hand to oversimplify all questions of technique. (Ibid.,
71.)
What MacIntyre means by "technique" is what he will, nearly 30 years
later, single out as the lacuna in Marxism: the absence of a plausible
path to a free society. Marx predicts that freedom will be achieved,
but MacIntyre points out that such a prediction requires, for its
realization, that a great many human beings will first accept the
theory behind it as the motive for their action. That this will
necessarily occur is simply an unwarranted assumption, especially since
"those structures of power which man in society has created" are too
strong to be assumed away. There is moreover "an unpredictability" to
history that makes it resistant to "human rationality" (ibid., 71). In
short, Marx's error is that he "wishes now to speak of what is rather
than what ought to be." Marx's decision "to eliminate from his
doctrines the last traces of the biblical and Hegelian theme of
estrangement...leads Marx to deny any moral foundation to a vision
whose whole origin lay in moral concerns" (ibid., 69-70, emphases
original). This decision leads Marx to substitute prediction for
prophecy.
Prophecy is a call to action, a vision of what the future could
be, based on a recognition of present estrangement. The Paris
Manuscripts were prophetic; The German Ideology and Capital are not.
"Prophecy does not bear a date, prediction does. Moral denunciation
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does not wait on the completion of processes, prediction must" (1953,
75). What happens if, on the predicted date, capitalism does not
collapse? Either Marxism is abandoned, as it was by Germany's Social
Democratic Party at the end of the nineteenth century; or it is made
into an orthodoxy. In the latter case, the process of defending the
prediction from falsification turns the doctrine justifying the
prediction into an object of veneration. As well, the scope of
salvation is narrowed down from humanity as a whole to the ranks of
those who accept the doctrine. This narrowing eventually sanctioned
Lenin's use of "a small highly-disciplined group bringing the truth to
the masses" (ibid., 102, 103). "The concomitant of orthodoxy is the
persecution of heretics" (ibid., 103).
Prophecy as the Is-Ought Bridge
Christianity, MacIntyre maintains in 1953, is a corrective to "the
worst in Marxism." Far from being, as Marx assumed, a superstitious
explanation of the natural phenomena investigated by science,
Christianity is a critique "of every social order," based on the
recognition "that no human order can ever be adequate to the perfection
which God ordains and which is displayed in Jesus Christ" (1953, 77).
True religion perceives "the corruptibility of communist society as
clearly as that of any other society. Such a religion can see the
reality of redemption only in a society which is able continually to
question and to criticise in radical terms its own achievements"
(ibid., 83).
Friedman 259
Tragically, the "a priori canons of rationality" (MacIntyre 1953,
84) that Marx inherited from the Enlightenment via Hegel and Feuerbach
led him to equate the 'free association of producers' under communism
with the existence of "some standard of rationality and intelligibility
to which human relations should conform," a standard that is to result
in "'perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations as between man and
man and as between man and nature'" (ibid., 85, quoting Marx). Because
"religious beliefs do not accord with these standards," relying as they
do on "myth and image," Marx repudiated religion indiscriminately. But
"human relations have in them something more than the merely human,
something which demands that allegiance for which only God can ask"
(ibid.). This something is invoked "when a man prays," for he then
"envisages himself in a dramatic, rather than a speculative,
relationship to God. The drama which he envisages takes the form of
religious myth," and religious myth inspires "the vision of a unifying
pattern in history" (ibid., 86, 87). Such a vision is the basis of
prophecy and therefore of what is good in Marxism: "Marxism begins with
the mythological vision of the good society which it finds in
Christianity" (ibid., 88). In his "transition from prophecy to
prediction," Marx lost sight of the fact that "some things can only be
said obscurely in extended metaphors" (ibid., 89).
It may seem that the distance between the young and the mature
MacIntyre is even greater than that which MacIntyre thinks separates
the young and the mature Marx. Social practices, virtues, and
traditions play no role in Marxism: An Interpretation. But that is
Friedman 260
just the point. MacIntyre does not begin from the preoccupations that
would signal a philosophical communitarian in the making. His
communitarianism is eventually devised as an initial solution to the
strategic problems of a political theory, Marxism. These problems
ultimately derive from Marxist concessions to the same enemy that
preoccupies MacIntyre in After Virtue: emotivism. And the solution to
them is narrative, not because narratives make our lives satisfying
wholes, as one might be tempted to conclude from After Virtue, but
because narratives convert facts into values.
"Moral judgments," the young MacIntyre writes, "announce our
decisions. The problem is, what kind of argument do we use to solve
problems of decision? The emotive theory suggests that it is all a
question of feelings and that no rational pattern can be discerned in
such an argument." But emotivism rests on a disjunction between facts
and values that is disproven by "the description of the novelist or the
dramatist," (1953, 114), which
is always itself the evaluation....It is not the
case that we read Engels' description of England in
1844 and then draw the conclusion that this system
ought to be condemned. Any such conclusion would be
superfluous. The description itself is the
condemnation. (Ibid., 114-15.)
Now we gain a clearer idea of what MacIntyre meant by comparing
Friedman 261
prayer to a drama, and by chiding Marx for shunning the extended
metaphors in which alone some things can be adequately said. The is-
ought gap presupposed by the emotivist is bridged by the prophet or the
novelist, who confers meaning on the world by picturing it as a
dramatic narrative. In the context of such a narrative, moral
obligations follow directly (if not always unambiguously) from facts.
When Marx decided to speak only of what is, not what ought to be, the
problem was not that he spoke of what is, but that he spoke only of
what is. We do need to start with what is, but we need to derive from
it what ought to be, and Marx forgot this when he exchanged prophecy
for prediction.
The nonhuman "something" to which we appeal in prayer makes
morality compatible with reason, albeit a different form of reason than
the a priori, transparent, Enlightenment version. The nonhuman
something is not God but a religious myth, a normative narrative, which
has moral authority because it is built on what "is." This myth is
what gave rise to the young Marx's critique of capitalism. MacIntyre's
first attack on emotivism, and his narrative alternative to it, spring
from his effort to remedy the defect of Marxism by returning to Marx's
prophetic inspiration.
The defect of Marxism is that its emancipatory, egalitarian
aspirations have somehow resulted in tyranny. Marxism turns out, in
short, to be a worse-than-ineffective strategy for achieving the "true
community" of freedom. The young MacIntyre's explanation of this
problem, and his solution to it, rest on his discernment in Marx's
Friedman 262
thought of a scientistic deviation from its religious origins, which
produces in Marxism a gap between what is and what ought to be. In
turn, MacIntyre develops an understanding of religion as able to close
the is-ought gap by deriving value from fact in the form of myth. This
makes religion profoundly antiscientistic, although not antiscientific.
Science uses facts to predict; religion uses facts to prescribe. The
problem with prediction is not that it is an attempt to bridge the is-
ought gap. Rather, the problem is that it subordinates the ought to
the is, in the form of the is that will be. Confidence in what will be
slides easily into orthodoxy and tyranny when history does not
cooperate. Reconfiguring Marxism as a prophetic vision, then, will
rescue Marx's normative impulses from the Stalinist form they had taken
by MacIntyre's day. A prophetic vision bridges the is-ought gap in a
way that avoids the subversion of communal freedom that follows from a
predictive is-ought bridge.
As early 1953, then, we can find in MacIntyre's thought a number
of suggestions for the proper interpretation of After Virtue.
Foremost, of course, is MacIntyre's endorsement of the vision of
human freedom that he finds explicit in the young Marx and implicit in
the mature Marx. MacIntyre objects to Marx's attempt to predict the
future, but not to the kind of future he predicts. From the very
beginning, MacIntyre embraces the liberal ends pursued by Marx while
criticizing the means of obtaining them: Marx's philosophy of history.
Second, MacIntyre's unquestioning adherence to Marx's normative
vision enables him to subordinate epistemic to strategic
Friedman 263
considerations. Taking for granted the legitimacy of his communist
aspirations, the only question becomes how to enact communism, not how
to justify it. It is obvious to MacIntyre that capitalism is unjust:
merely to describe it is to prescribe its antithesis. Even to have to
condemn capitalism "would be superfluous. The description itself is
the condemnation" (1953, 115). By giving certain facts (such as the
conditions in Manchester described by Engels) the aura of values,
MacIntyre's normative self-assurance will make him a lifelong builder
of is-ought bridges. These bridges are a means to a predetermined end,
equal freedom as embodied in communism. The means to that end are as
indisputably true as the end is good.
Immersed in the world of British communism, MacIntyre is
understandably preoccupied with differences between advocates of
various strategies for achieving the socialist utopia. By 1953 he has
already chosen the side of the anti-Stalinists, so he tailors his
philosophical conclusions to produce a new form of Left politics that
will bring communism without repression. If the root of Stalinism is
Marx's proclivity to predict the future, then a different form of is-
ought bridge must be sought--and if found, it must be valid, not just
expedient: that is the nature of is-ought bridges. They collapse the
distance between valid ends and expedient means.
In 1953, MacIntyre locates the bridge in religious prophecy,
since it retains enough of a normative edge, derived from the
perfection of God, to serve as a platform for criticizing Stalinist
orthodoxy. In truth, however, this means that the "ought" overwhelms
Friedman 264
the "is"--as, conversely, when the bridge is predictive, the "is"
obliterates the "ought." Religious prophecy of the sort MacIntyre has
in mind is, in fact, "moral denunciation" (1953, 75) that is so self-
assured that it presumes to be a mere statement of fact. No mere
statement of fact, however, reveals what ought to be--although it can
reveal the complacency of the prophet who equates his norms with facts.
Third, MacIntyre's initial critique of emotivism is as strategic
as is his proposed "factual" alternative. MacIntyre condemns emotivism
precisely because it would call the morally obvious into question.
Certainly MacIntyre's opposition to emotivism, at least as of 1953, has
nothing to do with any worries about psychological consequences that
might follow from value uncertainty, worries that such commentators as
Holmes (1993, 92) detect in MacIntyre's mature thought. And the idea
of narrative that reappears in After Virtue is, when first employed in
Marxism: An Interpretation, unrelated to any psychological benefits
associated with being able to view one's life as a unified whole.
Indeed, narrative unity is, at least in 1953, wholly compatible
with the possibility that different people's views of moral truth will
be incommensurable with each other. It is even compatible with
relativism. The purely strategic foundations of MacIntyre's early
endorsement of is-ought bridges (as opposed to the truth-conclusions
MacIntyre unwarrantedly draws from them), like the strategic
foundations of his parallel condemnation of emotivism, are revealed
definitively by the subjectivism that afflicts his alternative to
emotivism. This comes out in an essay MacIntyre published in 1957,
Friedman 265
"The Logical Status of Religious Belief," a critique of that variety of
emotivism embodied in the logical positivist thesis that religion, as
distinguished from morality, merely expresses emotions.
MacIntyre (1957, 189) answers this form of emotivism by asserting
that the truth-claims made in the course of worship "always occur as
part of a total narration in which a dramatic wholeness of vision is
presented." Such narratives, "commonly denominated myths...are
stories...with a plot and a culmination," in which "God figures as the
predominating character" (ibid., 189-90). To place God in the
narrative in this way, each religion relies on "an authoritative
criterion" that has "no logical justification outside" itself (ibid.,
199, 198). In accepting this authority, "we discover some point in the
world at which we worship, at which we accept the lordship of something
not ourselves" (ibid., 202). Echoing Sartre and explicitly following
Kierkegaard, MacIntyre writes that "the only apologia for a religion is
to describe its content in detail: and then either a man will find
himself brought to say 'My Lord and my God' or he will not" (ibid.,
205). There can be no justification of religion apart from such a
radical individual choice; religion is "beyond argument" (ibid., 211).
This is, it seems, why MacIntyre had earlier juxtaposed, against Marx's
scientism, the uncertainty and ambiguity of ethico-religious judgments.
Prophecy as an is-ought bridge allows for a multitude of conflicting
moral codes based on individuals' acceptance of a variety of competing
prophecies, each with its own narrative authority.
MacIntyre has, in short, produced an individualistic version of
Friedman 266
pure, relativistic communitarianism. The individual rather than the
community is the one whose perception of morally charged facts is
unchallengeable, making disagreements between individuals unbridgeable.
This brings out an instructive aspect of MacIntyre's thought: its
tendency toward relativism precedes, and is independent of, his
communitarianism. Communitarianism is but one version of the
relativism that flows from the equation of facts with values--at least
when the facts in question are subject to plural interpretation.
In the schema implicit in MacIntyre's 1957 paper, each
individual's choice among contradictory religious commitments is both
arbitrary and valid. The validity of the individuals' potentially
contradictory choices, however, is proved not by any argument about the
nature of religious or moral truth, but by the assumption that morality
is an obvious matter, akin to the perception of a fact. By
generalizing his own moral complacency into a general account of moral
epistemology--by moving from a specific moral conviction about the
indubitable evil of capitalism to a generalized prophetic alternative
to emotivism--MacIntyre goes beyond the strategic purpose of his
critique of Marxian predictivism, but at the price of inadvertently
relativizing all values. On the one hand, prophetically deriving value
from fact serves to allow dissent from Stalinist orthodoxy, the better
to achieve the unquestioned goal of communist freedom. On the other
hand, by failing to perceive this move as strategic, MacIntyre makes a
truth-claim that, ironically, produces relativism.
Friedman 267
Essential Desire as the Is-Ought Bridge
In Marxism: An Interpretation, MacIntyre had attributed the
degeneration of Marxism to Marx's shift from prophecy to prediction.
In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," a two-part article published in
1958 and 1959 in The New Reasoner, MacIntyre blames this shift not on
Marx, but on Stalin's response to Marx's failure to describe the
transition to socialism. In order to make the transition happen,
Stalin built a socialist economy on the basis of the tyrannical
"manipulation of the economic and industrial arrangements of society"
(MacIntyre 1958, 97). In MacIntyre's earlier view, Stalinist tyranny
is a defense against the falsification of Marxist predictions; now it
is an attempt to make good on them.
It cannot possibly be a successful attempt, though, since the
point of socialism "is a freeing of our relationships from the kind of
determination and constraint hitherto exercised upon them....Socialism
cannot be impersonally manipulated into existence, or imposed on those
whose consciousness resists, precisely because socialism is the victory
of consciousness over its previous enslavement" (1958, 99-100). While
in MacIntyre's earlier view, Marxist inevitabilism was merely liable to
be false and thence--through the indirect and contingent process by
which orthodoxy was defended--to result in tyranny, MacIntyre now
argues that inevitabilism is necessarily antithetical to Marx's
emancipatory vision, since it rests on deterministic predictions based
Friedman 268
on "laws governing human development independently of human wills and
aspirations," whereas the socialist era "is to be characterised
precisely as the age in which human wills and aspirations take charge
and are no longer subservient to economic necessity and to the law-
bound inevitability of the past" (ibid., 100).
A Marxism that attempts to liberate "human wills and
aspirations," however, suggests a new, nonreligious bridge over the is-
ought gap. Previously, religious prophecy revealed to us the normative
import of facts, in the same way novels and prayers supposedly do; but
this suggested a radically individualist view of the translation of
facts into values--one that could issue in interpretations of the facts
that might be at odds not only with each other, but with the
interpretations MacIntyre finds so obvious. Now MacIntyre replaces
religious narrative with a more strategically useful is-ought bridge:
"the more permanent and long-run of human desires" (1959, 90).
According to "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," the moral vision
of free community springs naturally from these permanent desires; the
only reason this is not obvious to us is that we live in a society that
frustrates and even remolds these desires. In capitalist society,
then, desire seems "purely individual" and self-interested; "desire as
a driving force is stripped of all those qualities which unite men,"
and morality comes to be seen as an oppressive but necessary restraint
on anarchic desire, just as on another level the social contract
restrains anarchic individuals (MacIntyre 1959, 93). Under capitalism
even Christians come to accept the inevitability of "inequality and
Friedman 269
disunity" instead of being scandalized by them; "human rights" are
proclaimed, yet are thought to be compatible with "poverty and
exploitation" (ibid., 94).
Under current conditions we fail to see that what we really
desire is what we now assume contradicts desire: morality. What we
really wish is "to be fundamentally at one with mankind" (1959, 98).
Once the desire for social unity has been liberated in us, we shall be
able to live together in complete freedom, not only because we will
lack any interest, originating in the division of labor, that would be
served by treating another as our means; but because we will be
informed by an overpowering inborn motive to refrain from such
oppressive behavior.
The desire for unity is not an arbitrary preference: our "common
shared humanity" is a fact (MacIntyre 1959, 94). We discover this fact
not through individual commitment but by participating in "the history
of class-struggle"--that is, "the experience of human equality and
unity that is bred in industrial working-class life" (ibid., 95).
"When Communist workers meet, they have as first aim
theory, propaganda and so on. But they take for their
own at the same time and by this token a new need, the
need for society, and what seems a means has become an
end." So Marx. One meets the anarchic individualist
desires which a competitive society breeds in us, by a
rediscovery of the deeper desire to share what is common
Friedman 270
in humanity, to be divided neither from them nor from
oneself, to be a man. And in this discovery moral rules
reappear as having point. For their content can now be
seen as important in correcting our short term
selfishness, and thus helping to release desire.
(Ibid.)
Capitalism provides a form of life in which men
rediscover...that what they want most is what they
want in common with others; and...that certain
ways of sharing human life are indeed what they
most desire. (Ibid.)
Deriving norms from our historically revealed permanent desires
not only requires MacIntyre to repudiate the almost existentialist
understanding of human value acquisition evident just a year earlier,
in "The Logical Status of Religious Belief"; it enables him, by doing
so, to link his now-disowned existentialist subjectivism to
individualism; to liberalism (as an individualistic and a
universalistic ideology); to emotivism; and to Stalinism. "Notes from
the Moral Wilderness" therefore suggests the possibility that
MacIntyre's mature critiques of emotivism, liberalism, and Marxism are
compatible with an overaching communist (but anti-Stalinist) normative
and philosophical framework. For in this essay MacIntyre is able to
group together "liberals" and Stalinists on the grounds that, as
Friedman 271
emotivists, they fail to bridge the is-ought gap--unlike true
communists, who recognize the normativity of our permanent desires.
In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," MacIntyre's immediate
targets are those ex-communist liberals who, like Leszek Kolakowski,
"repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle" (1958, 90).
Where "the Stalinist identifies what is morally right with what is
actually going to be the outcome of historical development," swallowing
up "the 'ought' of principle...in the 'is' of history,"
the moral critic puts himself outside history as a
spectator. He invokes his principles as valid
independently of the course of historical events.
...The 'ought' of principle is completely external
to the 'is' of history....The question of the course
of history, of what is actually happening and the
question of what ought to happen are totally
independent questions. (Ibid., 91.)
Thus, "the moral critic's standpoint" is "a kind of photographic
negative of Stalinism." But what clinches the case against Kolakowski
is that he mirrors not only Stalinism but "the pattern of liberal
morality which prevails in our society. For it is of the essence of
the liberal tradition that morality is taken to be autonomous" (ibid.).
It cannot be overemphasized that the "liberalism" MacIntyre has
in mind, as in all his subsequent work, is not the belief in the
Friedman 272
desirability of individual freedom. It is instead the moral
epistemology, which he attributes in 1959 (89) to Kant, that holds
individuals to be radically free in choosing their moral commitments:
the view that "in the end our most general and ultimate principles
...stand beyond any rational justification"--particularly beyond "any
appeal to facts, historical or otherwise." It is the view that in
exercising our freedom, "we cannot argue, we can only choose. And our
choice is necessarily arbitrary in the sense that we cannot give
reasons for choosing one way rather than another" (ibid., 92). The
"liberalism" MacIntyre now attacks is, in short, very close to being
his own position from 1953 to 1957, when he had equated true
rationality with the embrace of religious myth. The key difference is
that MacIntyre had grounded this radical decisionism on the
individual's normative interpretation of "facts," while MacIntyre now
condemns liberal decisionism as being ungrounded by any facts because
of its individualism.
The liberal sees himself as choosing his values.
The Marxist sees himself as discovering them.
He discovers them as he rediscovers fundamental
human desire; this is a discovery he can only make
in company with others. The ideal of human
solidarity, expressed in the working-class
movement, only has point because of the fact of
human solidarity which comes to light in the
Friedman 273
discovery of what we want. (Ibid., 96.)
Here MacIntyre can once again be seen to project onto the world his
confidence in the justice of communism, such that it is not a value he
chooses but one that, as it were, forces itself upon him. "We discover
rather than choose where we stand as men with particular aspirations at
a particular point in history" (1959, 97), and this discovery, like the
unearthing of an empirical fact, gives MacIntyre a crucial strategic
advantage over the prophetic is-ought bridge he proposed in 1953: it
catches Kolakowskian liberals in the same net as Stalinists.
To do so, it identifies both schools with an "emotivist" failure
to link facts and values. On the one hand, Stalinist emotivism is
undesirable because it traduces equal freedom. Driven only by the
desire to achieve the predicted future, the Stalinist uses any means
necessary to get there. In practice Stalinist "means-end morality"
leads to an unleashing of "desire as it is, random and anarchic,
seeking power and immediate pleasure only too often"--a form of "crude
utilitarianism" that sacrifices living human beings in the name of the
inevitable future (1958, 95; 1959, 98; ibid.). On the other hand, the
liberal version of emotivism is undesirable because its protests
against Stalinism are ineffectual. The liberal, according to
MacIntyre, turns "'ought' into a kind of nervous cough with which we
accompany what we hope will be the more impressive of our injunctions"
--rendering the declamations of "the liberal moral critic of
Stalinism...unintelligible"--and thus void of persuasive power--to
Friedman 274
those who have chosen different ultimate values (1959, 90, 96). In
short, the individualistic version of the is-ought bridge that
MacIntyre had himself advocated as recently as 1957 is now condemned
for being unable to persuade other individuals of desirability. The
"fragility" of "the ex-Communist" Kolakowski's "appeal to moral
principle," according to MacIntyre, "lies in the apparently arbitrary
nature of that appeal. Whence come these standards by which Stalinism
is judged and found wanting and why should they have authority over
us?" (1958, 90-91). The problem, in MacIntyre's mind, is the
appearance, not the reality, of arbitrariness, since that is what
renders Kolakowski's liberalism impotent. But like the other
communitarians, MacIntyre has a regrettable tendency to confuse
strategically inconvenient appearances with philosophical defects, and
strategic remedies with metaphysical improvements.
The moral epistemology common to Stalinists and liberals alike,
according to MacIntyre, is politically counterproductive. In
attempting "to treat his fundamental moral principles as without any
basis," MacIntyre writes, the "believer in the autonomy of morality"
claims "that neither moral utterance nor moral action can be vindicated
by reference to desires or needs. The 'ought' of morality is utterly
divorced from the 'is' of desire"; liberal emotivism renders morality
"unintelligible as a form of human action" because it makes "our moral
judgments appear like primitive taboos, imperatives which we just
happen to utter" (1959, 89-90).
It is important to notice not only the strategic motivation of
Friedman 275
MacIntyre's rejection of emotivism, but the strategic foundation of his
alternative to it. His claim that "it is obvious" that divorcing is
from ought makes morality "unintelligible" (1959, 90) is credible only
to the extent that one finds the derivation of values from facts
through participation in class struggle plausible; and the only thing
that renders this derivation plausible is belief in the obvious
desirability of its normative upshot: communism. MacIntyre finds in
"permanent human desires" for what I have been calling a "liberal"
society a way to condemn Stalinism without abandoning communism--and
without ceding to Kolakowski a supposedly individualistic basis for
reaching anti-Stalinist conclusions, since this basis seems powerless
to bring about the obviously desirable utopia. But the conclusion that
the permanent desires are "moral absolutes" (granting that they exist)
is warranted only by MacIntyre's prevenient dedication to communism
(ibid., 96). Thus, in asserting that "the separation of morality from
history, from desire discovered through the discovery of that common
human nature which history shows as emerging, leaves morality without
any basis" (ibid., 97), MacIntyre presupposes what is at issue: whether
such a desire would provide a sound basis for moral judgments in the
first place.
As far as I can determine, MacIntyre only twice2 in his entire
career tries to argue for the validity of an is-ought bridge in a way
that does not substitute strategic for epistemic considerations. The
second attempt is presented in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988), and will be discussed below. The first attempt occurs in After
Friedman 276
Virtue's justly maligned treatment of such "functional concepts" as
"watch" and "farmer." "We define" such concepts, MacIntyre observes,
"in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or farmer are
characteristically expected to serve" (1984a, 58). This observation is
intended to vindicate the Homeric tradition's assumption that "to be a
man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and
purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of
God" (ibid., 59). But the conclusion follows only if we conflate terms
of functional evaluation ("a good watch," "a good farmer") with terms
of moral evaluation ("a good man"). Functional evaluation stipulates
the very thing that is put in question by moral evaluation. MacIntyre
overlooks the fact that a functional evaluation can be turned into a
moral one by challenging rather than accepting the stipulated criterion
of good functioning. Perhaps you want a watch that looks good on your
wrist, not one that tells accurate time; then you may challenge the
"characteristic" assumption that the more accurate the watch, the
better it is. You and I may then argue about what the criterion of a
good watch should be. Which end is better: the usual one, which
allowed me to evaluate different watches as means to efficient time-
keeping; or the aesthetic one that you propose? There is nothing
inherent either in watches or in people's "characteristic" judgments
about them--the "facts" in question--that could decide such an issue of
values. Stephen Holmes is right to call MacIntyre's argument here
"patent[ly] feebl[e]" (1993, 99).
In 1959, however, MacIntyre privileges not the functions people
Friedman 277
"characteristically" assign watches or human beings, but
"characteristically human desires, needs and the like"3 (1959, 89), not
through philosophical argument, no matter how flimsy; but by means of
(i) the implicit and illicit assumption that such desires are
dispositive; and (ii) the explicit but entirely strategic claim that
such desires fill the lacuna in Marxism--specifying, as MacIntyre would
later say, "on what basis" socialist man "enters into his free
association with others" (1984a, 261). Between 1953 and 1957,
MacIntyre's political strategy was to propose a view of moral and
religious "facts" that would recover a Marxism that is prophetic rather
than predictive, serving the aim of achieving communal freedom while
avoiding the horrors of Stalinism. In the short time separating "The
Logical Status of Religious Belief" (1957) and "Notes from the Moral
Wilderness" (1958-59), however, prophecy is supplanted by a deep-rooted
human desire to live harmoniously in a free community. This change in
the content of the is-ought bridge replaces the "emotivist,"
individualist separation of facts and values implicit in Kolakowski's
allegedly ineffectual liberalism with supposedly objective,
transhistorical, yet historically discoverable facts. But MacIntyre's
shift in strategy is not justified by any demonstration that
individualism is invalid, or that the notion of an is-ought bridge is
valid.
The journal in which "Notes from the Moral Wilderness" appeared,
the New Reasoner, was "produced by a group of Marxists who had broken
with the British Communist Party over the invasion of Hungary in 1956"
Friedman 278
(McMylor 1994, 19). MacIntyre's strategic complaint is not that
Kolakowski is wrong to criticize Stalinism, but that Kolakowski will
not persuade very many Stalinists--such as, we may infer, those in the
British Communist Party--that he is right by appealing to universal
moral principles, abstracted from such facts as those of history and
human desires. On this basis, plus the unargued acceptance of these
facts as valid, MacIntyre has produced, by 1959, the essentials of his
mature position on emotivism, liberalism, and Marxism. Without any
recourse to narratives (which have dropped from sight, at least
temporarily), practices, virtues, or traditions, or more generally to
any epistemological or metaphysical arguments for communitarianism,
MacIntyre has developed a link between emotivism, liberalism, Marxist
historical determinism, and tyranny that enables him to "revive the
moral content within Marxism" (1958, 93)--the ideal of a community of
equal freedom--while staving off the totalitarian extirpation of this
ideal.
As he does in After Virtue, MacIntyre holds in "Notes from the
Moral Wilderness" that a commitment to equal freedom that does not
bridge the is-ought gap (i.e., one that does not explain how we are to
get from the capitalist present to the communist future, filling the
strategic void in Marxism) devolves into either Kantian abstraction or
Stalinist "utilitarianism" (by which he means not the greatest good for
the greatest number, but the satisfaction of the commissars'
appetites). MacIntyre has also added, to his earlier definition of
what he is for (communist freedom), a description of what he is against
Friedman 279
(individualism); both of these descriptions, I will contend, remain
accurate in After Virtue (and thereafter). Yet what he is against has
been determined on the basis of its political usefulness in bringing
about what he is for. Far from being anti-individualistic on
epistemological grounds, he himself had advanced a radically
individualistic epistemology as recently as 1957. The only apparent
rationale for his change of heart is the notion that individualism puts
the proponent of equal freedom in the position of fruitlessly waving
protest placards against the armored columns of the Warsaw Pact, unable
to enlist legions of followers because his moral objections to
Stalinism are not anchored in some objectivity-conferring fact.
The Beginnings of MacIntyre's Communitarianism
What remains for MacIntyre is to refine his strategy for fighting
against individualism and for communism, to sharpen his appreciation of
the threat the former poses to a free community, and to start replacing
his universalistic "permanent desire" for communism with a
particularlist communitarianism--which must then be constrained so as
to lead only to communist results. He makes significant strides in all
of these directions in his 1960 essay, "Breaking the Chains of Reason."
Here MacIntyre affirms the essentialist take on equal freedom
elucidated in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness": we are to "live out"
the "Hegelian and Marxist" alternative to the status quo, he writes,
"not by manipulation of people so that they will move in some direction
Friedman 280
that we desire, but by helping them to move where they desire. The
goal" of ratifying our permanent desires "is not happiness, or
satisfaction, but freedom"; "freedom is the core of human nature"
(MacIntyre 1960, 235, 200). Marx shows us that "the concepts of
intention, deliberation and desire...are essential to understanding men
as agents and not as mere passive reflexes of non-human forces" (ibid.,
218). This Marxian insight precludes a predictive approach to human
history or a manipulative approach to achieving communism.
What is new in this essay is MacIntyre's insistence, first, that
rationality is essential not only to morality in general but to freedom
in particular; and, second, that rationality is essentially social.
"The growth in reason and the growth in freedom are inseparable,"
MacIntyre argues, because "only in so far as reason guides action are
men free to discern alternative possibilities and to frame purposes"
(1960, 200-201). MacIntyre makes this point (anticipating Taylor's
version of positive freedom) so as to distinguish his desirous is-ought
bridge from utilitarianism--not the Stalinist version of
utilitarianism, but the capitalist one. Capitalist utilitarians, in
MacIntyre's view, equate freedom with the desires people happen to have
under current social conditions. This is unacceptable not, as one
might expect, because it legitimates contradictory subjective value-
claims, but because it suggests that despite class antagonisms, there
is in capitalist society a common interest in desire-satisfaction--a
mystification that stands in the way of revolutionary thinking.
Against this type of utilitarianism, MacIntyre argues that true freedom
Friedman 281
of desire is freedom of rational desire.
What, then, constitutes rationality? MacIntyre answers this
question indirectly. He turns to Hegel to remind us of "the essential
connections between the concept of human action and the concepts of
reason and freedom," a connection that has been lost to "the
contemporary academic mind." The academic view is that "human activity
can be reduced to patterns of response to the stimuli of conditioning"
(1960, 203). From this positivistic perspective, there can be no
"concept of a common human nature" (ibid., 206). Such a concept,
presumably, appears to positivists as a piece of meaningless
metaphysics. To tell us what reason is and therefore what are the
rational desires that need to be liberated, MacIntyre must therefore
rebut the positivist understanding of human activity.
Picking up a theme he had sounded in his critique of predictive
Marxism in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," MacIntyre denies that
human action can ever be understood if it is "equated with physical
movements," since "the same physical movements may be involved in
indorsing a cheque, signing a peace treaty or putting my name to a
proposal of marriage" (1960, 212). But since he is now attempting to
define what rational desires are, MacIntyre cannot, without falling
into vicious circularity, point to motivation by those very desires as
the criterion that marks "a given piece of human behaviour as a human"-
-i.e., an "intelligible"--action, as he had done in the earlier essay
(1959, 89). Instead, MacIntyre turns to Wittgenstein's social-language
thesis, enunciated in Philosophical Investigations (1953). What
Friedman 282
distinguishes between the physical movement that in one instance
constitutes check signing and in another treaty signing is, MacIntyre
writes, "the socially recognised conventions, the rules, in virtue of
which the movement is taken as signifying this or that....Human
activity is intelligible and explicable only in a social and only in an
historical context" (1960, 212-13). Wittgenstein rebuts positivism by
showing that reason is inherently social. It seems that MacIntyre
wants us to infer from this rebuttal the same thing Taylor suggests by
conflating positively free strong evaluation with social expressivism:
support for the thesis that rational choices--free choices illuminated
by reason--are necessarily communal in origin. The community in
question is the proletariat engaged in an historical struggle (ibid.,
218) that unearths our permanent desire for freedom in community. At
the same time, MacIntyre denies that "positive freedom" justifies
"tyrannis[ing] over" people "for their own good" (ibid., 201).
MacIntyre's appropriation of Wittgenstein will in short order
transform his ideas into communitarian ones. The proximate effect,
however, is not only to distinguish his position from utilitarianism,
but to link "the spirit of welfare capitalism" (1960, 238) to Stalinism
more directly than he did in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness." In the
earlier essay, contemporary Western ideology shared Kolakowski's
"Kantian," i.e., emotivist, i.e., individualistic moral methodology:
the Western mainstream agreed with Stalin that morality is distinct
from history, ought from is, such that the individual chooses her
values with no factual "basis." In "Breaking the Chains of Reason,"
Friedman 283
however, MacIntyre begins to speak of liberal-capitalist ideology as
primarily positivistic rather than moralistic. Positivism no less than
moralism presupposes an is-ought gap; but since it tries to understand
people without reference to their socially originated, positively free
agency, mainstream social science operationalizes positivism in such a
way that "to understand is to be in a position to manipulate." Thus,
"the theorising of those self-appointed therapists of our culture, the
social scientists," is implicitly coercive; Stalin is merely more
explicit than they are (ibid.).
To carry through the positivist program would require "possession
of that power the exercise of which is depicted in Brave New World and
1984" (1960, 211). But since "for Wittgenstein language is essentially
social, essentially a matter of human activity and not at all to be
understood mechanistically"--recalling "Marx's assertion that 'language
is practical consciousness'"--"Wittgenstein's thought...might help us
to break through the prevailing [positivist] miasma" (ibid., 234). For
rational debate over the application of moral, indeed,
more generally, of evaluative concepts, requires that
there be some standard, independent of the desires,
preferences, and wills of the contending parties, to
which appeal can be made in trying to show why the
reasons supporting one point of view are superior to
those supporting another. In the absence of such a
standard, there is nothing to distinguish genuinely
Friedman 284
rational moral or evaluative disagreements from any
other clash of conflicting desires, preferences, and
wills. (MacIntyre 1991a, 97.)
If the contending parties are individuals, and language is, as
Wittgenstein (allegedly) establishes, inherently social, then the free
community that has been MacIntyre's normative given all along can be
seen as something more than his own "emotivist" goal, untethered from
facts. The communal nature of language can confer on community itself
a factuality that gives the "appearance of" objective rationality to
the extinction of interpersonal coercion that is possibly only when we
share common ends.
Wittgenstein, however, creates problems of his own. In a 1964
essay, "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?",
MacIntyre first takes note of the question of relativism--although not,
it should be added, the subjectivist relativism of his liberal
emotivist enemies. MacIntyre has, to this point, objected to liberal
emotivism not as subjectivistic, but as politically impotent. But what
in 1964 he calls Peter Winch's "Wittgensteinianism in philosophy of
religion" raises for MacIntyre the question of whether his own
Wittgensteinianism, beneath the appearance of objectivity that it
confers on a language community, actually has relativistic implications
as between language communities.
Winch (1958) contended that attention to the "'many and varied
forms'" taken by "'intelligibility'" in different cultures and contexts
Friedman 285
shows that "there is no 'norm for intelligibility in general'"--a
contention that leads, according to MacIntyre, to "total relativism"
(1964a, 119-20). This result, however, can be avoided. What Winch
ignores is that criteria of intelligibility "have a history";
conceptual change over time "suggests strongly that beliefs and
concepts are not merely to be evaluated by the criteria implicit in the
practice of those who hold and use them" (ibid., 120-21). For example,
Polynesian taboos may express superseded criteria of intelligibility;
"sometimes to understand a concept involves not sharing it. In the
case of 'taboo' we can only grasp what it is for something to be taboo
if we extend our insight beyond the rules which govern the use of the
expression to the point and purpose which these rules once had, but no
longer have, and can no longer have in a different social context"
(ibid., 122-23).
Historicism thus rescues MacIntyre from Wittgensteinian
relativism, at least for the moment, by allowing him to criticize the
"intelligibility" of other cultures retrospectively. On the pure-
communitarian side of the ledger, MacIntyre writes that "all
interpretation has to begin with detecting the standards of
intelligibility established in a society"--anticipating by decades
Walzer's tautological "have to." On the constraining, universalist
side, MacIntyre maintains that with the passage of time, we are able to
"detec[t] incoherence" in the criteria of intelligibility employed by
"primitive" cultures (1964, 126, 121). Inasmuch as this historicist
notion serves to rein in the relativism inherent in MacIntyre's
Friedman 286
newfound communitarianism, it is the first of several versions of what
may be called MacIntyre's historical proviso.
A second work of 1964 indicates that MacIntyre's Wittgensteinian
turn completes the critique of Marxian strategy later sketched in After
Virtue. Recall that the main target of After Virtue's critique of Marx
--Marx's failure to establish the "technique" by which freedom could be
achieved--had already been criticized by MacIntyre in 1953. By 1958
MacIntyre had anticipated his claim, in After Virtue, that Marxism
degenerates into Kantianism and utilitarianism; but this claim was, in
its 1958 version, premised on Marxists having forgotten the human
essence: the permanent desire for social unity. At that stage,
MacIntyre still entertained the hope that class struggle could recover
the perception of this desire, and it seems fair to couple his optimism
in this regard with the supposition, in line with his critique of
Winch, that such an awareness would, by virtue of coming late in
history, invalidate previous communally held normative perceptions.
In Secularization and Moral Change (1967), however, which
consists of a series of lectures on British religion and society that
MacIntyre delivered in 1964, he shifts toward the pessimism about the
transition to communism evident in After Virtue. This somber outlook
is based on MacIntyre's low estimate of the ability of capitalism to
provide the requisite conditions for Wittgensteinian intelligibility.
MacIntyre's central allegiance in these lectures is a normative
Wittgensteinian communitarianism that is, once again, asserted rather
than being defended. "There being an agreed right way of doing
Friedman 287
things," he claims, "is logically prior to the acceptance of authority
as to how to do things" (1967, 53). For instance,
the game of chess exists as a set of established and
agreed practices....Were it not for this prior social
agreement the notion of an authority in chess would be
a vacuous one. What is true of chess is also true of
morality; unless there is an established and shared
right way of doing things, so that we have social
agreement on how to follow the rules and how to
legislate about them, the notion of authority in
morals is empty. (Ibid.)
But why think of morality in terms of "the notion of authority" in the
first place? Why view what is good as being whatever some authority
designates as good, rather than as something that inheres in the object
or action in question? And why does "social agreement" establish such
authority? MacIntyre does not say.
It is one thing to allow that "an individual can only act
intelligibly in the eyes of others if in large part at least his or her
actions can be interpreted as flowing from good reasons" (MacIntyre
1986c, 93). It is plausible that social consensus about what
constitutes such reasons will be a prerequisite of intellegibility in
the eyes of others; but why is this type of intelligibility so
important (we are, after all, often opaque to each other)? And why
Friedman 288
should the resulting consensus be not only a source of mutual
understanding, but of normative obligation? The only reason MacIntyre
has given (in 1960) is strategic: achieving a free society will require
liberation from not only Stalinist "utilitarianism," but from
positivistic social science, with its manipulative tendencies subtly
disguised by pretensions to value neutrality; and both forms of
liberation can be attained only by privileging what is rendered
communally "intelligible"--including, apparently, the permanent desire
for interpersonal unity that becomes visible in the course of class
struggle. This desire, unlike the diverse individual desires that are
the object of utilitarian satisfaction in emotivist society, has moral
"authority" only if (for some reason) what is agreed upon communally
is, ipso facto, dispositive.
MacIntyre's offhand remarks suggest that he finds Wittgenstein
persuasive for strategic reasons that will be familiar from his
critique of Kolakowski. MacIntyre equates intelligibility with moral
authority because an unintelligible moral standard will not be
effective in gaining others' compliance through reasoned discussion,
there being no shared moral premises to guide the reasoners. As a
result, dishonesty--manipulation--will have to be used to gain
compliance instead. The "distressing fact about our own society,"
MacIntyre contends, is that while "the effective and honest use of
moral predicates does presuppose a shared moral vocabulary in an
established moral community," we "do not as a whole community share
such a single moral vocabulary" (1967, 52). Social consensus has the
Friedman 289
(alethic, objective, rational) "authority" MacIntyre attributes to it
only if one has already concluded that a noncoercive, consensual
society is (objectively, rationally) good.
This situation originated in the destruction of traditional forms
of social order. British urbanization uprooted "the older forms of
community...to which religion had given symbolic expression," and the
subsequent use of religion in appeals to the workers to refrain from
class warfare had made it "only too obvious...that the alleged
authoritative norms to which appeal is made are in fact man-made, and
that they are not the norms of the whole community to which in their
own way men of every rank are equally subject" (MacIntyre 1967, 12, 14,
emphases original). The religious beliefs that have survived this
disillusionment are "only fragments of a vocabulary in which to ask or
answer" ethico-religious questions (ibid., 30).
Marxism, which provided a secular answer to such questions, has
been doomed to irrelevance in the contemporary world for the same
reason that religion is withering away. While in Germany the failure
of Marx's prediction that capitalism would collapse led to Bernstein's
revisionism and thence the cooptation of the SPD by the welfare state,
in Britain workers were uninterested in Marxism in the first place
because, deprived of a meaningful religious outlook by the class
divisions of their community, they were never much "concerned with
advancing the claims of one way of life against another; they were
concerned with making claims for so much an hour" (1967, 27.)
Instead of being, as before, the result of the philosophical
Friedman 290
acceptance of an is-ought gap, emotivism (as well, presumably, as the
acceptance of an is-ought gap) is, in MacIntyre's new account, a
consequence of social conditions that have deprived us of "any over-all
social agreement as to the right ways to live together" which might
render "intelligible" social "claims to moral authority" (1967, 54).
"The impact of industrialism and of a liberal and individualist ethos
destroys" the earlier association of "a man's duties" with "his
specific role or function in society" (ibid., 72). Such a notion of
duty, or something to take its place, is needed because the "activity
of appealing to impersonal and independent criteria only makes sense
within a community of discourse in which such criteria are established,
shared. Outside such a community the use of moral expressions is only
a kind of private gesture" (ibid., 52), an ineffectual protest of the
sort launched by liberals such as Kolakowski. MacIntyre's appeal to
impersonal--and thus, MacIntyre assumes, objective and rational--moral
criteria, however, is now grounded not in facts of history or of
psychology, but of community: Wittgenstein allegedly shows that moral
"authority" is to be found in "established, shared," "agreed" communal
criteria.
Once class conflict has made such criteria unavailable, however,
emotivist attitudes follow in due course and Marxism is prevented from
making headway. Wittgenstein's perspective has now become
indispensable to MacIntyre, for it provides something that the notion
of a permanent desire for community activated by working-class politics
not only lacked, but precluded: an explanation for why it is that
Friedman 291
working-class politics has not eventuated in socialism. Moreover,
Wittgenstein turns MacIntyre's unwavering normative goal, "the
Christian vision of human freedom in the free society" (1953, 45), into
the method of its own achievement. Free community is now not only the
end, but the means by which that end may be both reached and therefore
(since to MacIntyre they are the same thing) legitimated: it is not
only an ideal of uncoerced life, but its attainment flows from the
shared values that make such a life uncoercive; and the
"intelligibility" made possible by such values is the closest thing
MacIntyre will ever offer to a reason for privileging the resulting
freedom. On the other hand, the dual nature of community in
MacIntyre's thought circa 1964--as both end and means--makes it hard to
see how, in the absence of such a community brought about by class
conflict, it could be constructed. Hence MacIntyre's ongoing
pessimism.
MacIntyre now contends that in light of the damage capitalism has
done to earlier forms of communal moral authority, it was foolish for
Marx to assume that the proletariat would automatically achieve a free
society. MacIntyre writes, in yet another article published in 1964,
that Marx "never rid himself entirely of the notion of an inevitable
progress" that he had inherited from Hegel; in Marx's later work this
notion assumes the form of "inevitable and necessary laws governing
human affairs and bringing them to their goal" (1964b, 106-7). In
After Virtue MacIntyre describes the idea of leapfrogging over the
deficiencies of capitalism as a "Nietszchean fantasy," but the reason
Friedman 292
for this characterization of Lenin's and Lukacs's confidence in the
Party had emerged 17 years prior. The Party-state is a tyranny rooted
in the attempt to do the impossible: retrieve from capitalism the basis
for moral community that it has destroyed.
MacIntyre has, by 1964, passed all the judgments on Marxism
contained in After Virtue. Marx was too optimistic. This optimism
stemmed from his failure to explore the basis on which socialist man
"enters into his free association with others" (1984a, 261). This
lacuna leads to the three degenerate forms of Marxism: "crude tyranny,"
i.e., Stalin's "crude utilitarianism"; "Weberian social democracy,"
i.e., revisionist welfare statism, which relies on a positivist social-
scientific rationale and leads to manipulative policies; and now
"Nietzschean fantasy." These defects signify a radically
individualistic element in Marxism, because they suggest Marx's
obliviousness to the destruction of the communal setting required for
any moral vision to achieve legitimacy (i.e., collective
intelligibility).
Despite his disagreements with Marx, however, MacIntyre continues
to take for granted the normative legitimacy of communism. His
criticisms of Marx's determinism and individualism call into question,
as they have from the first, how to achieve the transition to a society
of equal freedom, and now whether such a transition is possible--but
not its desirability. MacIntyre's pessimism stems from the chasm
between the status quo and the conditions needed for the transition to
socialism, given a Wittgensteinian understanding of those conditions.
Friedman 293
At no point before 1965 (or after) has MacIntyre been anything less
than hostile to capitalism. Given the advent of capitalism, however,
he now thinks that Marxist hopes for automatic progress to communism
are profoundly unrealistic.
From Wittgenstein to Homer
Community--whether established by prophetic, desirous, or
Wittgensteinian means--has been valuable in all versions of MacIntyre's
thought thus far because it serves to harmonize people's desires. When
antagonistic interpersonal ends somehow give way to social unity, so,
too, will relationships of power: people can be free to do as they
wish, for what they wish will not require pushing each other around.
But what makes MacIntyre a "communitarian" is not his commitment to a
community of freedom, which is but a utopian version of the preeminent
liberal commitment to individual liberty. What is distinctively
communitarian in MacIntyre's thought first appears in 1960, with his
Wittgensteinian turn. Only then, as strategic concerns make it
attractive to begin deriving a community of freedom from the allegedly
social nature of reason, does MacIntyre seize on social facts to bridge
the is-ought gap. Thus, for example, in Secularization and Moral
Change (1964), MacIntyre equates the particularistic "established"
norms of "a single moral vocabulary"--which make possible a "common
life" possessing "moral authority"--with freedom: such "shared" norms
are based on social "practices," and the moral rules governing these
Friedman 294
practices rely on "social agreement on how to follow the rules" (1967,
12, 52, 53, 53, 53, 53, emphasis added).
MacIntyre continues to make these equations in A Short History of
Ethics (1966). There he insists, for example, that "the concept of
legitimate authority has application only within a context of socially
accepted rules, practices, and institutions. For to call an authority
legitimate is to appeal to an accepted criterion of legitimacy" (1966,
137). "Where there is no such criterion there can only be power or
rival powers"; this is the problem with Hobbes's politics--it
represents the coercive alternative to communitarian moral authority.
MacIntyre faults Plato's elitism on similar grounds: "the social order
which the Platonic concept of justice enjoins could only be accepted by
the majority of mankind as a result of the use of nonrational
persuasion (or force)" (ibid., 49). Now, however, MacIntyre is in
Munchhausen's position of needing to establish a community free of
manipulation or force by means of a consensus that can issue only from
the authority of such a community. Without the historically generated
recognition of a transhistorical desire for free community, how can
that community be achieved?
MacIntyre here confronts the very problem he would later tax Marx
for failing to solve: the strategic Ur-problem of communism, how to get
from here to there. But in A Short History of Ethics, MacIntyre hits
on an answer that gets him almost all the way to his mature position.
This achievement stems from MacIntyre's turn to Greek thought, as
embodied in Homer and articulated in Aristotle. The central idea is
Friedman 295
that being raised in the practices of a community can educate human
desires to communal ends, solving the conundrum of how people are to
achieve a consensus around values. Desire is, in classical thought, a
malleable means to the end of shaping people's interests; MacIntyre
seizes on this means as a way to make people's interests dovetail in a
manner that makes interpersonal manipulation unnecessary. This is made
possible by the Greeks' implicit recognition of the factor that must
cause pessimism about communism emerging from capitalist social
conditions: the necessary basis of "intelligible...claims to moral
authority" (1967, 54) in shared social norms.
In "a well-integrated traditional form of society," MacIntyre
(1966, 103) writes,
the rules which constitute social life and make it
possible and the ends which members of the community
in question pursue are such that it is relatively
easy to both abide by the rules and achieve the ends.
...To achieve the personal ideals of the Homeric hero
...and to follow the social rules...cannot involve
fundamental conflict. At the other end of the scale,
we might cite as an example the kind of society which
still sustains traditional rules of honesty and
fairness, but into which the competitive and
acquisitive ideals of capitalism have been introduced,
so that virtue and success are not easily brought
Friedman 296
together.
MacIntyre's point is twofold. First, classical ethics made
virtue easy, because social norms worked with individual desires rather
than against them. By acting as one's inclinations dictate, one could
freely do the "right" thing (what one ought to do) because social norms
(what is--the socially given) had trained those inclinations. One grew
up agreeing with one's peers and being trained to feel accordingly, so
that to act in free accord with one's desires would not be to act
antisocially. One can imagine MacIntyre being struck by the lack of
tortured self-doubt in the deliberations of Homer's heroes: here are
people whose ends are completely "intelligible" to them, and why?
Because their obligations rest on their social position, and their
rearing has made the obligations of each social position crystal clear
to one and all.
Second, capitalism makes virtue difficult, because it pits
individual inclination against social norms. This is because
capitalism's "acquisitive ideals" orient each individual toward
himself, undermining the social basis of any "authoritative" moral
claim. Individual
ends become dissociated from the requirements of the
public domain. They provide other and rival private
ideals. It will be natural in this situation to
conceive of the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit
Friedman 297
of virtue as mutually exclusive alternatives.
(Ibid., 104.)
When "the individual no longer finds his evaluative commitments
made for him, in part at least, by simply answering the question of his
own social identity," then "from the facts of his situation as he is
able to describe them in his new social vocabulary nothing at all
follows about what he ought to do" (1966, 126). By contrast, in
Homeric society, where obligations follow automatically (MacIntyre
claims) from social functions, "the logical gulf between fact and
appraisal is not so much one that has been bridged" as "one that has
never been dug" (ibid., 7).
The is-ought bridge provided by socialization into agreed norms
is, as all of MacIntyre's previous is-ought bridges were intended to
be, the path to personal freedom, rectifying the strategic deficiency
bequeathed to communists by Marx. But the problem with which MacIntyre
haltingly dealt in the course of his confrontation with Winch's
Wittgensteinian relativism haunts A Short History--although not as much
as it will haunt After Virtue, where MacIntyre goes beyond inserting
his perspective into the history of thought and tries to defend his
alternative expressly. In A Short History MacIntyre continues to deal
with the problem of relativism he had previously addressed in the form
of Winch's intercommunal relativism, but with our "permanent desires"
playing the role of a psychological proviso that he would soon fold
into the historical one.
Friedman 298
MacIntyre's initial interest in Aquinas stems not from Thomistic
insights into the nature of God or His world, but from the fact that
Aquinas's "Aristotelianism...is concerned not with escaping the snares
of the world and of desire, but with transforming desire for moral
ends." Aquinas, however, is not just another Aristotelian. He
constrains the relativistic possibilities of Aristotelianism, "showing
how the conceptual links between virtue and happiness forged by
Aristotle are a permanent acquisition for those who want to exhibit
these links without admiring" the benighted, illiberal values and
social institutions of Aristotelian Athens (1966, 117-18). For unlike
Aristotle, who assumed that "the virtues of the polis" are "normative
for human nature as such," Aquinas "describes the norms of human nature
as such, and expects to find them exemplified in human life in
particular societies" (ibid., 118). "Quite clearly," MacIntyre writes,
"our desires as they are stand in need of criticism and correction";
and he praises Christian egalitarianism for establishing "the dividing
line between all moralities which are moralities for a group and all
moralities which are moralities for men as such" (1966, 148, 149).
But in the same breath, MacIntyre maintains that the way to
criticize our desires as they stand is to appeal to "the ideals which
are implicit...in the very way actions may be envisaged in a given
society" (ibid., 149). Utilitarianism allows each individual to take
her desires as given, but this "ignore[s] both the possibility of
transforming human nature and the means available for criticizing it in
the ideals which are implicit...in the very way actions may be
Friedman 299
envisaged in a given society" (ibid.). Does MacIntyre mean to say that
the ideals "given" in individuals' desires should be replaced by those
of various "given societ[ies]"? Apparently not, because Christianity
is to be applauded for amending Aristotelianism with the notion, as
"alien" to Aristotle as to Homer, that "somehow or other all men are
equal in the sight of God"--ruling out communal visions of the good
that do not go beyond the "local and particular" to embrace the "cosmic
and universal" (1984a, 148), as MacIntyre would put the point in After
Virtue. But how can this universalism be reconciled with MacIntyre's
overarching particularism?
The idea of "permanent desire" seems to provide the answer.
MacIntyre concludes that "it is not necessarily the case that the
desires elicited by a particular form of social life will find
satisfaction within that form" (1966, 200).4 "The individual discovers
his aims and his desires from within a set of rule-governed
relationships to others," but only from within the rule-governed
relationships to others that are appropriate to "men as such" (ibid.,
244-45, 149)--relationships not only of freedom, but of equality.
Originally, the notion of a permanent desire was MacIntyre's is-ought
bridge; it is what enabled his communist convictions to appear more
persuasive than Kolakowskian liberalism. But now a Wittgensteinian
picture of intelligibility-cum-normativity is serving that community-
legitimizing function in MacIntyre's thought. The problem is that it
brings in its train the same conundrum Winch confronted. Although he
is less than clear about the subject in A Short History of Ethics,
Friedman 300
MacIntyre seems now to deploy permanent desire not as the "factual"
rationale for his vision of free community, but as a constraint against
such communities' relativism. All communities confer intelligibility,
but only those that are in line with our permanent desires are
normative.
Although Wittgenstein was originally brought on board to
differentiate between MacIntyre's posited social desire and the given
desires satisfied by utilitarians, Wittgenstein alone has thus far
proven inadequate to the task, precisely because the prerequisite of
Wittgensteinian community--the existence of socially shared languages--
is so broad as to be (nearly, in MacIntyre's interpretation)
coextensive with given desires, ill serving the aim of privileging a
society in which socially educated desires make free relationships
among equals possible. Hence MacIntyre's continued reliance on a
permanent desire for social freedom. This desire provides a standard
apart from "intelligibility" against which various societies can be
judged.
Thus, MacIntyre gives us two kinds of freedom: the freedom from
interpersonal conflict conferred by socially instituted rules of
whatever type, and the freedom instantiated in a community that meets
our permanent desire for the freedom of equals; two kinds of happiness:
"the satisfaction to be gained from achieving...socially established
ends" (ibid., 196), no matter how privatistic, and the happiness
produced by free actions that reflect our social desires; and two
bridges over the is-ought gap: the one provided by socially established
Friedman 301
rules, and another by our social desires. Clearly MacIntyre endorses
the latter varieties of freedom, happiness, and "socially agreed,"
impersonally chosen values; what is less clear is how this endorsement
is positively connected to the former, Wittgensteinian varieties,
rather than being at odds with them--universalistic constraints on
social particularity.
A New Historical Proviso
In 1968 MacIntyre issued a revised version of Marxism: An
Interpretation entitled Marxism and Christianity, in which, despite the
title, the theology has been removed but the normative liberalism, if
anything, has been strengthened. Marxism is, for instance, now
described as an attempt to "enable men to self-consciously and
purposefully achieve such transformations of social life as they wished
to see" (1968, 5, emphasis added); the ideal society could not any more
clearly be described in terms of (negative) freedom. In the new
volume, the problem with Marxism that had been identified in Marxism:
An Interpretation--as in A Short History of Ethics--is Marx's failure
to live up to this ideal. As in the earlier books, this problem has
two sources. First there is Marx's predictive attitude toward the
transition to socialism (1968, 85; cf. 1966, 214). Marx failed to see
that because "the form of society" the workers "will construct in the
course of emancipating themselves cannot be prescribed to them by
anyone else," it "cannot be predicted" (1968, 92). Second, there is
Marx's assumption that capitalism will give birth to socialism; in
Friedman 302
reality, "the conditions which are inimical to religion seem to be
inimical to Marxism too" (ibid., 111). These conditions--the social
factors that have destroyed the Wittgensteinian intelligibility of
religion--have made of Marxism a mere "set of 'views' which stand in no
organic relationship to an individual's social role or identity, let
alone his real position in the class structure" (ibid., 122-23).
Just as redolent of MacIntyre's earlier works is his attack on
the liberal inability to link facts to values:
Not only are the moral attitudes of Marx, or the
analysis of past history, or the predictions about
the future abandoned; so is the possibility of any
doctrine which connects moral attitudes, beliefs
about the past, and beliefs in future possibility.
The linchpin of this rejection is the liberal
belief that facts are one thing, values another--
and that the two realms are logically independent
of each other....But for Marxism and Christianity
only the answer to questions about the character and
nature of society can provide the basis for an answer
to the question: 'But how ought I to live?' For the
nature of the world is such that in discovering the
order of things I also discover my own nature and
those ends which beings such as myself must pursue
if we are not to be frustrated in certain predictable
Friedman 303
ways. (Ibid., 124.)
However, there is something new in the critique of liberalism
embodied in the curious phrase "future possibility" (cf. MacIntyre
1968, 92, 115-116, 142). Evidently, these words are intended to
suggest criticisms of social particularity--i.e., of "the past." The
criterion of criticism is, as with MacIntyre's rejoinder to Winch, once
again retrospective--but the perspective from which one looks back
critically on the past is the future, enabling present as well as past
socially given rules to be criticized. The "Marxist attempt to
envisage societies from the standpoint of their openness to the
future," MacIntyre writes, embodies "the virtue of hope...in a secular
form" (ibid., 142). Reviving this virtue will allow particular
societies to be critically evaluated--but without (MacIntyre seems to
think) reverting to a universalistic "ought" deprived of any persuasive
grip on what "is." The now-revised historical proviso obviates the
need for a permanent desire for social unity as a check on
communitarian relativism--although, in arguing that the end result of
historical criticism is to avoid human "frustration," it seems possible
that MacIntyre still sees a psychological desire for social unity as
the ultimate standard of future "hope."
As early as 1970, however, it becomes clear that MacIntyre has
expressly abandoned the social-desire thesis. The occasion for
MacIntyre's reversal on this point is his book-length assessment of
Herbert Marcuse, himself a New Left theorist of desire fulfillment.
Friedman 304
"According to Marcuse," MacIntyre writes, "freedom and happiness were
intimately connected"; but he hotly disputes Marcuse's suggestion that
"part of the difference between Hegel and Marx" is that, to quote
Marcuse, in Marx "the idea of reason has been superseded by the idea of
happiness" (1970, 10-11). Not only does Marcuse fail to give textual
evidence for this "gratuitous falsification of Marx," but the fact is
that "freedom is a goal which may be incompatible with the goal of
happiness" (ibid., 37).
MacIntyre had made a version of this argument in 1966, but only
as a way of condemning totalitarians and paternalists who sacrifice
freedom for short-term, individualistic happiness, as opposed to the
long-term happiness that will come from the satisfaction of our social
desires. But in 1970 MacIntyre writes that "the gap between aspiration
and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that
tragedy will be permanently relevant to contemporary human experience"-
-as Marx and Trotsky knew, according to MacIntyre. For "the acceptance
of freedom as a goal is the acceptance of the possibility that in
utilizing their freedom men will produce situations which invoke
frustration, sacrifice, and unhappiness" (1970, 37).5 To explain why,
if socialism would make us happy, we have not already thrown ourselves
into socialism, Marcuse must distinguish between true and false needs
and must claim that the stimulation of the latter has distracted us
from pursuing the former--just as MacIntyre had done since 1958. But,
MacIntyre asks, "How has Marcuse acquired the right to say of others
what their true needs are?" Marcuse's position, MacIntyre concludes in
Friedman 305
Walzerian fashion, is "inescapabl[y] elitist" (ibid., 72).6 It may be
that in reading Marcuse, MacIntyre realized that his own attempt to
supply the basis for communism had been developing in a direction that
was antithetical to the goal of equal freedom. If we are capable of
failing to recognize our own "permanent desires," perhaps a vanguard
party should feel entitled to act on these desires on our behalf.
In any case, MacIntyre's critique of Marcuse marks a watershed in
his thought. By jettisoning the distinction between true and false
needs, and by inference that between permanent and culturally specific
desires, he completes his Wittgensteinian turn. This deprives him,
however, of psychological criteria for distinguishing good from bad
communities. How, then, can MacIntyre presume to criticize capitalism-
-which, after all, might be thought to have some basis in social
agreeement?
MacIntyre's response to this predicament is to deny that
capitalism satisfies Wittgensteinian criteria of intelligibility. To
this end, he deploys the historical proviso against managerialism and
positivistic social science in such papers as "Social Science
Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority" (1975). This
critique is central to MacIntyre's ongoing attempt to elaborate what he
called, three years before the publication of the first edition of
After Virtue, a "general post-Marxist ideology of liberation" that
would achieve "socialism with a human face" (1978, 94), because it
allows him to portray would-be scientific managers as, in reality,
implementing not techniques that might command widespread agreement,
Friedman 306
but their own wills or those of others--wills that command no social
agreement. Managerialism is, in reality, the institutionalized form in
which, when "the individual qua individual...is taken to be the unit of
moral discourse," social life becomes "an arena in which self-
interested individuals contend for advantage and aggrandizement"
(MacIntyre 1985, 245). Under these circumstances "modern bureaucratic
organizations characteristically arise" (MacIntyre, 1975, 57). What
MacIntyre in 1975 begins to call the "Weberian view of bureaucratic
authority" (ibid., 54)--by which he apparently means the view that
bureaucracy is the most effective form of social power--came into being
to provide some kind of predictability to a social world that would
otherwise be atomized to the point of "unintelligibility." In claiming
that her expertise provides "levers for effective manipulation" of her
subordinates (ibid., 75), the bureaucrat justifies dealing with others
coercively rather than in the rational terms that would be available
within a shared "narrative" (1973b, 325).
The manager is, of course, one of the prototypical personalities
through which MacIntyre, in After Virtue, condemns emotivist society.
For MacIntyre in the 1970s, emotivism is what it was in 1958, and what
it will be in his mature work: a legitimation of clashing individual
wills. Only the identity of the individuals changes. No longer are
they (at least not primarily) the commissars of the Second World; now
they are the bureaucrats, government and corporate, of the First.
Their power is legitimate only (MacIntyre believes) if postivist
managerial ideology is valid. If it is not, then there is no agreement
Friedman 307
on the social rules promulgated by the managers, and modern society
becomes unintelligible: that is, it loses its legitimacy. On the basis
of a critique of managerialism, then, capitalism can be criticized
without reference to eternal human desires.
Thus, in "Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution" (1973),
MacIntyre contends that positivists rely on factual claims about
"illusion, distortions of thought, and the like" that "can in general
be made only from the standpoint of..a privileged exemption from such
distortions"; MacIntyre calls this standpoint "epistemological self-
righteousness" (1973b, 322), also known as universalism. The
universalist diremption of is from ought culminates, among
"revolutionary theorists," in "predictions of the course of history";
but among "orthodox social scientists" and "industrial managers," it
leads to "a parallel elitism": "a claim to privilege with respect to
power" (ibid., 341-42).
MacIntyre invokes the historical proviso to render this
managerial elitism implausible. The ambition to make lawlike
generalizations about human behavior overlooks the fact that the same
physical action can have a variety of meanings; and we "make our
actions intelligible not only in relation to what has gone before, but
also to future possibilities," by placing them in the context of
"historically idiosyncratic, interrelated narratives" which are
therefore unpredictable by means of general laws (MacIntyre 1973b, 325;
cf. idem 1975.) "Intelligibility" is to be found only in socially
constructed "dramatic and narrative forms." "The production of
Friedman 308
dramatic and narrative forms through which we make our actions
intelligible to ourselves and others is of course," MacIntyre asserts,
"a cooperative affair" (1973b, 325). The narrative basis of
intelligibility is ignored by revolutionary theorists and managers
alike. But our freedom to alter the course of the narratives in which
we are involved dooms any attempt to predict their outcome.
In another paper from 1973 MacIntyre writes, of "social
particulars" that are characterized by "a certain kind of continuity in
belief and in practice informed by belief," that "part of the
continuity and identity both of such a form of social practice and of
such a form of social organization is the continuity of
institutionalized argument, debate, and conflict" (1973a, 57). In a
single stroke the notion of future possibilities--which MacIntyre will
later embody in his notion of a tradition--fends off the danger of
relativistically defending whatever is socially agreed upon by allowing
it to be criticized retrospectively, even while it delegitimizes the
apparent social agreement found in capitalist societies, based as it is
on a predictive managerialism that is as spurious as predictive
Marxism.
We have now arrived at the doorstep of After Virtue--without
MacIntyre abandoning the normative commitments that had led him to
Marxism, and without him making any epistemological or otherwise
metaphysically communitarian claims that are unmotivated by these
commitments.
Friedman 309
MacIntyre's Mature Communitarianism: Constrained Wittgensteinianism
MacIntyre opens After Virtue with the same Homeric traditionalism he
had praised in A Short History of Ethics, which he now sees as one of a
variety of "heroic" ethics found in premodern societies, in which one's
social position dictated one's obligations. Presenting the
unreflective correspondence between individual duty and one's place in
the social order displayed in the Iliad as the polar opposite of modern
emotivism, MacIntyre preserves this unreflectiveness in the pure
communitarian thread running through his canonical book. Thus, he
admires how "the self of the heroic age lacks precisely that
characteristic which...some modern moral philosophers take to be an
essential characteristic of human selfhood: the capacity to detach
oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step
backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of
view from the outside" (1984a, 126). Heroic versions of embedded
selfhood begin, MacIntyre writes in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988), from "some condition of pure historical contingency, from the
beliefs, institutions, and practices of some particular community which
constitute a given. Within such a community authority will have been
conferred upon certain texts and certain voices....The beliefs,
utterances, texts, and persons taken to be authoritative are deferrred
to unquestioningly" (1988, 354).
Homeric particularism alone might seem to achieve MacIntyre's
normative aims, without recourse to Aristotle or Aquinas. The now-
Friedman 310
familiar goal of ending emotivist interpersonal manipulation by giving
people a set of ends in common is achieved by subordinating people to
socially sanctioned practices. By adopting as our own the goods
internal to these practices, we--the members of any given community--
gain the ability to deal with each other without manipulation.
Whenever we disagree, we can reason with each other by making reference
to the shared premises inculcated in us by our participation in the
same practices. We are free because we need not coerce each other to
attain our ends; our ends, being shared, are no longer antagonistic.
But we are not yet equal: slaves, metics, and women are means to
others' ends.
MacIntyre allows that Aristotle justifiably affronts us by
"writing off...non-Greeks, barbarians and slaves, as not merely not
possessing political relationships, but as incapable of them"; and by
restricting to "the affluent and those of high status" the important
virtues of "munificence and magnanimity." Crucially, "this blindness
of Aristotle's" accurately reflected the "blindness of his culture," so
in condemning it MacIntyre demonstrates that the socially particular
can be criticized. But criticized in the name of what? MacIntyre
cannot uphold universalistic egalitarian criteria against Aristotle
without subverting the particularism that has been, in one form or
another, the strategic means to his political ends for 30 years. Thus,
according to MacIntyre, Aristotle's error was that he did not take
account of the future possibilities of his tradition. He "did not
understand the transience of the polis because he had little or no
Friedman 311
understanding of historicity in general" (1984a, 159). Aristotle had
set himself "the task of giving an account of the good which is at once
local and particular--located in and partially defined by the
characteristics of the polis--and yet also cosmic and universal"
(ibid., 148). The cosmic and universal dimension of his thought is put
in the particularist form of the historical proviso. Even though it
grows out of what Aristotle adds to pure, unconstrained Homeric
communitarianism, it can be used against Aristotle, too, when he fails
to grasp the future potentialities of the tradition of which he is a
part.
We need not labor the fact that drawing the boundaries of what
count as (worthwhile) "possibilities," or of the tradition itself, will
provide an illicit answer to all normative questions, just as drawing
the boundaries around Sandel's and Walzer's territorial communities,
and around Taylor's philosophical tradition, answers--by begging--those
questions. A theorist may claim to be an Aristotelian or a Thomist,
but if, in some respect, he--like Aristotle himself--does not meet
MacIntyre's normative criteria, then this aspect of his thought can be
jettisoned as incompatible with the tradition's future. The point is
not that MacIntyre is being duplicitous, but that making normative
claims without thereby "universalistically" attributing extra-communal
validity to them is impossible. At any rate, this is the point taken
up in Chapter 7.
The Philosophical Proviso
Friedman 312
Aristotle's dictum that man is "a political animal" can be used to
illustrate both his contribution to the heroic tradition, as MacIntyre
sees it, and the way his contribution can be turned against normatively
undesirable aspects of that tradition, including those promulgated by
Aristotle. On the one hand, our "political" nature signifies
Aristotle's debt to heroic ethics by suggesting that our proper ends
are set for us by our community. Aristotle sought to link "the
concepts of virtue and goodness on the one hand and those of happiness,
success and the fulfilment of desire on the other," as they were linked
in heroic societies (1984a, 140). But rather than following Plato in
achieving this linkage by setting reason against inclination--which is
unrealistic--Aristotle saw, according to MacIntyre, that we are so
constituted that we can be trained, through participation in practices
that presuppose socially given criteria of excellence, to acquire the
inclinations, the virtues, that are internally validated by such
practices. Such virtues reflect our nature as political beings in two
senses. First, the process of acquiring them requires that during a
training period we be subordinated to norms established within the
polis. Second, the end result of this training is to premise our
happiness on success in activities that are, again, socially
established. The reason MacIntyre cannot accept Aristotle's
"metaphysical biology"--by which he seems to mean Aristotle's claim
that the ultimate human end is to contemplate the metaphysically
permanent, i.e., the divine--is that a contemplative view of the human
essence conflicts with "Aristotle's view of man as essentially
Friedman 313
political" (ibid., 158).
There is no trace here of a specific, social desire constraining
Aristotle; rather, Aristotle advocates bending people's desires
according to communal notions of the good, even those that deviate from
the particular norms of Homeric Greece. The historical proviso,
however, legitimates Aristotle's deviation from Homer, in turn giving
birth to another caveat, the philosophical proviso: Aristotle's "cosmic
and universal" assumption that "man is" communal ("political") by
nature. This assumption not only ratifies the historical proviso; it
also elevates the particularism of heroic ethics--when suitably
modified by the two provisos--into the good of man qua man. While in
heroic ethics there is no gap between facts and values because what one
is, according to the norms of one's particular society, directly
determines the excellences one should pursue (so that even to describe
an individual's role in such terms artifically bifurcates it), in
MacIntyre's gloss on Aristotelian ethics, there can be no is-ought gap
because what one essentially is, the universal human telos, directly
determines the virtues one should pursue. These virtues are those that
are internal to communal practices, because practices, being doubly
social, express our political nature.
Yet this non-biological telos also serves to constrain
"conventional and local" practices, as does the historical proviso.
The philosophical proviso is an attempt to derive tradition-
transcending norms from the authority of a tradition itself. It has
two chief results. First, the Aristotelian telos subjects local
Friedman 314
conventions, according to MacIntyre, to "natural and universal...rules
of justice" (1984a, 150). These rules prohibit practices and virtues
that run counter to the "qualities of mind and character which would
contribute to the realization of [the] common good" of those engaged in
"founding a community to achieve a common project" (ibid., 151). "The
absolute prohibitions of natural justice" follow, that is to say, from
Aristotle's recognition "that the individual is indeed intelligible
only as a politikon zoon" (ibid., 150). Examples of offenses against
the common good "would characteristically be the taking of innocent
life, theft and perjury and betrayal" (ibid., 151).
The philosophical proviso also, and just as crucially, limits
pure communitarianism by establishing that the purpose of justice is
allocation according to desert. "To deserve well is to have
contributed in some substantial way to the achievement of those goods,
the sharing of which and the common pursuit of which provide
foundations for human community," and the achievement of which "is a
good for the whole community who participate in the practice" (1984a,
202, 190-91). At first glance this may seem not to limit but to
enshrine particularism; but it rules out communities in which
distribution accords with merits that are external to practices.
External goods (e.g. power, fame, and especially money) "are always
some individual's property and possession," and "the more someone has
of them, the less there is for other people" (ibid., 190). In this
respect they are in conflict with the essentially social human essence.
This explains why Aristotle juxtaposes against the virtue of justice
Friedman 315
the vice of pleonexia, or acquisitiveness. In practice, MacIntyre
writes in a 1995 introduction to Marxism and Christianity, "justice of
desert" means the enforcement of "a just wage and a just price," which
"necessarily have no application to transactions within...capitalist
markets" (1995, x).
In addition to subjecting communal practices and virtues to
natural law and to the standard of desert, the dictates of essential
human nature limit the local and particular in a third way when joined
with an heroic insight that Aristotle suppressed, but that was revived
in the Middle Ages. This insight is the unavoidability of "tragic
conflict"--conflict, that is, "of good with good"--due to "a
multiplicity of goods" (1984a, 201, 163). Once tragic conflict is
recognized, the pursuit of plural individual ends and even the
individual's repudiation of her tradition are licensed. Without an
allowance for tragedy, the freedom created by shared subordination to
the virtues internal to practices would be the freedom of sheep;
MacIntyre seems to want people to be not only free of interpersonal
coercion, but to be able to choose freely from among communally
sanctioned and sometimes contradictory ends.
MacIntyre admits that pervasive tragic conflict would lead to
something like the situation facing modern emotivists--"too many
conflicts and too much arbitrariness"--but for the fact that by
positing a human telos, Aristotle subordinates practices and their
virtues to "the notion of a type of whole human life which can be
called good" (ibid., 201, emphasis original). What it means to lead
Friedman 316
such a life depends on the interaction of the philosophical with the
historical proviso, as can be seen by examining the historical
proviso's own historical origins.
The historical proviso originates in the medieval concept of a
"narrative quest." This concept historicizes the Aristotelian telos,
since for medieval Christians we are in this life engaged on a journey
from a sinful beginning toward the salvific future.
The medieval vision is historical in a way that
Aristotle's could not be. It situates our aiming
at the good...in contexts which themselves have
a history. To move towards the good is to move in
time and that movement may itself involve new
understandings of what it is to move towards the
good. (1984a, 176.)
"An adequate sense of tradition," therefore, "manifests itself in a
grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available
to the present," MacIntyre (1984a, 223) writes--echoing an argument he
made when he was unquestionably a Marxist (in Marxism and
Christianity).7 Anticipating Taylor's, Sandel's, and Walzer's similar
provisos, which allow the participants in a community to dissent from
its precepts, the historical proviso makes individual freedom more than
a matter of being uncoerced by one's fellow community members; it edges
MacIntyre perilously close to restoring to the individual the
Friedman 317
conventional liberal totem, freedom of choice. For while
the story of my life is always embedded in the story
of those communities from which I derive my identity...
rebellion against my identity is always one possible
mode of expressing it....The fact that the self
has to find its moral identity in and through its
membership in communities such as those of the family,
the neighborhood, the city and the tribe does not
entail that the self has to accept the moral
limitations of the particularity of those forms of
community. Without those moral particularities to
begin from there would never be anywhere to begin;
but it is in moving forward from such particularity
that the search for the good, for the universal,
consists. (1984a, 221, emphasis original.)
Once the philosophical proviso that constrains pure
communitarianism is, in turn, modified by the conjunction of tragic
choices and the historical proviso, the result is MacIntyre's abstract
and seemingly empty specification of the human telos, the "type of
whole human life which can be called good," as consisting in "the unity
of a narrative quest," such that "the good life for man is the life
spent in seeking for the good life for man" (1984a, 201, 219). What
makes such a life possible is that it is conducted within the confines
Friedman 318
of a community animated by "a history" that makes each of its members,
willy-nilly, "one of the bearers of a tradition"--by which MacIntyre
means not only a body of just but of socially given practices and
virtues (practices and virtues limited by the requirements of natural
law, desert, and scope for tragic choices), but a body of practices and
virtues that is capable of being transcended through future-directed
"criticism and invention" (ibid., 221, 222).
Thus, while insisting that we should learn from heroic societies
that "all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local
and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to
a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion" (1984a,
126-27, emphasis added), MacIntyre allows that the "authoritative texts
or utterances" of a tradition are "susceptible to...alternative and
incompatible interpretations" (1988, 354-55). Somehow, MacIntyre
supposes, the "unity of a narrative quest" imposed on a human life
spent in seeking the good for man qua man--one, that is, that begins
from a communally determined point of agreement, inasmuch as
"individual human lives" can have "narrative structure" only "because
they are embedded within social traditions" (1984c, 72)--ensures that
such a life will not endure "too much" arbitrariness and hence, we may
be entitled to infer, not too much mutual unintelligibility and
coercion.
Will Kymlicka (1989, 57) has underscored how MacIntyre's notion
of a tradition oscillates between pure communitarianism and
universalism. If we can participate in a tradition by criticizing it--
Friedman 319
if we can express our communally given identity by rejecting it--"then
it's not clear how MacIntyre's view is any different from the liberal
individualist one he claims to reject." Just as Walzer, Sandel, and
Taylor alternate between, on the one hand, descriptions of our
embeddedness in tautologically defined communities in which it seems
that anything that is "socially constituted"--which is to say anything
at all--goes; and proscriptions of certain types of community on the
other, MacIntyre seems to be faced with a contradiction between, on the
one hand, his sustained polemic against "modern individualism" for
claiming that "I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are
taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence,"
and, on the other, his description of "all reasoning" as taking place
"within the context of some traditional mode of thought" (1984a, 220,
222, emphasis added). If all reasoning is traditional, then modern
individualism has to count as a tradition; how, then, can MacIntyre
criticize it, or its emotivist denouement, as being antithetical to
tradition?
It would seem that one must either accept the tautologization of
particularism achieved by MacIntyre's allowances for normative tragedy,
depriving one of any communitarian basis for criticizing liberalism; or
else that, in order to condemn liberalism, one must defend the pure
authority of the socially particular over the individual. But to take
the latter course would mean not only stifling individual freedom, but
replacing the clash of irrational individual "preferences" to which
MacIntyre objects with an equally irrational clash of communal
Friedman 320
traditions; the arbitrary selection of values by individuals would give
way to the arbitrary selection of values by communities. As we have
seen, though, MacIntyre has never criticized emotivist arbitrariness as
undesirable per se. Emotivism is undesirable only insofar as it
indicates a lack of the social basis of "intelligibility," consensus;
therefore, it is a marker for interpersonal manipulation. While pure
communitarianism may be as arbitrary as emotivist individualism, it has
the advantage of precluding coercion within a given community--which
has been the point all along. Assuring that the community is neither
capitalistic nor otherwise criminal, and that it does not impinge on
individual freedom of choice in other ways, is the task of what I am
calling the philosophical and historical provisos.
The sticking point is that both provisos are patently
universalistic. They ensure that MacIntyre's communitarianism leads
not to a society that has values anything like Homer's (or Aristotle's)
society did, but to a communist society: a society of equal
subordination to some common set of ends, but also one in which the
ends cannot be Nazi or Mafioso or capitalist or even ancient Greek
ends, since they must conform to natural law and the criterion of
desert, and must allow people to dissent from their traditions in
making tragic choices.
As much harm as good accrues to MacIntyre's cause from pure
communitarianism, since he cannot, on pain of reopening the gap between
facts and values, treat communitarianism as a clever way to achieve
communism--say, by openly prescribing as universally good our mutual
Friedman 321
subordination to a set of practices carefully limited so as to preclude
uncommunist values. Having never called the goal of a society of free
community into question, he has always portrayed it as a direct
inference from facts: either from everyday facts of the sort Engels or
Dickens describes; or from a transhistorical fact of human psychology;
or from the "social facts," the tacit agreements, that make human
behavior intelligible. Each of these strategies having proven
problematic, MacIntyre now inserts Marxist liberal normative goals in
the very logic of communal particularity by means of the provisos.
The obvious objection is that MacIntyre is tacitly ruling out
communities with which he disagrees, such as that of Aristotle, by
means of a rococo structure of universalist caveats designed to confer
legitimacy on only one type of community. Why, then, keep up the
pretense of particularism? The charitable explanation is that it
simply doesn't occur to MacIntyre that political philosophy could or
should do anything but construct rationales for predetermined
conclusions--that is, that political philosophy can or should be
anything but "political" in the pejorative sense.
The Politics of After Virtue
Support for this conclusion is to be found in the consistency of After
Virtue's political implications with the political agenda MacIntyre had
pursued for decades before the book's publication. Given the narrowly
strategic concerns that had always animated MacIntyre and the
constricted set of political possibilities--liberalism versus
Friedman 322
communism--that stand behind those concerns, it does not seem
unreasonable to attribute MacIntyre's self-contradictory mature
philosophy to the political complacency that marked his entire career.
Thus, not only does the philosophical proviso specifically target
capitalist societies as unacceptable, but the particularism that it
constrains has the effect of achieving MacIntyre's lifelong goal: doing
away with interpersonal coercion. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes
that "the key to the social content" of modern individualism is that it
"entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between
manipulative and non-manipulative social relations" (1984a, 23). This
claim is the key to the political content of After Virtue.
It explains, for instance, the otherwise puzzling presence in
that book of the chapters on "'Fact,' Explanation and Expertise" and
"The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and Their Lack of
Predictive Power," which separate MacIntyre's history of the rise of
emotivism from his history of the decline of the virtues. These
chapters give political point to MacIntyre's critique of emotivism by
showing that that critique also condemns predictive social science and
the capitalist and totalitarian regimes that, according to MacIntyre,
social science legitimates. MacIntyre summarizes these chapters by
writing that "in our culture we know of no organized movement towards
power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of
no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form"--
including justifications that pay rhetorical obeisance to Marxism
(1984a, 109). Modern individuals, bereft of shared moral standards,
Friedman 323
have no choice but to try to get each other to satisfy their mutually
exclusive individual preferences by means of "nonrational persuasion"
(1988, 86)--i.e., "the manipulation of human beings into compliant
patterns of behavior" through the use of psychological pressure or
bureaucratic power (1984a, 74). This is why the paradigmatic modern
characters are "the rich man committed to the aesthetic pursuit of his
own enjoyment," regardless of the costs to others; the bureaucratic
manager, who "represents in his character the obliteration of the
distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations";
and the therapist, who "represents the same obliteration in the sphere
of personal life" (ibid., 30, emphasis removed). While under modern
conditions "each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an
autonomous moral agent," the reality is that "each of us also becomes
engaged by modes of practice...which involve us in manipulative
relationships with others" (ibid., 68).
Since "it is primarily within the context of practices that good
reasons have to be sharply discriminated from other types of cause of
action," by reestablishing the authority of such reasons over us we
could confer on each other the "respect" shown when one offers another
such reasons rather than "trying to influence him in non-rational ways"
(MacIntyre, 1986b, 67; 1984a, 46.) We could, in other words, stop
treating each other always as "means, never ends"; we could "deal with
other men...as with men"; we could "embody (our) own plans and projects
in the natural and social world" without forcing others to go along
(1984a 24; 1953, 55; 1984a 104). We could be free to make choices
Friedman 324
among tragically incommensurable goods, free "not merely to be the
creations of other people's projects, intentions, and desires," and on
that account, free to be unpredictable--(somehow) within the limits of
our tradition (1984a, 104). This conception of freedom would explain
why MacIntyre endorses Aristotle's view that "the free self is
simultaneously political subject and political sovereign," and that
"freedom is the presupposition of the exercise of the virtues and the
achievement of the good" (ibid., 159).
For what education in the virtues teaches me is that
my good as a man is one and the same as the good of
those others with whom I am bound up in human community.
There is no way of my pursuing my good which is
necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because
the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly
--goods are not private property. (MacIntyre 1984a, 229)
Although nothing in After Virtue or in MacIntyre's other
published works suggests that he entertains any doubt about Marx's
ideal of freedom, one may wonder whether his mature position has not
strayed, however inadvertently, from socialism.
Although it is not my intention to define the essence of Marxism,
I will suggest that MacIntyre views capitalism as the main enemy of
freedom and that his Aristotelian communitarianism is intended to
Friedman 325
abolish it.
Unearthing MacIntyre's mature opposition to capitalism requires
no extensive research; it is spelled out clearly in After Virtue. He
identifies as "the empirical counterpart" of his account of the virtues
Adam Ferguson's sociology, which "saw the institutions of modern
commercial society as endangering at least some traditional virtues"
(1984a, 195), in that "the specialization of different trades and
professions in commercial society eroded the civic virtues by means of
which individuals understood their primary loyalties as being to the
society as a whole (1986a, 27). MacIntyre's extension of Ferguson's
project focuses on explaining the institutional barriers faced by "any
contemporary attempt to envisage each human life as a whole, as a
unity, whose character provides the virtues with an adequate telos"
(1984a, 204). Capitalism, if not the division of labor itself, is the
explanation for these barriers, because it leads each of us to see life
not as a quest for the good that must be conducted in common with
others if it is to be intelligible as a narrative, but instead as a
bundle of pursuits of private goods. For
the kind of work done by the vast majority
of the inhabitants of the modern world cannot
be understood in terms of the nature of a
practice with goods internal to itself,
and for very good reason. One of the key
moments in the creation of modernity occurs
Friedman 326
when production moves outside the household
. . . and is put to the service of impersonal
capital, (such that) the realm of work tends
to become separated from everything but the
service of biological survival and the
reproduction of the labor force, on the
one hand, and that of institutionalized
acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia,
a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now
the driving force of modern productive
work. (Ibid., 227-28.)
Goods internal to practices are thus peripheral to "central
features of the modern economic order and more especially its
individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of
the market to a central social place" (ibid., 254). So
the historical process by and through which the aesthete,
the bureaucratic manager--the essential instrument for
organizing modern work--and their social kindred become
the central characters of modern society...and the
historical process by which the narrative understanding
of the unity of human life and the concept of a practice
were expelled to the margins of modern culture turn out
to be one and the same. It is a history one aspect of
Friedman 327
which is the transformation of forms of social life:
the continuously reestablished dominance of markets,
factories and finally bureaucracies over individuals.
(Ibid., 228, emph. removed.)
Discerning MacIntyre's communist alternative is a bit more
difficult than locating his indictment of capitalism: political options
are not seriously discussed in After Virtue. Still, the book's
equation of justice with desert, desert with distribution according to
one's contribution to the community, and contribution to the community
with excellence in socially established practices seems consistent with
communism. This impression is borne out explicitly by more recent
writings. "The rules of a market economy," according to a 1985 paper,
"detach the rewards of economic activity from any conception of merit
or desert. When prices and wages are determined within a market
framework, such expressions as 'just price' and 'just wage' are
deprived of application"; yet "justice in exchange requires that
conceptions such as those of a fair wage and a just price should have
application" (MacIntyre 1985, 245; idem 1989, 15). To set prices
freely is to treat goods as external to the practices that generate
them; to distribute goods according to desert requires controlling
their prices. Moreover, "for an Aristotelian[,] acquisitiveness as
such, pleonexia, is a vice, indeed the vice which is the principal form
of injustice" (1989, 15). This is what justifies MacIntyre's
repeatedly expressed endorsement of laws against usury, which would
Friedman 328
have the effect of ending any private, yet socially coordinated,
capital accumulation.
Between that measure and price controls, MacIntyre would seem to
have produced something less comprehensive than state socialism via
nationalization--which would, on its face, defeat the goal of a free,
egalitarian community--but more drastic than market socialism. To hold
his position, he rightly affirms, "is to set oneself in radical
opposition to any economy dominated by markets and requiring the
accumulation of capital" (1989, 15.) Is this radical posture
consistent with the closing peroration of After Virtue, in which
MacIntyre calls for "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" (1984a,
263)?
Yes: the task for those who agree with him, MacIntyre wrote in
1991, is to bring the message of justice to our society in two ways:
first, by participating in "the making and remaking of institutions"
that is ongoing in "schools, clinics, workplaces, and other
institutions"; second, by "show[ing] as well as say[ing] what an
adequate conception of justice amounts to, by constructing the types of
institutionalized social relationship within which it becomes visible"
(1991a, 110, emphasis removed.)
What we should show is that the ends of justice
involve the making and sustaining of what in each
Friedman 329
particular set of social circumstances will be a
highly determinate kind of community in which each
person can play his or her due part. As, and if,
we thus move towards those ends, we shall reverse
the sequence which Marx foresaw in the movement
from socialist to communist justice....We shall
have to move from the justice of "From each according
to his ability, to each according to his or her needs"
to the justice of "From each according to her or his
ability, to each according to his or her contribution."
(Ibid., 107.)
After After Virtue
In After Virtue, MacIntyre treated liberalism as the antithesis of
tradition, but in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), he treats it as an inferior
tradition. In this way he tries to answer the "relativist challenge"
to his position, which, MacIntyre writes, "rests upon a denial that
rational debate between and rational choice among rival traditions is
possible" (1988, 352). If this challenge stands, then there is no way
his system of thought can succeed in "unmasking and dethroning
arbitrary exercises of power, tyrannical power within communities and
imperialist power between communities" ([1984] 1987, 397).
MacIntyre's task after After Virtue, then, is to demonstrate that
Friedman 330
competing individual interpretations of a tradition, and competing
traditions, do not preclude the possibility of "impersonal standards of
judgment, neutral between competing claims" (ibid.), of just the type
that a given tradition provides for the individuals within it.
MacIntyre's attempt to meet this challenge emphasizez that when
traditions are viewed as ongoing debates, they can sometimes encounter
dead ends in which progress stops, or "crises" in which their
presuppositions are called into question. At such junctures they are
vulnerable to being superseded by other traditions that offer ways
around the obstruction and that explain, in terms acceptable to
adherents of the stymied tradition, why that tradition has reached an
impasse and why only those who adopt the competing tradition's
standpoint can understand the genesis of the first tradition's
difficulties. Thus did Aquinas solve the problems of two traditions,
Augustinian Christianity and Averroist Aristotelianism, by explaining,
from a perspective that fused them, why, on their own terms, they had
both reached certain conundrums that could only be resolved, and
explained, from his new position. In enlisting intellectual history to
his cause, MacIntyre does not want, of course, to be seen as partaking
of the "individualistic" illusion that one can judge traditions "from a
purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached
from all social particularity" (1984a, 32). Like Sandel's immanentist
hermeneutics, however, MacIntyre's attempt to set limits to pure
communitarianism without admitting that this requires an appeal to
community-transcending universals founders on its inherent
Friedman 331
contradictions.
MacIntyre's use of intellectual history as a form of what might
be labelled "immanent transcendence" rests on the agreement, by
participants in a tradition, that progress in the tradition must be
seen as consistent with the essence of the tradition; that stasis in
the tradition iis bad; and that challenges to the tradition must be
seen as crises within it rather than simply as invalid criticisms of
it. Yet it is not at all difficult to imagine a tradition--such as
that of Homeric Greece or modern Islamism--that is imbued with, even
defined by, antithetical assumptions, either because it equates change
in general with evil or because it holds that a particular status quo
embodies the final understanding of the good and, therefore, views the
notion of "progress" away from that status quo as a contradiction in
terms. From the standpoint of such a tradition, MacIntyre's form of
traditional rationality would be seen, correctly, as an alien,
universalist imposition.
But because of its pretenses to particularism, MacIntyre's
version of rationality is not a satisfactory form of universalism,
either. To maintain the fiction of immanence, MacIntyre saddles his
traditionalism with the requirement that what is true must be able to
generate an explanation of what is false. Yet from the perspective of
the universalist or philosophical (or, as MacIntyre calls it in Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, "encyclopedist") tradition, a
tradition's ability to explain a competing tradition's difficulties is
irrelevant, strictly speaking, to the truth of either tradition; all
Friedman 332
that counts is which tradition is right, not which tradition produces
better intellectual history. Just as, in science, the "context of
discovery" does not bear on the truth-value of a discovery--which might
have had its inspiration in a dream or an hullucination--so, in
philosophy, the ability to explain the predicaments of a competing view
is irrelevant to the view's validity.
Take, for example, MacIntyre's own critique of liberalism. He
purports to explain the incoherently relativistic tendencies of the
liberal tradition by blaming them on individualism. In Chapter 8 of
the present essay, working from the antivoluntarist perspective
justified in Chapter 7, I will present an alternative critique of
liberalism that blames the same tendencies on metaethical voluntarism.
How is one to determine which of these explanations is better?
MacIntyre would defend his explanation of liberal relativism as better
than mine because communitarianism bridges the is-ought gap, while
antivoluntarism takes that gap to be inescapable.
If he were able to defend this conviction successfully against
the arguments presented in Chapter 7, then MacIntyre would be right to
prefer his intellectual-historical critique of liberalism to mine. For
if voluntarism is valid, as (ex hypothesi) he would maintain, then the
relativistic tendencies in liberalism, which are (he agrees)
incoherent, cannot be due to its voluntarism. But then MacIntyre's
preference for his is-ought bridge would have to be justified not on
intellectual-history grounds, but on the basis of some nonhistorical,
universalistic, philosophical, encyclopedist argument against my
Friedman 333
nonhistorical, universalistic, philosophical, encyclopedist critique of
voluntarism. Conversely, if he could not make cogent nonhistorical
objections to my critique of voluntarism, then MacIntyre would be
wrong--according to the universalist tradition of philosophy that
begins with Socrates, and in which I participate--to prefer his
intellectual-historical critique of liberalism to mine. So for
MacIntyre to rest his case on his intellectual history of liberalism
alone would both beg the question against universalism, and would
constitute a transcendent insistence on the universal validity of his
own, particularist tradition as against the universalist one. But this
would defeat the anti-universalist pretense that defines MacIntyre's
tradition.
Or consider the status of the intellectual-historical explanation
of communitarian failings presented in Part I of this essay. That what
Part I attempts to explain are communitarian "failings" requires me to
bring forth different evidence--evidence of underargued or unargued or
contradictory assumptions--than the intellectual-historical evidence
required to attribute these alleged failings to the communitarians'
"political" or strategic agenda. That is why Part I is not a critique,
of communitarianism, as Part II is intended to be; it is merely an
explanation of communitarianism’s failings (which are unproven until
Part II). In MacIntyre's view, however, communitarians are free to
ignore an intellectual-historical explanation of their view's failings,
because the notion that their view has failings in the first place
depends on universalistic, nonhistorical arguments that their tradition
Friedman 334
holds to be invalid precisely because of their universalism. MacIntyre
is in the nice position of saying, when I demand some kind of
justification for the authority of the community, "Isn't that just what
one would expect from an exponent of encyclopedist universalism?"
Only if a communitarian already feels that her tradition has run
into an epistemological crisis would she be obligated (according to
MacIntyre's version of communitarianism) to pay attention to
intellectual-historical explanations of those crises. Just as
communitarianism celebrates the prevenient validity of whatever moral
claims "we" already feel inhere in "our" identity, it licenses closing
one's mind to criticisms one does not preveniently find valid. Very
well; but by the same token, MacIntyre's post-After Virtue defense
against the charge of relativism should not be convincing to anyone not
preveniently sympathetic to its strategic purposes, because it provides
no argument against liberal universalism that does not presuppose the
validity of his version of particularism. Without an argument against
the truth-value of universalism, an "encyclopedist" can, according to
MacIntyre's own standards of rationality, simply treat MacIntyre's
intellectual history of liberalism as, at best, interesting but merely
suggestive antiquarianism. This would produce no more of an
epistemological crisis for the universalist than universalist
criticisms would produce for MacIntyre.
MacIntyre claims that pure communitarianism inheres in the very
nature of practical reasoning. He points out that an agent's untutored
desires may interfere with the performance of the action that is the
Friedman 335
conclusion of a practical syllogism, rendering the individual
irrational (MacIntyre 1988, 139). But then he simply assumes, without
justification, that (1) only communal tutoring, as opposed to
individual introspection, can bend desires toward performing well-
reasoned actions; and, more importantly, that (2) the ends toward which
communal tutoring bends individual desires must, by virtue of being
communal, be rational in the strong, non-instrumentalist sense he has
in mind. These two assumptions inhere in MacIntyre's tendentious
illustration of practical reasoning as being exemplified by someone
who, in the hockey rink, takes the actions appropriate to a "person qua
hockey player" (141)--as if all human action is and should be as
convention-bound as playing a game.
From the hockey metaphor, MacIntyre infers at once that
it is thus [sic] only within those systematic forms
within which goods are unambiguously ordered and
within which individuals occupy and move between
well-defined roles that the standards of rational
action directed toward the good and the best can
be embodied. To be a rational individual is to
participate in such a form of social life and to
conform, so far as is possible, to those standards."
(Ibid., 141.)
This account of "the good" is entirely open-ended, leaving it to the
Friedman 336
community (in the absence of the historical and philosophical provisos)
to supply any conceivable premises, and thus conclusions, to practical
syllogisms. Traditions, MacIntyre (1988, 355) reminds us, have their
origins
in and from some condition of pure historical contingency,
from the beliefs, institutions, and practices of some
particular community which constitute a given. Within
such a community authority will have been conferred upon
certain texts and certain voices....Where a person or
text is assigned an authority which derives from what is
taken to be their relationship to the divine, that sacred
authority will be...exempt from repudiation [during]...
the development of [the] tradition.
This pure communitarian moment in MacIntyre's post-After Virtue thought
is not far removed from the justificatory strategy of his canonical
book, either in its perfunctory reasoning (recall, in After Virtue,
MacIntyre's reliance on the socially determined function of a
wristwatch), or in the alacrity with which MacIntyre leaps from
individual subjectivism ([3], in the schema set forth above in Chapter
2) to the alleged remedy of normative collectivism (~3), on the basis
of the non sequitur that if individualist moral epistemology (1)
subjectivizes the good, then communitarianism (~1) necessarily makes it
objective. Like Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer, MacIntyre fails to connect
Friedman 337
the dots by making an argument (as opposed to an assumption) regarding
the inherent superiority of communitarian (~2) to individualistic (2)
epistemology.
Instead, the force of MacIntyre's case against individualism, as
it was in After Virtue, is that individualism leads to manipulative
social relationships, and that his form of communitarianism does not.
When he decries "the modern liberal conception of government as
securing a minimum of order, within which individuals may pursue their
own freely chosen ends" (1988, 201), it is not because MacIntyre
objects to individual freedom per se, but because freedom to choose
ends (except, apparently, from among a menu of tragic choices offered
up by one's community) is incompatible with interpersonal freedom from
coercion. "Justice in the fullest and proper sense governs only the
relationships of free and equal citizens within a polis," MacIntyre
writes of Aristotle with apparent approval (ibid., 146).
If we are to be free from coercion, MacIntyre holds, we must be
free from the pursuit of incompatible interests; and this freedom
requires that our community set our "identities" for us. Only to the
extent that communities are "imperfect," MacIntyre writes in Dependent
Rational Animals (1999, 144), are "competing interests...apt to emerge.
And it is therefore important that, so far as is possible, communities
are structured so as to limit such emergence." Accordingly, MacIntyre
explicates with approval Aquinas's assertion that "the best regime best
conduces to education into the virtues in the interest of the good of
all" (1988, 201).
Friedman 338
Like the "proceduralist" liberalism Sandel criticizes,
MacIntyre's (and Sandel's, and Taylor's, and Walzer's) communitarianism
is but a formal procedure designed to enact whatever ends a community
values--as long as these values are not such as would violate
interpersonal freedom. The virtues inculcated by the community inject
no more content into this proceduralism than the liberal virtues
promoted by such writers as Macedo and Berkowitz designate substantive
ends for the individuals who display them. Liberal virtues make
possible a society in which individuals can pursue any ends, as long as
these ends are communally inculcated and respectful of the other
individuals’ like pursuit. MacIntyre's virtues, too, make possible a
society in which individuals, while not choosing their ends, pursue any
ends that are consistent with the freedom of other individuals.
"Prudence is...concerned with how reason should operate in practice.
Justice...is an application of reason to conduct....Temperateness is
the restraining of passions contrary to reason....Courage is the
holding fast of the passions to what reason requires" (1988, 197).
Inasmuch as MacIntyre makes shared ends a precondition of reason-cum-
"intelligibility," the virtues he lists are all designed to make people
into good communitarians who do not interfere in their neighbors'
pursuit of shared ends, just as liberal virtues make for good liberal
citizens who cooperate in their neighbors' pursuit of divergent ends.
In such a formalistic, content-free account of "the good," what
does the political work turns out, as in After Virtue, to be the
constraints on MacIntyre's communitarianism, not the communitarianism
Friedman 339
itself. On the one hand, Aristotle (presumably like Aquinas)
"represents a tradition of thought, in which he is preceded by Homer
and Sophocles, according to which the human being who is separate from
his social group also deprived of the capacity for justice" (MacIntyre
1988, 96). Yet, on the other hand, Homer and Sophocles and Aristotle
were anything but egalitarians, and would recoil from MacIntyre's most
recent additions to the list of what justice requires: not just the
inclusion of all able-bodied human beings in the polis or its
equivalent, but also inclusion of the severely disabled (MacIntyre
1999); not just the repudiation of class barriers to political
participation, but the demand "that there should be relatively small
inequalities of income or wealth," since "gross inequality of income or
wealth is by itself always liable to generate conflicts of interest and
to obscure the possibility of understanding one's social relationships
in terms of a common good" (ibid., 144); not just the rejection of
occupational barriers to citizenship, but the requirement that
everyone, "so far as is possible, will have to take their turn in
performing the tedious and the dangerous jobs, in order to avoid
another disruptive form of social inequality" (ibid., 145).
MacIntyre's deviations from the "texts and voices" of his own
tradition is apparently justified by not only the philosophical
proviso, which allows MacIntyre to distinguish what is essential in his
tradition (its communitarian dimension) from what can be discarded, but
by the historical proviso: "The exercise of practical relationships in
communities always has a history and it is the direction of that
Friedman 340
history that is important." What counts as a good direction is not
even a question MacIntyre seems able to entertain; thus, he writes
blandly of "communities that have been or are open to alternative
possibilities" that they "sometimes move towards the better and
sometimes towards the worse" (ibid., 143), adding en passant that the
worse are--obviously--those that succumb to "corruption by narrowness,
by complacency [sic], by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole
range of other deformities" (ibid., 142).
"Justice" in pursuing whatever a community counts as the common
good is the requirement--derived from what I have been calling the
philosophical proviso--that ensures that historically "open"
communities turn out the way MacIntyre wants them to. Although
MacIntyre (1988, 121) maintains that "it would be consistent with what
[Aristotle] asserts to hold that natural justice would generally
require the citizens of a constitutional polis to abide by their own
conventions," he must also maintain--without benefit of sanction from
Aristotle, Sophocles, or Homer--that "the standards of rational
justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which
they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects
of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition"
(ibid., 7). This universalistic constraint on MacIntyre's putative
particularism is all that enables MacIntyre to single out the elements
in Aristotle and Aquinas that anticipate Marx as being the essential
aspects of the Thomist tradition. "The requirements of distributive
justice are satisfied," according to MacIntyre's exegesis of St.
Friedman 341
Thomas, "when each person receives in proportion to his or her
contribution...to the good of all" (1988, 199). Communities that
distribute goods according to other criteria are illegitimate. "The
labor theory of value" also receives Thomistic (as well as
Aristotelian) approval (ibid.), and "the standard commercial and
financial practices of capitalism" are condemned by virtue of failing
to distinguish "between the value of a thing and what it is worth to a
particular person, a distinction which lacks application in the modern
economics of free markets" (ibid., 200). However, that distinction
would be nugatory without some standard of "the value of a thing," and
many such standards are conceivable: a thing's beauty, its actual (as
opposed to hoped-for) utility in making people happy, its disclosure of
an aspect of reality....MacIntyre reaches communist conclusions about
the economic theory he locates in Thomism by assuming tacitly that the
only alternative to the arbitrary individualistic assignment of value
under capitalism is a collective--hence nonarbitrary--assignment. But
MacIntyre never supplies anything like an adequate argument showing
that "to reason apart from" one's status "qua member of a particular
type of political society and not just qua individual human being...is
to have no standard available by which to correct the passions"
(MacIntyre 1988, 321).
That MacIntyre wants to make such logical leaps is explained by
his politics. That he feels able to is explained by his metaethics, to
be explored in Part II. For the moment, we need only notice how
misleading it is for MacIntyre to associate "the good" (1988, 212,
Friedman 342
emphasis original) with the particular type of community that is
screened in by his interpretation of Thomism. It is in the nature of
his reduction of the alternatives to either individual or communal
proceduralism that MacIntyre feels entitled to contrast the liberal
"notion of the human individual as such with whatever desires or goods
he or she may have as providing the measure of value" (1988, 108,
emphasis original) against "reasons for action whose authority and
force deriv[e] from some particular account" of the good given by a
community (ibid., 212, emphasis added)--without specifying what
account. The only determinateness in MacIntyre's argument flows from
the philosophical proviso and, thus, from the requirements of natural
law and distributive justice--which produce an account not of the good,
but of communist freedom to pursue "some" good specified by the
community.
Apparently because, since at least 1953, MacIntyre has conflated
his strategic opposition to universalism with a metaphysical embrace of
value-laden facts; and because, since at least 1960, this conflation
has taken the form of dichotomizing individualist and communitarian
moral epistemology, MacIntyre's mature thought has been pushed so far
toward the blanket acceptance of all internally harmonious communities
--even grossly inegalitarian ones--that he has had to impose on them a
tacit structure of caveats that, since the publication of After Virtue,
he has portrayed as outgrowths of the same tradition they constrain.
In this respect his recent position is much like that of his college
friend Taylor's recourse to the Western tradition as the "source" not
Friedman 343
only of pure republican nationalism, but of the "hypergoods" that
filter out illiberal republics. But MacIntyre goes a step farther by
making allegiance to his (Thomistic) tradition not, as with Taylor--
and, in their own ways, Sandel and Walzer--a mere matter of value
commitments that "we," the communitarian authors and their liberal
audience, already find compelling. MacIntyre closes the circle by
contending that his tradition can prove its superiority to others,
making his a uniquely universalistic particularism. But in the end,
the effect of this final step is to shift MacIntyre's claim for the
"authority" of his tradition from ethical precepts that liberal readers
are likely to find congenial toward epistemic precepts they are likely
to find bizarre. That he should do so, however, is consistent with his
self-understanding not as the progenitor of a metaphysically improved
liberalism, but as a radical critic of everything for which liberalism
stands.
It is hard to agree with MacIntyre's self-assessment. Yes, he
puts less emphasis than conventional liberals on providing people the
means to pursue their own ends, but only because for him, individual
freedom means the absence of interpersonal coercion more than the
ability to choose, or attain, ends one has chosen. But while they may
not be ends they have chosen, the ends pursued by members of
MacIntyrean communities are still ends of their own; it is the freedom
to pursue these, unmolested, that requires that they be "chosen" by the
traditions into which individuals are born. It is in the scope of his
ambition more than its content that MacIntyre differs from mainstream
Friedman 344
liberals. As he puts it, "Trying to live by Utopian standards is not
Utopian, although it does involve a rejection of the economic goals of
advanced capitalism" (MacIntyre 1999, 145).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
1. This is not to say that Hegel's teleology stands up any better, in
the end. But at least it is not so blatantly relativistic as Taylor's
appropriation of it is. With Hegel, the question is whether "history"
(any more than "nature") is a real telos, or whether it collapses into
a hidden voluntarism in which the interpreter of history validates his
substantive moral claims with the imprimatur of progress.
2. In A Short History of Ethics (1966, 265), MacIntyre sets forth a
description of is-ought reasoning similar to the one presented in After
Virtue, but he declines to "pursue this as yet unfinished argument
further." He merely contrasts it against "the individualism which has
had recurrent mention in this history," where the assumption "that
facts can never entail evaluations" leads to the view "that the only
authority which moral views possess is that which we as individual
agents give to them" (ibid., 264).
3. It is striking that in "The Logical Status of Religious Belief"
(1957), 201n1, MacIntyre had favorably analogized our reaction to
religious visions with "the relation between an imperative and
obedience to it." By 1965 MacIntyre will be able to publish a paper,
Friedman 345
"Imperatives, reasons for action, and morals" (in MacIntyre 1967), that
rebuts the notion that morality is imperatival, and suggests that the
notion that it is results from the modern disjunction between morality
and "human well-being."
4. Here MacIntyre is explicating Hegel, but in light of his very
limited criticisms of Hegel MacIntyre gives us no reason to think this
is not his own view as well.
5. Cf. MacIntyre's article, "Ought" (1971): In particularist cultures
"there is no citing of some human good which will be procured by
whatever action is in question. Indeed, the fact that obedience to the
rules will produce disaster for a man is sometimes noted in the
sagas...and this contributes not at all to showing that the agent
therefore ought not to do what the rules prescribe." In MacIntyre
1978, 145.
6. Cf. "The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology" (1971)
in MacIntyre 1978, 10: "Nobody can know what an agent wants better than
the man himself."
7. Cf., inter alia, 1984a, 221: "Insofar as the virtues sustain the
relationships required for practices, they have to sustain
relationships to the past--and to the future"; and ibid., 146: "The
past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, yet
Friedman 346
corrected and transcended in a way that leaves the present open to
being in turn corrected and transcended by some yet more adequate
future point of view."