Chapter 5
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE and Stanley Hauerwas have already entered these pages a number of times as representative critics of the political culture of modern democracy. As I have already suggested, their influence is especially strong in the seminaries, where the term “liberal” is nowadays as unlikely to be used in praise of someone as it is in the arena of presidential politics. Their writings are clearly one source of the animus against secularism discussed in the previous chapter.1 I want now to look closely at the form of traditionalism MacIntyre and Hauerwas espouse. Its most troublesome feature, from the perspective of this inquiry, is its tendency to undermine identification with liberal democracy. In MacIntyre’s account of modernity, the term “democracy” scarcely appears. But all things liberal come in for much abuse in his writings, and he obviously has liberal democracy as well as totalitarianism in mind when he dismisses “modern politics itself” as something anyone “who owes allegiance to the tradition of the virtues” must reject. As MacIntyre sees it, modern democracy is merely “civil war carried on by other means.”2 And on each of these points, Hauerwas not only pronounces MacIntyre correct; he ups the ante, outbidding MacIntyre in a rhetoric of excess.
Friends of democracy therefore have reason to be concerned about the influence these writers enjoy, especially in quarters where the fine print is likely to be ignored. But there is also a serious intellectual challenge here that democratic thinkers need to address. For MacIntyre and Hauerwas have done more than any other recent writers to confront us with a crucial question. Do we have reason to be happy with the kind of people we have become under the influence of modern ideas, practices, and institutions? The traditionalist answer to this question, of course, is no. We are exactly what the market and the liberal state have made us—namely, self-interested individualists, out to get what we want. As the traditionalist prefers to put it, we simply lack the virtues required to sustain an admirable way of life. Because we are not bound together by commitment to a single shared tradition we cannot take very much for granted when conversing with one another. As a result, our public ethical discourse is a cacophony of disparate claims. The function of such discourse is merely to express how we feel, so we should not be surprised that nothing gets resolved.
There must be something to these charges; otherwise, the new traditionalism would have trouble garnering attention, let alone followers. Its picture of modern ethical discourse is sufficiently disturbing, and perhaps sufficiently plausible at first blush, to require a seriously considered response. It seems to me, however, that many of those who have been attracted to MacIntyre and Hauerwas have some lingering democratic sentiments that are either discounted or neglected in the new traditionalism. For example, these readers would not in fact be willing to join a traditional community in which women lacked the rights that men enjoy or in which a king denied his subjects the freedom to speak openly on political questions. They would find premodern forms of trial and punishment deeply revolting. And they would rebel against the prospect of a marriage arranged for them by their parents. Such people are therefore acting in bad faith, or with a divided heart, whenever they use traditionalist categories to express their misgivings about our society while leaving their democratic sentiments unvoiced and unexplained.
The categories that most obviously require scrutiny in this context are the matched pair, tradition and modernity. Traditionalism needs to define these concepts dichotomously; otherwise, it cannot impose the sharp and simple partition it uses to justify rejection of “modern politics itself.” The half-conscious thought at work in this dichotomy is that genuine modernity, being in essence antitraditional, does not have traditions. Modernity—specifically, modern democracy—is something that brings about the demise of tradition, and leaves us after virtue. We will see that MacIntyre and Hauerwas sometimes trade on this thought in a way that consigns much of modern ethical discourse to invisibility. Among the varieties thus rendered invisible, I would argue, are both the strand of Romantic traditionalism to which the new traditionalists owe their basic tropes and the strand of Emersonian thinking carried forward in the work of Whitman and Dewey. As I tried to show in chapter 1, the latter is a form of self-consciously modern thinking that is no less concerned with the virtues than the traditionalists are. One thing that makes it different from traditionalism, however, is its interest in reconceiving the virtues in democratic terms. The upshot of my analysis will be that the new traditionalism tells a largely false story about modern ethical discourse. I will begin, in this chapter, by examining several different versions of the story as MacIntyre has told it, and then turn, in the following two chapters, to Hauerwas’s variations on the same themes.
THE PROBLEM OF POINT OF VIEW
MacIntyre published A Short History of Ethics more than three decades ago.3 He has been rewriting it ever since: resolving problems in the structure of his narrative, making explicit various assumptions on which his account of our predicament depends, defining and redefining his allegiances, changing his mind about some details, filling in many others, but never deviating from profound discontent with liberal society. Already in 1966, MacIntyre was saying that “the acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures” and that “we live with the inheritance of not only one, but of a number of well-integrated moralities” (SH, 266). The book was more ambitious than the introductory textbook it might have seemed, for it set out to explain both how modern moral philosophy had reached an impasse through neglect of its own history and how moral discourse itself had been fragmented in the course of the same history.
“Conceptual conflict,” he wrote, “is endemic in our situation, because of the depth of our moral conflicts” (SH, 268). He now often puts it the other way around, with conceptual conflict explaining the depth of moral conflict. But the resulting choices are equally pressing either way: “Each of us therefore has to choose both with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided. These two choices are inextricably linked” (SH, 268). How is the choice of a vocabulary to be made? This depends on whether one stands within a coherent community, already committed to its outlook, its practices, and its modes of reasoning. “Speaking from within my own moral vocabulary, I shall find myself bound by the criteria embodied in it. These criteria will be shared with those who speak the same moral language” (SH, 268). But if I do not already stand within a coherent community, committed to its standards of judgment, how can my choice of a vocabulary be more than an expression of arbitrary preference or will?
MacIntyre’s first book, Marxism, appeared in 1953, when he “aspired to be both a Christian and a Marxist.” By the mid-1960s, however, he had grown “skeptical of both” outlooks and accordingly revised the book under the new title Marxism and Christianity.4 Neither Christian nor Marxist any longer, he had not moved closer in the meantime to liberalism. What, then, was he? He seems to have found himself outside of the moral traditions he had once tried to integrate, still alienated from the broader society in which he found himself, yet unable to affiliate himself in good conscience with another identifiable community or tradition. These words from A Short History of Ethics thus take on a certain poignancy: “And I must adopt some moral vocabulary if I am to have any social relationships. For without rules, without the cultivation of virtues, I cannot share ends with anybody else. I am doomed to social solipsism. Yet I must choose for myself with whom I am to be morally bound. I must choose between alternative forms of social and moral practice” (SH, 268).
Poignant these words may be on a personal level, but they also raised a problem of theoretical consistency for A Short History of Ethics, as MacIntyre later acknowledged. I have called this the problem of point of view. A narrative that explains in moral terms how morality has disintegrated, and pronounces this outcome disastrous, leaves one wondering from what point of view the verdict could have been reached and how that point of view is itself to escape the implied condemnation. If MacIntyre did not already occupy an identifiable and defensible normative point of view, the tragic tone of his historical narrative and the various evaluations expressed in it would be groundless. Yet in this period he was prepared to take his stand only against the self-images of the age.5 The ground on which he had taken that stand remained invisible.
MacIntyre therefore set himself the task of elucidating the point of view from which he had been writing his history and expressing his discontents. This task involved making previously unacknowledged assumptions explicit, correcting and extending them through systematic reflection, and locating them within a suitably revised narrative of the history of ethics. After Virtue, the most influential theoretical expression of the new traditionalism, merely begins the task of elucidation. The reasoning that led to the writing of After Virtue seems to have gone more or less as follows.
If MacIntyre hoped to justify a sweepingly negative verdict on the moral discourse of the age, he would have to articulate a point of view that belongs to the age he condemns but does not share the incoherence he ascribes to it. In his scathingly critical 1970 book on Herbert Marcuse in the Modern Masters series—the main thesis of which seems to have been that Marcuse did not deserve inclusion among the modern masters—MacIntyre pronounced Marcuse’s most famous book deficient on precisely these grounds: “The central oddity of One-Dimensional Man is perhaps that it should have been written at all. For if its thesis were true, then we should have to ask how the book came to have been written and we would certainly have to inquire whether it would find any readers. Or rather, to the extent that the book does find readers, to that extent Marcuse’s thesis does not hold.”6 The same criticism can be raised against A Short History of Ethics. MacIntyre could sidestep the criticism, while maintaining his condemnation of the age, only by locating himself in a marginal position, taking a point of view in the age but not of it.
What point of view might that be? It should, first of all, be consistent with rejection of liberal individualism. It should also, however, disown various forms of modern radicalism, including Marxism, which MacIntyre views as symptoms of the diseases they aim to cure. It should, furthermore, be sufficiently coherent and complex to provide defensible criteria of rational choice—criteria that would justify MacIntyre’s criticisms of the age. Otherwise, the moral critic will be condemned to mere assertion. Finally, it should, if possible, allow the critic to share ends with at least some of his contemporaries, thereby avoiding social solipsism and political impotence.
THE RHETORIC OF AFTER VIRTUE
If we assume that MacIntyre was reasoning in roughly this way, we can see why he felt a need to affiliate himself openly with a particular “well-integrated” moral tradition. One way to discover such a tradition would be to leaf back through the chapters of his moral history and locate the point at which premodern moral tradition begins to be displaced by liberal modernity. And this is what MacIntyre did in After Virtue. His name for the tradition that suffered rejection at the outset of our era was “the tradition of the virtues.” He intended to show, above all, that this tradition, although largely rejected and isolated in our age, now deserves to be revived and, in light of its misfortunes, reformulated. Writing as an advocate of this tradition, he believed he had finally resolved the problem of point of view, but he now had to recast his history of ethics accordingly. For the narrative had acquired not only a self-conscious point of view, but a new protagonist. The villain of course remained the same.
I do not think that any critic has done full justice to After Virtue’s imaginative power. I have in mind, first of all, the striking imagery with which the book begins. We are asked to imagine “that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe,” with the consequence that the current practitioners of science “have largely forgotten what it was,” while possessing only “fragments” of a once-coherent empirical practice and theoretical discourse. This imagery of catastrophe belongs to the collection of tropes used since Longinus as indicators of sublimity. MacIntyre uses his imaginary tale about science to introduce his main thesis, which is that ethical discourse now lies in ruins analogous to the condition of scientific discourse in his tale. The image of ruin strives to reveal the energies of mind and heart that were, on his interpretation, concentrated in the practices of a previous epoch, and MacIntyre measures the height of that epoch’s achievement by the sharpness of the break.7 In the bolt of light cast by the opening paragraphs of After Virtue, our familiar patterns of discourse take on the uncanny appearance of fragmentary ruins—in Hazlitt’s phrase, “stupendous … structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay.”8 In introducing his major thesis in this strongly figurative way, before his reasons have been offered, he somehow manages not to call attention to the artifice of the rhetoric. The uncanniness of those paragraphs consists in the sense that we have learned something we already knew but have kept hidden.
It is with the stage thus set that MacIntyre introduces, in chapter 2, his account of “The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism.” Here he attempts the boldest of figurative reductions. We are meant to see the essence of our contemporary culture as condensed in—of all things—the emotivist moral philosophy of C. L. Stevenson. This vision startles ethical theorists, in part because they know that no more than a few contemporary philosophers believe that Stevenson’s moral philosophy is true. This audacious synecdoche is accomplished primarily through the use of three examples of modern ethical debates. These examples are meant to license an inference to the conclusion that modern ethical discourse itself lies in virtually complete fragmentation. That is a lot to show on the basis of three examples sketched in a total of only two pages: the debates over war, abortion, and economic justice. MacIntyre counts on his readers to know these debates by heart. They are the very stuff of every newspaper’s editorial page and of the “moral problems” courses currently being taught in our colleges. MacIntyre says that “it is their typicality that makes them important examples here” (AV, 8). What they typify, he adds, is the interminability of moral debates in our culture. This, he argues, is to be explained by appeal to the incommensurability of the premises from which the participants in modern ethical discourse argue their cases. Once we see this, he concludes, we will realize that the arguments, although cast in the form of impersonal appeals to reason, actually function only to vent and manipulate emotions. That is why we live in the age of Stevenson, for it was his emotivism that explained how our ethical discourse really functions, despite pretenses to the contrary on the part of those of us who engage in the debates.
Well, these are ethical debates, and it is true that they have yet to end. This shows neither that they are interminable nor that the interminability they allegedly exemplify is characteristic of our ethical discourse as such. Any ethical debate now going on is a debate that has not yet ended. This goes without saying. Are there no examples of ethical debates in our culture that have come to an end? MacIntyre does not ask this question. Suppose we go back to mid-nineteenth-century America. What is the most impassioned ethical debate of the day? Clearly, it is the debate over the abolition of slavery. This is not, I am happy to add, an unfinished debate. It would be foolish to pretend that it was settled solely by reasoning, but it would also be foolish to think that the reasoning it involved can be explained away as nothing more than Stevensonian hot air. In the meantime, we have had great debates over whether women should be permitted to vote, whether alcoholic beverages should be banned in a society that cares about the virtue of temperance, and whether blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus. Each of these more recent debates, so far as I can tell, is now over. They were settled, moreover, without massive bloodshed. Incommensurable premises did not prevent our fellow citizens from reaching a high level of consensus on them by exchanging questions and reasons with one another. No doubt, each of these debates seemed interminable at the height of public controversy on the issue in question. Each of them produced great examples of ethical discourse, both religious and secular in inspiration, that deserve to be preserved in historical memory. Yet they are entirely missing from MacIntyre’s account.
After Virtue takes many twists and turns before it reaches its memorable conclusion, in which MacIntyre assembles his readers once again among the sublime ruins to initiate a quest for forms of “community in which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (AV, 263). The book exerts its persuasive power through an intricate interweaving of argumentation and historical narrative unlike anything else in twentieth-century moral philosophy. It is hard to imagine a book less like Rawls’s Theory of Justice in form or content than this one.
BEYOND AFTER VIRTUE
MacIntyre stressed that his history of ethics was “a work still in progress” (AV, 278) and immediatedly promised a sequel, which appeared in 1988 under the title Whose Justice? Which Rationality?9 Nobody would think of calling Whose Justice a short history of ethics. Perhaps it needed to be a long and intricate book, given the problems remaining to be solved in MacIntyre’s position. The most obvious of these was that After Virtue had not expounded or defended its pivotal assumptions about the dependence of rationality upon tradition. If those assumptions cannot withstand scrutiny, the necessity of affiliating with a single “well-integrated” tradition of thought and practice is called into question. I shall return to this problem later. It will suffice for the moment to note that his recognition of this lacuna in his previous work explains MacIntyre’s preoccupation with the theme of practical rationality and the concept of tradition in Whose Justice?
Another relatively obvious problem was that After Virtue’s historical narrative had achieved its dramatic effect by focusing our attention on sharp contrasts and major transitions. This meant deferring the detailed discussion of specific figures and of scholarly counterargument that would, in the end, be required to sustain the narrative’s central claims. The sequel, in contrast, offers finely drawn portraits of a wide range of figures from ancient Greece, medieval Christendom, and eighteenth-century Scotland. It concentrates not on the shifting fortunes of “the virtues,” but rather on those of two virtues in particular, justice and practical wisdom, and this requires MacIntyre to enter more deeply into the writings of the figures he discusses. The book also works much harder than its predecessors did at vindicating its interpretations over against alternative views in the scholarly literature. If the interest of most readers is bound to flag ten pages into an account of Sir James Dalrymple of Stair or ten paragraphs into a dialogue with John Cooper’s reading of Aristotle on the practical syllogism, those of us who lament the dearth of good ethical historiography are bound to feel deeply in MacIntyre’s debt. As a work of historical scholarship, Whose Justice? has hardly silenced expert critics, but it is easily MacIntyre’s most impressive accomplishment to date.
Since I have argued on previous occasions that After Virtue’s historical narrative is inadequate, I want to take this opportunity to point out several respects in which Whose Justice? does better.10 The first of these has to do with my charge that “the tradition of the virtues” championed in After Virtue is too amorphous to play the role assigned to it. Upon close inspection, it becomes clear that this tradition, although presented in such a way that Aristotle can be its principal spokesperson, was meant to include anyone who gives sufficient prominence to “the virtues” and “the good” in ethics. Because it was arrived at initially in a quest for an all-purpose “Other” in comparison to which liberal modernity could be seen as hopelessly divided and incoherent, it gathers together people with vastly different tables of virtues and conceptions of the good. These include many people who would want to dissociate themselves from a tradition in which Aristotle could be cast as the central figure. Any tradition so diverse could not supply the wanted contrast with liberal modernity, nor could it satisfactorily resolve the problem of point of view. To do those things, MacIntyre would have to commit himself to a particular conception of the good life and a correlative table of the virtues.
Whose Justice? speaks of four distinct traditions: Aristotelianism, Augustinianism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and liberalism. And MacIntyre brings his spiritual autobiography if not full circle, at least homeward bound, by identifying himself openly with the Thomistic strand of Augustinian Christianity. This confession does indeed clarify the position MacIntyre intends to occupy while criticizing liberal society and reworking his account of Western culture’s allegedly downward slide. It helps us see, furthermore, which of the “local forms of community” vaguely alluded to in the concluding pages of After Virtue MacIntyre wants us to inhabit while the “new dark ages” are upon us. It also, of course, underlines the significance of the role religious traditions have played and continue to play in our moral history.
A second criticism I had made of After Virtue—one I had made on another occasion when discussing A Short History of Ethics—was that its neglect of the religious traditions seriously vitiated its historical reconstruction of our past.11 In the postscript to the second edition of After Virtue, MacIntyre acknowledged the validity of this charge and promised to do better in the sequel. The ample space given in Whose Justice? to Augustinian tradition and to the influence of Calvinism on eighteenth-century Scottish culture redeems that promise. What, then, is gained from such additions, aside from mere comprehensiveness?
One benefit emerges clearly in the new account of Aquinas, which is not only much longer than the corresponding section of After Virtue, but also vastly more adequate. I had complained that After Virtue read Aquinas through the eyes of his later scholastic interpreters, thereby overestimating the place of natural law in his thought and underestimating the place of Aristotelian practical wisdom. The result, I claimed, was a highly misleading picture of Aquinas as a rigid system-builder partly responsible for the lamentable demise of Aristotelian practical wisdom in Western culture. The picture was also designed to highlight what MacIntyre then took to be Aquinas’s inability to account for moral tragedy, and here I suggested that MacIntyre’s case was at best radically incomplete.12 The interpretation of Aquinas in Whose Justice?, however, includes none of these deficiencies. The assertion that Aquinas is unable to account for moral tragedy has been withdrawn. MacIntyre has converted. More to the point, he has broken free from scholastic Thomism’s reading of Aquinas and given not only a more detailed but a more accurate reading of the relation between Aristotelian, Stoic, and Augustinian elements in the Summa Theologiae. Where he had expressed suspicion of Aquinas’s attempt to produce a total system, he now emphasizes, rightly, that the system is self-consciously unfinished in form and that its mode of inquiry is dialectical in nature.13
Upgrading his assessment of Aquinas in these ways does, however, have its costs. After Virtue had explained the misfortunes of Aristotelian tradition after Aquinas in part by declaring its view of moral tragedy deficient and its metaphysical commitments excessive. Now that MacIntyre has changed his mind on these matters, the explanation will have to take a different shape. It also will need to show why metaphysical commitments once thought excessive, and thus a source of weakness for the Aristotelian tradition as it entered the modern age, are now essential.
Augustinian liberals, recognizing that these commitments are not generally shared by the citizenry as a whole, are content to factor them into their own moral thinking without expecting fellow citizens in the earthly city to do likewise. MacIntyre shows no signs of becoming that kind of Augustinian, but he has thus far done little to clarify the role he envisions for theological assumptions in public life. His position appears to be that ethical discourse cannot be sustained as a coherent rational process without taking some such assumptions for granted. Another of my criticisms of After Virtue bears directly on this issue. I had said that by neglecting the role of religious traditions, and thus of religious conflict, in moral history, MacIntyre had simultaneously neglected one of the reasons that public discourse in many modern settings has become secularized, in the sense defined in the previous chapter. When high levels of agreement on metaphysics or on a complete theory of the good life could not be achieved through rational argument, some parties used coercion (often in the form of armed force or torture) to compel acceptance of theological presuppositions. Others, however, tried to hammer out a way of thinking and talking about ethical issues that did not presuppose theological agreement. Both alternatives were tried repeatedly in early modern Europe. The bloodshed, unrest, and spiritual misery caused by the former made the latter increasingly attractive.
Whose Justice? uses a similar hypothesis, albeit somewhat tentatively, to repair MacIntyre’s explanation of the rejection of Aristotelianism:
That [the] coexistence of Aristotelianism in the moral sphere with a variety of Augustinian theologies and with increasingly anti-Aristotelian modes of theorizing in the sciences should have proved fragile is scarcely surprising. But what most profoundly finally moved the largest part of Europe’s educated classes to reject Aristotelianism as a framework for understanding their shared moral and social life was perhaps the gradual discovery during and after the savage and persistent conflicts of the age that no appeal to any agreed conception of the good for human beings, either at the level of practice or of theory, was now possible. (WJ, 209; emphasis in original)
Needless to say, from my point of view this change promises to improve the account considerably. Yet MacIntyre neither integrates this hypothesis into the narrative as a whole nor allows it to influence his appraisal of liberal society. So despite his admission that the facts of pluralism may have been the most important factor in the rejection of Aristotle, the rest of the book shows no traces of this thought. In particular, MacIntyre does not grapple with the apparent implication that the educated classes of early-modern Europe may have had good reason to tailor their institutions and vocabularies to accommodate diverse reasonable perspectives on theology and the good.
HOW NOT TO DISCUSS LIBERALISM
This failure of integration becomes especially problematic in a chapter called “Liberalism Transformed into a Tradition.” Of the four traditions treated in Whose Justice?, only liberalism is dispensed with in a single chapter. The beginning of the chapter concludes the discussion of Scotland begun more than a hundred pages earlier, leaving only barely more than a dozen pages on liberalism as such, at the end of which MacIntyre acknowledges the need to do much more. Why didn’t he do more here? Perhaps he feared the book was getting too long as it was, but he also knew that because he was still writing against liberalism, he could not do without some account, however cursory, of its salient features. The result is utterly unsympathetic caricature at the very point where the narrative most urgently requires detailed and fair-minded exposition if it means to test its author’s preconceptions with any rigor at all.
MacIntyre once criticized Marcuse for “his way of lumping together very different thinkers under a common label for purposes of either castigation or commendation” (HM, 84). Yet castigation-by-lumping is the main function performed by the label “liberalism” in both After Virtue and Whose Justice? So the plentiful proper names that filled out the chapters on Greece or Scotland give way here to such oversimplifying abstractions as “the liberal system of evaluation” and “the liberal self,” as well as heavy reliance on the passive voice. Readers will be hard-pressed to discover just who is being discussed. After asking why it matters that Marcuse’s version of the history of philosophy is highly selective, MacIntyre said this in 1970: “The answer is that by omitting so much and by giving a one-sided interpretation of those authors whom he does invoke, Marcuse is enabled to exaggerate, and in some instances to exaggerate grossly, the homogeneity of the philosophical thought of a given age” (HM, 15). Similarly, MacIntyre complained about Marcuse’s “willingness to rely upon abstractions” instead of talking about particular people (HM, 18), of his tendency “too much to read the history of culture through the lenses provided by his own version of the history of philosophy” (HM, 15–16), and of his contentment with “incidental illustrations of his theses” where he should have offered “evidence in a systematic way” (HM, 14). All these criticisms apply to MacIntyre’s chapter on liberalism in Whose Justice?
My point is not that MacIntyre had higher and better standards back when he had not yet gone traditionalist. The standards he applied to Marcuse are built into his current theory of rationality, which requires members of traditions in crisis to meet challenges from their opponents by learning alien languages and engaging in reasoned debate with competing traditions, while leaving open the possibility of refutation. The same standards are reflected in his praise of Aquinas’s attempt to overcome the conflict between Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions. Such conflicts, MacIntyre says, achieve resolution only when they move through at least two stages: one in which each tradition describes and judges its rivals only in its own terms, and a second in which it becomes possible to understand one’s rivals in their own terms and thus to find new reasons for changing one’s mind. Moving from the first stage to the second “requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight” (WJ, 167), a gift Aquinas’s writings exemplify. MacIntyre shows great empathy for ancient Greeks and for the religious tradition from which he was once alienated but none whatsoever for liberal modernity. After three major books and half a dozen minor ones, his dialogue with liberalism has yet to reach the second stage.14
The chapter on liberalism does include a promising, if grudging, concession. The section in which the concession is made begins with a familiar and unpromising claim “that the project of founding a form of social order in which individuals could emancipate themselves from the contingency and particularity of tradition by appealing to genuinely universal, tradition-independent norms was and is not only, and not principally a project of philosophers. It was and is the project of modern liberal, individualist society” (WJ, 335). Here MacIntyre identifies liberalism with an antitraditionalist quest, one that seeks to rise above all tradition to the vantage point of universal reason and that is expressed in both liberal thought and liberal practice. It is the project of liberal society as such. But MacIntyre immediately goes on to say that the history of this project, and in particular the interminability of its debates over supposedly universal principles, demonstrates that liberalism is in fact one tradition among others. Liberalism, then, is a tradition, but one whose necessarily frustrated project is to cease being what it is.
This line of reasoning has often been used, by Hauerwas as well as MacIntyre, to dispense with liberal society as the embodiment of an obviously incoherent project. In Whose Justice?, MacIntyre stops just short of that conclusion. He clearly intends to make the idea of “liberalism transformed into a tradition” strike the reader as paradoxical, and he thinks liberals have reason to feel embarrassed by this transformation, but he also makes a concession when he adds that:
increasingly there have been liberal thinkers who, for one reason or another, have acknowledged that their theory and practice are after all that of one more contingently grounded and founded tradition … unable to escape from the condition of a tradition. Even this, however, can be recognized without any inconsistency and has gradually been recognized by liberal writers such as Rawls, Rorty, and Stout. (WJ, 346; emphasis added)
It can indeed be recognized without any inconsistency, and even without a slight air of paradox or embarrassment, but only if we reject MacIntyre’s definition of the liberal project. The idea of “liberalism transformed into a tradition” remains a paradox or an oxymoron only if liberalism is initially defined as MacIntyre has defined it. What should we do if we reject MacIntyre’s definition? Let me consider two options.
The first is to replace his definition of the liberal project by another one. MacIntyre’s new account of the rejection of Aristotle in early-modern Europe suggests a candidate at once. We can say that the liberal project was simply to tailor the political institutions and moral discourse of modern societies to the facts of pluralism. Saying this would supply an answer to the question MacIntyre poses in Whose Justice?: “What kind of principles can require and secure allegiance in and to a form of social order in which individuals who are pursuing diverse and often incompatible conceptions of the good can live together without the disruptions of rebellion and internal war?” (210). Speaking in this way allows us to view the quest for a standpoint above all tradition and the attempt to abstract entirely from consideration of the common good as two, but only two, possible expressions of the liberal project. We are free to declare them completely discredited without abandoning that project in the least. Notice that one can, on this view, remain a liberal while abhoring virtually everything MacIntyre identifies with liberalism in Whose Justice?, including not least of all “the liberal self” and “the liberal system of evaluation.”
The second option is to drop the notion that there is something worth calling the liberal project. We might then use the phrase “liberal society,” if at all, simply as a name for the configuration of social practices and institutions we in the United States and certain other countries happen to be living with right now. We might add that any such configuration is too complicated to be explained as the expression of a single project. We might insist, with this in mind, that social criticism is not well served by sweeping pronouncements either for or against liberal society, but rather by balanced and detailed commentary on its various features and prudent counsel on how one or another of them should be changed. We might even come to think of “liberalism” as the name for a particular kind of obsolete ideology whose critics and defenders thought there was something worth calling the liberal project and who therefore engaged in fruitless debates over whether it was a good or a bad thing.
Both options have advantages. I advocate the second, and in this book have steered clear of the term “liberalism” whenever possible. (That is why I feel slightly uncomfortable when MacIntyre refers to me as a liberal writer.) Reading his chapter on “liberalism” reconfirms my suspicion that the very term may at this point be blocking the path of inquiry. He may respond, however, by charging that my use of the phrase “liberal society” implicitly concedes the central contention of After Virtue, that our society is too fragmented and incoherent to sustain rational moral discourse. Whose Justice? defends this contention by describing the metaphysically austere “internationalized languages of modernity” as the result of attempts to abstract discourse from “all substantive criteria and standards of truth and rationality” (WJ, 384). The intended implication seems to be that the languages in fact being used in liberal society make rational moral discourse impossible. Users of such languages, like the social solipsist mentioned at the end of A Short History of Ethics, can make choices but not rational ones, for they lack any framework of criteria and standards within which reasons for action might be found.
I say that this seems to be the implication MacIntyre intends, but at the end of the chapter in which he gives his account of the “internationalized languages of modernity,” he adds a qualification:
the condition which I have described as that characteristic of the late twentieth-century language of internationalized modernity is perhaps best understood as an ideal type, a condition to which the actual languages of the metropolitan centers of modernity approximate in varying and increasing degrees, especially among the more affluent. And the social and cultural condition of those who speak that kind of language, a certain type of rootless cosmopolitanism, … is also ideal-typical. (WJ, 388)
MacIntyre’s ideal-types are caricatures by another name. Caricatures have legitimate uses. They can draw attention, by means of exaggeration and abstraction of actual traits, to significant truths. They do not take the place of realistic portraiture. What we need to know if we are to judge the rationality of our moral discourse by MacIntyre’s theory, and what he has not yet shown, is the precise degree to which the “languages-in-use” in our society approximate the extreme that his dystopian ideal describes.
In the final chapter of Whose Justice?, MacIntyre grants that few of us are social solipsists, “alien to every tradition of enquiry” we encounter and utterly deprived of the resources of rational traditions (WJ, 395–96).
Most of our contemporaries do not live at or even near that point of extremity. … Instead they tend to live betwixt and between, accepting usually unquestioningly the assumptions of the dominant liberal individualist forms of public life, but drawing in different areas of their lives upon a variety of tradition-generated resources of thought and action, transmitted from a variety of familial, religious, educational, and other social and cultural sources. (WJ, 397)
Here the term “liberal” is applied only to those features of our society that MacIntyre finds contemptible. The “tradition-generated resources of thought and action” are admitted to be present in our society, but they are made out to be residues of something nonliberal or preliberal.
This way of speaking, like his use of ideal-types, allows MacIntyre to depict anything he approves of in our society as inessential to it. He is then free to discount apparent counterevidence to his claims about “liberal society” as beside the point. The counterevidence merely shows that there are forces and tendencies not yet crushed under the foot of the liberal project. We are not meant to be thankful to liberal democracy for allowing “tradition-generated resources” of various kinds to survive the early-modern war of all against all. I refer once more to MacIntyre’s critique of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man:
He holds that there are forces and tendencies in society which run counter to the tendency that his book describes. He asserts that One-Dimensional Man is concerned with these counterforces and tendencies also; but they do not, except for one or two paragraphs, appear in his book until the penultimate page, and then no great hope is attached to their prospects. Marcuse’s pessimism … is only very loosely supported by an appeal to evidence. (HM, 70)
MacIntyre’s pessimism about “liberal society” analogously depends upon rhetorical devices in which, first, that society is identified with an essentially antitraditionalist project and, second, any counterforces within it are dissociated from the vacuous and rootless condition toward which it aspires.
It therefore comes as no surprise when MacIntyre condemns not only the few social solipsists in his midst, but also the majority of his contemporaries, who live “betwixt and between”: “This type of self which has too many half-convictions and too few settled coherent convictions … brings to its encounters with the claims of rival traditions a fundamental incoherence which is too disturbing to be admitted to self-conscious awareness except on the rarest of occasions” (WJ, 397). But this harsh judgment against both his contemporaries and the somewhat younger man who wrote A Short History of Ethics, Marxism and Christianity, and Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic has not been established. To establish it MacIntyre would have to do two things he has not yet done. He would have to show, first of all, the precise point at which eclectic diversity of “tradition-generated resources of thought and action” becomes mere fragmentation, thereby condemning most members of a society to “fundamental incoherence.” And he would also have to show that our society has already passed that point. The theory of rationality defended in Whose Justice? fails to perform the first task. His caricature of liberal society could hardly perform the second.
MacIntyre deploys these same devices in a slightly different way in his 1990 book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.15 Here he sets out to debunk two major modern alternatives to his own Thomism. One position, which he labels “genealogy,” is exemplified in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. The other, which is meant to suggest what became of Enlightenment liberalism in the course of its nineteenth-century decline, is exemplified in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Three Rival Versions does have the virtue of associating liberalism with the writings of particular people. MacIntyre mentions a number of proper names: J. G. Frazer, Henry Sidgwick, and Edward Burnett Tylor, among others. He offers an analysis of the ethos that the contributors to the Ninth Edition shared. The analysis is much more detailed and substantive than anything in the corresponding chapter of Whose Justice? But suppose we grant that MacIntyre has adequately characterized the men who put together the Ninth Edition. Grant, further, that MacIntyre is right to declare the encyclopedists the losers in the debate he has arranged for them with the representatives of genealogy and tradition. Assume, in other words, that the form of liberalism they represent really does lie in shambles by book’s end. What does this dialectical exercise teach us about modern people who neither collaborated on the Ninth Edition, nor subscribed to the ethical and philosophical premises of those who did?
MacIntyre clearly intends the encyclopedists to represent something larger than themselves. But why let Sidgwick and his fellow encyclopedists stand for Whitman or Dewey or, for that matter, T. H. Green? There is an undefended principle of selection at work here—one that serves only to reinforce the sharp dichotomy between tradition and modernity. MacIntyre has interesting and effective criticism to offer of the works he discusses, but he does nothing to vindicate his selection of opponents. Why suppose that Sidgwick, Nietzsche, and Pope Leo XIII represent an adequate sampling of late nineteenth-century ethical inquiry? In After Virtue, the choice presented to the reader was given in the title of chapter 9, “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” This assumed, of course, that the “Enlightenment project” had already been dismantled in earlier chapters, after having been exposed to Nietzsche’s relentless criticism. In Three Rival Versions, the encyclopedists stand in for the likes of Hume and Kant. Nietzsche retains his previous role. And the Thomism of Pope Leo XIII represents Aristotelian ethics in its latter-day, Augustinian form. So the choice we are being offered remains essentially the same.16 But, as before, MacIntyre has given us no reason to suppose that modern ethical discourse can be reduced so easily to a small handful of theoretical options.
At one point in After Virtue (243), MacIntyre describes William Cobbett, along with Jane Austen and the Jacobins, as one of the last great representatives of the tradition of virtue ethics. This is a bold and provocative claim, for which MacIntyre gives no support. Is it true? Only, I think, if we define “virtue ethics” very narrowly, so that only a form of ethical discourse conforming closely to an Aristotelian or Thomistic framework qualifies. Loosen up the definition a bit and look in the right places, and you will find discourse on the virtues permeating the ethos of modern democratic culture. Cobbett himself was a towering, ethically ambiguous, transitional figure, with one foot in medievalist nostalgia and the other in modern democracy. His writings are almost as important as Thomas Paine’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s for anyone who wants to understand the relations among religion, critical thought, and the emergence of democratic culture in Britain and America. As E. P. Thompson has shown, Cobbett’s journalism played a major role in creating a mass audience for social criticism in Britain in the decades after the French Revolution.17 Another historian, Christopher Lasch, assigned him an equally important role in the development of modern populist thought.18 Cobbett’s debunking History of the Protestant Reformation is a major modern source of antiprogressivist nostalgia for medieval times.19 He also set in motion those forms of modern radicalism that take their inspiration from an image of premodern communities and virtues. Rural Rides inaugurates the kind of observational (eye-witness) social criticism that twentieth-century readers might associate with works like Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier or Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.20 Cobbett’s Thirteen Sermons and the countless issues of the weekly magazine, the Political Register, which he not only edited but wrote almost single-handedly for years, were among the most widely read texts of the period.21 In short, Cobbett is far more important than MacIntyre implies, and mainly for a reason that MacIntyre’s history cannot easily make room for, which is that so many strands of modern ethical discourse can be traced directly to his influence. Once it dawns on us that the heirs of Cobbett’s observational social criticism include Orwell and Agee, among many others, we ought also to begin suspecting that MacIntyre’s examples of ethical discourse after Cobbett are either arbitrarily or self-servingly chosen. If Cobbett is, as MacIntyre suggests, an exemplary social critic, and if other exemplary social critics were in fact inspired by his example, then modern ethical discourse begins to seem somewhat less bankrupt, even by MacIntyre’s own standards.
Wendell Berry may be the best contemporary example to use in making this point. Berry, who works by day as a farmer in Kentucky, is a gifted practioner of observational social criticism. Much of his work has the rural flavor and antimetropolitan animus of Rural Rides. The themes of tradition, community, and the virtues (in the plural) are also much in evidence in his writing. His work is not properly described, then, as antitraditional or “after virtue.” It is, however, very much a product of democratic culture. Hazlitt, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman all appear in his quotations, and one can sense their influence on his prose style as well as his normative commitments. Berry’s work, not MacIntyre’s, is the closest thing to Cobbett’s that we have from a living writer. It is, by my lights, a more honest and rigorously conceived body of work than MacIntyre’s. And it has three sizeable advantages over MacIntyre’s: first, by virtue of expressing in a quite beautiful style a profoundly spiritual sensibility; second, by doing so, for the most part, without resorting to cant or posturing; third, because it includes both The Unsettling of America and The Hidden Wound, respectively the most important book on environmental ethics ever written and the best book on race that I know of by a white writer.22 The point to draw attention to here, however, is that Berry’s work, with its open embrace of both traditionalist and democratic elements, exists at all, or rather that it exists in democratic modernity.
But then so does MacIntyre’s. Because MacIntyre’s traditionalism itself belongs to modern ethical discourse, and could not have sprung out of nowhere, it is bound to have trouble accounting for itself without abandoning its contention that Cobbett and Austen were without modern heirs. In Three Rival Versions, MacIntyre does acknowledge indebtedness to the Thomists among his modern predecessors, but the rhetorical patterns we have already identified in After Virtue cannot be accounted for by this acknowledgement alone. For one thing, writing After Virtue was part of the path that led MacIntyre to rediscover his Thomist forebears. The Thomistic destination, which appears not to have been foreseen in advance, cannot be used to explain his movement down the path. For another thing, the connection to Thomism would not fully explain the rhetorical use of the sublime to which I have already drawn attention. In point of fact, the book belongs to a prominent strand of Romantic ethical discourse that has never been far to find in the modern period and has always relied, in just the way MacIntyre does, on the rhetoric of ruin and fragmentation. It is a very modern form of ethical discourse, but also a form that has a stake in not being able to recognize itself as belonging to the setting against which its criticism is directed.
TRADITION AND RATIONALITY
I will take the liberty of referring to both traditionalism, from Burke and Coleridge to MacIntyre and Hauerwas, and modern democratic thinking, from Emerson and Whitman to Nancy Fraser and Cornel West, as traditions. By speaking in this way, I am able to locate Berry in an area where two traditions interact. All I mean by the term “tradition” in this context is a discursive practice considered in the dimension of history. No general criterion for individuating traditions is assumed in this way of speaking, and so I shall offer none. I am content to let pragmatic considerations settle the question of individuation on a case-by-case basis. On another day, with a different purpose in view, one might have reason to refer to the likes of Coleridge and the likes of Emerson as embraced by a single, larger, looser tradition. MacIntyre sometimes uses the term in roughly the way I use it, but he also uses it in a narrower, normatively charged way. Susan Moller Okin, in her incisive feminist critique of MacIntyre, rightly observes that he equivocates between two senses:
In spite of MacIntyre’s persistent use of gender-neutral language, it is clear that most women, as well as men who have any kind of feminist consciousness, will not find in any of his traditions a rational basis for moral and political action. Where, then, do we stand? Are we outside all traditions and therefore, in MacIntyre’s view at least, “in a state of moral and intellectual destitution”? Can one be anything but an outsider to a tradition that excludes one, and some of the things one values most, from what it regards as the best human life? … [H]e gives conflicting accounts of what a tradition is. At times he describes it as a defining context, stressing the authoritative nature of its “texts”; at times he talks of a tradition as “living,” as a “not-yet-completed narrative,” as an argument about the goods that constitute the tradition.23
Okin goes on to point out that feminism, though not a tradition in the sense of being defined by deference toward authoritative texts, is a tradition in the second sense. I am proposing that the second sense be explicated in terms of the concept of a discursive social practice viewed diachronically.
MacIntyre uses the second of Okin’s two senses of tradition to gain credibility for the notion that rationality as such depends on tradition, which it surely does, if all we mean by a “tradition” is an enduring discursive practice. He uses the first, narrower sense to create the impression that unless we identify with a discursive practice of a very particular kind, we necessarily place ourselves outside the bounds of rational discourse itself. The kind of discursive practice he takes to be essential to the exercise of rationality involves deferential submission to authoritative texts and authoritative interpreters of texts, though this requirement does not, he assures us, preclude the ability to make large-scale revisions of inherited commitments when faced with epistemological crises. Equally essential to the rationality of a practice, according to MacIntyre’s account, is its embodiment in institutions that are capable of securing agreement on a doctrine of the human good (presumably, by means of catechism directed at newcomers and a combination of magisterial suasion, discipline, and excommunication directed at dissenters).24 Once tradition is identified with traditionalist practice (and the hierarchical institutional structure that goes along with it), it becomes possible to argue that modern democracy, because its ethical discourse is obviously not governed by a tradition in this sense, is nothing more than a scene of conceptual fragmentation. Yet once the ambiguity of the term “tradition” is made plain, it becomes obvious that the debate over the new traditionalism is best construed not as a debate between traditional and modern varieties of ethical discourse, but rather as a debate involving at least two traditions or strands of modern ethical discourse: a tradition dedicated to a very narrow conception of how traditions ought ideally to operate and a tradition dedicated to the project of loosening up that conception democratically and dialogically. It is also possible, of course, to identify a third tradition involved in this debate—namely, the Cartesian one I once described as the tradition that would rather not be a tradition at all.
Earlier in this chapter, I tried to show what mischief MacIntyre causes by defining liberal modernity reductively as the social expression of the Enlightenment project’s antitraditionalism. Here I simply want to call attention to the existence of multiple strands of ethical discourse in modern societies and to point out the dangers of confining our attention to ethical traditions in the narrow sense. MacIntyre has not demonstrated that traditions of the kind he favors are uniquely capable of fostering rational discourse, so he has not shown that such traditions are the only ones worthy of study or allegiance. Furthermore, if we study only the rigid kind of tradition that Coleridge stood for when he called for the creation of a virtuous clerisy as an antidote to modern fragmentation, we will not be able to hear both sides of the debate in which Coleridge was himself participating. Indeed, we will not be able to do justice to the complexities of the modern debate over traditionalism at all. This debate has been going on now for two centuries. The relatively loose kind of tradition represented by the patterns of influence that lead from Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt, and Emerson to their contemporary heirs is essential to understanding what modern ethical discourse has been like outside of the institutional settings in which clerisies exercise power. It should not be surprising to find that some writers, anxious to avoid being dominated by such a clerisy, have sought to distance themselves from it by denouncing “tradition” itself. What such rhetorical moves imply, in context, is often hard to make out, but the same writers have often had the agility to elude hyperbole on other occasions and acknowledge indebtedness to a discursive practice that evolves from one generation of discoursers to the next. Emerson and Whitman are perhaps the best examples of this. MacIntyre’s prose is not the only place where the term “tradition” slips back and forth between two senses.
Of the thinkers who first reflected on the opposition between the Enlightenment and traditionalism, it was Hegel who understood most fully the importance of overcoming the assumption that moderns must choose between reason and tradition if they wish to escape the rule of arbitrary will. MacIntyre flatly rejects the likes of Thomas Paine under the heading of the “Enlightenment project.” He denounces the traditionalist Edmund Burke as a shoddy theorist, a turncoat, and an “agent of positive harm.”25 Burke’s most important theoretical error, according to MacIntyre, was his failure to overcome the Enlightenment opposition between reason and tradition, a failure that required him to embrace an irrationalist type of traditionalism if he wanted to resist the intellectual and political consequences of antitraditional reason. This is a sound criticism. It was, however, not only fully appreciated by both Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt, but articulated at the highest level of philosophical theory by Hegel. In books like Marxism and Christianity and Against the Self-Images of the Age, one can sense MacIntyre’s continuity with, and dependence on, Hegel’s overcoming of this dualism. Consciousness of this continuity may be part of what kept him on course, in those days, as a radical social critic sensitive to the sources of his own thinking. His writings of the 1960s already embodied an exercise of critical reasoning that was conscious of its own dependence on an unfolding dialectic.
In one of the best critical discussions of After Virtue, Richard Bernstein concludes that “there is very little in MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment project that was not stated or anticipated in Hegel.” Bernstein laments, however, that after a brief reference to what “Hegel called philosophical history” (AV, 3), MacIntyre proceeds to discuss modern society and ethical theory as if Hegel never existed. “This is a curious omission considering the array of thinkers MacIntyre does discuss, the sensitive understanding of Hegel exhibited in MacIntyre’s earlier writings, and especially because of the relevance of Hegel to MacIntyre’s central concerns.” MacIntyre seems to have lost all awareness of how much he “himself appropriates from this tradition in his critical reconstruction of the virtues.”26 It would not take much to bring MacIntyre’s theoretical reflections on tradition and rationality into line with the commitments of a Hegelian pragmatist like Bernstein or me. One need only eliminate the arguments that depend on equivocating between Okin’s two senses of “tradition” and then eliminate all traces of the unwittingly Burkean assumption that all traditions worthy of the name are traditionalist. But larger corrective measures are required to set straight his history of modern thought and society. For at the time he wrote After Virtue, his long-standing hatred for all things liberal combined with his loss of faith in Marxism in a way that seems to have occluded his historical memory. The modern intellectual traditions to which he owes the most receive no acknowledgment whatsoever. This peculiar form of amnesia has everything to do with his grim conclusion that the exhaustion of Marxism “is shared by every other political tradition within our culture” (AV, 262).
MacIntyre was not a less rational man at mid-career than he is today. He could by now write the modern analogue of Augustine’s Confessions. The story of his reasoned movement betwixt and between the various traditions with which he has affiliated himself is itself strong evidence against a theory according to which rationality can be exercised at its best only within highly coherent and “well-integrated” traditions. MacIntyre has for many years been one of our most interesting and thought-provoking social critics. Even his mistaken arguments often instruct; even his caricatures often advance the debate. But he has performed a valuable service to his culture precisely by being the sort of person his current theory of rationality frowns upon.
What kind is that? It is the kind who, from time to time, finds it necessary to abandon a morality so well integrated that it suffocates thought, who has the courage to take a stand for which there is not yet a convenient label or easily defined lineage, and who has the practical wisdom to fashion a critical language for himself out of materials borrowed from many sources. All of this can be done without engaging in the liberal project, aspiring to be a citizen of nowhere, or ceasing to be one of us. One of the things I most like about our society, despite its many horrors and injustices, is that it breeds such people and occasionally rewards them, justly, by buying their books, debating their ideas, and sometimes even offering them distinguished professorships. When MacIntyre complains that one of the “most striking facts” about our society is its lack of “institutionalized forums within which … fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted” (WJ, 2), I have trouble squaring his complaint with the facts of his career or the existence of the various journals and presses he and I have used to express our disagreements with each other. By the same token, when I consider his traditionalist theory of rationality and the story he wants to tell about modernity, I cannot help suspecting that he may himself be the best case against his own central claims.