After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
by Alasdair MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).
Alasdair MacIntyre is known as one of the foremost critics of
liberalism, both liberal theory and liberal practice. As an
alternative to the utilitarianism and relativism of liberal moral
theory, MacIntyre has proposed virtue-ethics and “traditionconstituted
rationality.” As an alternative to the individualism and
bureaucratization of liberal moral practice, MacIntyre has proposed
the practices and politics of local community. MacIntyre
has presented his anti-liberal moral and political vision in his
trilogy, After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, in later works such as
Dependent Rational Animals, and in numerous articles, lectures,
and interviews; and he has done so with a brilliance, erudition, and
sophistication unmatched by his liberal opponents. Yet, as I shall
attempt to show in this article, MacIntyre’s moral theory contains
internal contradictions that render its practical application of
small-scale, tradition-constituted communities defective.
MacIntyre’s political prescription is built upon an incoherent
notion of the state, is insufficiently political, and fosters the
political liberalism he so vehemently opposes. Since MacIntyre’s
magnificent trilogy, though rich in moral theory, does not contain
much in the way of sustained political theory, to substantiate my
critique of MacIntyre’s political philosophy, I shall examine his
lesser-known Dependent Rational Animals, as well as some of his
lectures on politics.
In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre brings his thinking
down, as it were, from the meta-ethical and meta-theoretical level
of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, with its dialecticalhistorical
presentation of tradition-constituted rationality in general
and Thomistic-constituted rationality in particular, to a much
more concrete ethical and theoretical level. Essentially, he offers
us a revised account of the virtues, one quite different from what
we find in After Virtue, for it is now biologically, as well as
Aristotelianly and Thomistically, informed. Most importantly,
MacIntyre provides, for the first time, a description of the
particular social and political forms that best sustain and promote
these virtues. In the context of answering the question “Why
human beings need the virtues?” MacIntyre provides us with his
first extended treatment of a politics adequate to virtue-needing
human beings, or “dependent rational animals.” What is particularly
noteworthy about Dependent Rational Animals is its absence
of any treatment of tradition, and when one notes that this
absence coincides with the concrete discussion of particular
moral norms and ideal political structures, one wonders if the
reason for the absence is a substantive change in MacIntyre’s
thinking, or simply the effect of a change in philosophical focus.
In any event, we note the absence of theological matters in
Dependent Rational Animals like in other works, but it is a
particularly notable absence here, since the work involves, not a
formal, abstract, meta-ethical discussion of the generic structure
of the good, or a historical comparison of moral traditions, but a
content-rich, concrete, normative account of the specific virtues
of human flourishing.
MacIntyre asks the question: “What difference to moral
philosophy would it make, if we were to treat the facts of
vulnerability and affliction and the related facts of dependence as
central to the human condition?”1 This is a variation on MacIntyre’s
consistent condemnation of the Enlightenment’s conception of
man the autonomous and independent “individual,” with its
placing of the highest moral imperative precisely on the emancipation
of man from vulnerability and affliction. For the Enlightenment,
these latter are eminently remedial defects, not, as
MacIntyre claims, ineradicable aspects of the human condition.
The difference an affirmative answer to the question makes is the
recognition of an essential defect in the Aristotelian conception
of virtue, that rational agency requires the “virtues of acknowledged
dependence” in addition to the virtues of the independent
rational agent.
MacIntyre asks a second question: “What type of social
relationship and what type of the common good are required, if
a social group is to be one in and through which both the virtues
of rational independence and the virtues of acknowledged dependence
are sustained and transmitted?”2 To understand his answer
to this question, we must first examine what MacIntyre means by
the virtues of acknowledged dependence. In order for human
beings to flourish, they need to understand themselves as practical
reasoners about goods, and they come to learn this identity as
reasoners, as well as the particular goods about which they
reason, from arguing about them with others; this is an example
of our intrinsic dependence. To learn “how to stand back in some
measure from our present desires, so as to be able to evaluate
them,” and to “imagine realistically alternative possible futures,”
is required to become an independent practical reasoner, but this
learning itself requires the presence and occasional intervention
of others. In fact, our very identities depend upon our being
recognized by others: “I can be said truly to know who and what
I am, only because there are others who can be said truly to know
who and what I am.” Recognizing this is a prerequisite for gaining
the virtues of acknowledged dependence: “Acknowledgment of
dependence is the key to independence.” Accurate knowledge of
one’s good first requires accurate knowledge of one’s self, and this
can only occur “in consequence of those social relationships
which on occasion provide badly needed correction for our own
judgments.”3
MacIntyre’s discussion of the “social relationships of giving
and receiving” is similar to his discussion of “practices” in After
Virtue. The social relationships of giving and receiving that allow
for self-knowledge and knowledge of one’s good are also indispensable
to achieve this good. Once these relationships are
institutionalized, however, they become bound up with “unequal
distributions” and “established hierarchies” of power, and so
there is always a possibility of corruption in social relationships
that can “frustrate us in our movement towards our goods.”4 As
MacIntyre notes in his discussion of practices in After Virtue,
institutions, though prone to corruption, must exist to keep
practices in existence. In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that
practices can remain immune from institutional corruption as
long as the goods of effectiveness required to sustain institutions
are subordinated to the goods of excellence that are internal to
practices and required for human flourishing. In Dependent
Rational Animals, MacIntyre gives the same argument but in
different language: “The worst outcome is when the rules that
enjoin giving and receiving have been substantially subordinated
to or otherwise made to serve the purposes of power, the best
when a distribution of power has been achieved which allows
power to serve the ends to which the rules of giving and receiving
are directed.”5
This contrast of the two kinds of subordination is important,
for it is one of two fundamental ideas in MacIntyre’s analysis and
evaluation of the “social relationships” of the modern state. The
second fundamental idea is the common good. Practical reasoning
is “reasoning together with others,” and in order to reason
together effectively about the means to certain goods, there needs
to be agreement on these goods themselves. Our reasoning is only
as good as the others with whom we reason, since reasoning is an
essentially social activity: “The good of each cannot be pursued
without also pursuing the good of all those who participate in
those relationships.” MacIntyre defends this eminently non
liberal view of the human good by emphasizing our radical
dependence upon others at certain stages of our lives. If others
did not “make our good their good” at certain vulnerable times in
our lives, such as infancy, childhood, illness, and old age, then we
would have either never survived, or survived only with a severely
attenuated capacity for the virtues and activities of independent
practical reasoning. If I am to have a reasonable expectation of
receiving this care when I need it, which I must if I am to trust in
the possibility of my becoming an independent practical reasoner,
then I must be prepared to give this care to others, and in an
unconditional manner.6 Thus, in a flourishing community, one in
which there are vibrant networks of giving and receiving, and
where the virtues of acknowledged dependence are in abundance,
one can make the goods of the community one’s own. These
networks and virtues, although not reducible to rules, require
them, else there be a lack of mutual trust in others’ fulfillment of
responsibilities and deficiency in fulfilling these responsibilities
and deliberating about them. The set of precepts that include both
the necessary rules and enjoinments of the acts of the virtues that
the common good requires is what MacIntyre identifies as the
natural law.7
Macintyre suggests how diametrically opposed his conceptions
of the common good, social relationships, and practical
reasoning are to those which underlie modern liberal culture,
conceptions that suggest that “good” is no more morally significant
than the satisfaction of desire. In the modern “market-based”
culture, the only unchosen constraints we can accept on our
behavior and commitments are those dictated by a rationality
guided by the self-interested motive of preference maximization.
Other commitments and responsibilities may exist, but since they
are chosen with regard to our “affections” and “sympathies” only,
they are not fully rational. Whether we care for the radically
dependent unborn baby, for example, is not a rational or moral
issue—it cannot be, since there is only one person capable of
calculated self-interest in the relationship—it is a matter of mere
emotional attachment. MacIntyre argues that this is a false
dichotomy, since “[a]ffective and sympathetic ties are always
more then a matter of affection and sympathy.” Affection and
sympathy are things that we owe to others, to children and
parents, for example, and therefore are inexorably bound up with
“norms of giving and receiving.” Thus for MacIntyre, market
relationships of rational, calculative self-interest are not evil in
themselves; they only need to be attached to relationships of
giving and receiving if they are not to corrupt human flourishing
and the common good. Social practice must provide the context
for both aspects of human behavior or they become prone to
vice.8 The virtue that is the bridge between affectivity and
intelligence with regard to social relationships is “just generosity.”
This virtue directs one to give to others, even those outside one’s
recognized community, with a willingness to give an amount
disproportionate to what one hopes to receive. This virtue enables
misericordia, in which one feels others’ suffering as if it were one’s
own.9
Politics for MacIntyre is essentially the securing of the common
good, which is “found in the activity of communal learning
through which we together become able to order goods, both in
our individual lives and in the political society.”10 As this quote
exemplifies, a primary feature of MacIntyre’s political thought is
its focus on the necessary conditions for, as distinct from the
particular content or values inherent in, the practice of politics. In
After Virtue, MacIntyre articulated a “contentless” definition of
the good life for man: “We have then arrived at a provisional
conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the
life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues
necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to
understand what more and what else the good life for man is.”11
Continuing this formalistic, “meta-political” mode of description,
MacIntyre portrays political structures in a similar manner to
how he portrays traditions of inquiry, as institutions of communal
learning; thus, he evaluates the former as he does the latter, in
terms of their capacity to sustain rational argument about, and
enable the securing of, internal goods and virtues.
In Dependent Rational Animals and “Politics, Philosophy, and
the Common Good,” MacIntyre lays out six conditions that
political structures must satisfy to enable men to learn about and
achieve their individual and common goods. Three of the conditions
have to do with achieving the good, and three with learning
the good. The first of the three conditions relating to achieving the
good is the requirement that politics “afford expression to the
political decision-making of independent reasoners on all those
matters on which it is important that the members of a political
community be able to come through shared rational deliberation
to a common mind.” The second is that the norms of justice
involve the virtue of just generosity, aiming at securing the desert
and needs of independent and dependent citizens respectively.
The third is the provision that all citizens engage in communal
deliberation about the norms of justice, including the establishment
of “proxies” to speak for those who cannot speak for
themselves.12 We note here the great emphasis MacIntyre places
on the participation by all citizens in political activity, for an
essential aspect of the common good is that it be a good acknowledged
by all via a “common mind”; it is vital that this acknowledgment
come as a result of community-wide rational deliberation.
The first of the three conditions for a justifiable political order
in which men can learn about the good, both their own and that
of the community as a whole, is the communal recognition of and
obedience to the natural law, and a “shared understanding of
goods, virtues, and rules.” In another essay, MacIntyre defines
the natural law as “the exceptionless precepts . . . which, insofar
as we are rational, we recognize as indispensable in every society
and in every situation for the achievement of our goods and of our
final good, because they direct us toward and partially define our
common good.”13 It is important to note here that MacIntyre sees
universal agreement on a particular and authoritative conception
of the good as an indispensable condition for both knowing and
achieving personal and common goods. The second condition for
an acceptable political order is its size: “a relatively small-scale
society whose relationships are not deformed by compartmentalization.”
14 Compartmentalization is not simply the differentiation
of social roles and institutions, for this dynamic attends any
healthy political order, even small-scale ones, but the differentiation
of virtues, norms, and goods according to each social role and
institution. The result is the disintegration of the individual, who
must aim at conflicting goods, follow contradictory norms, and
adopt irreconcilable virtues; it also leads to the disintegration of
society, since after compartmentalization, no purview is available
for ordering the various goods of the differing institutions to the
good of society as a whole, which is the very purpose of politics.
MacIntyre writes,
Within each sphere such individuals conform to the requirements
imposed on their role within that sphere and there is no
milieu available to them in which they are able, together with
others, to step back from those roles and those requirements and
to scrutinize themselves and the structure of their society from
some external standpoint with any practical effect.15
For MacIntyre, compartmentalization is the inevitable concomitant
of large-scale political structures, whose complexity and
scope preclude the “face-to-face encounters and conversations of
local community.”16 The communal ordering of all internal goods
and practices to the common good is, for MacIntyre, the essence
of politics, and this is itself a “practice”: “Such a form of
community is by its nature political, that is to say, constituted by
a type of practice through which other types of practice are
ordered, so that individuals may direct themselves towards what
is best for them and for the community.”17 Indeed, politics is the
highest of practices, since it “affords the best opportunity for the
exercise of our rational powers.”18 A justifiable political order
must not only permit but also actively facilitate the engagement
by all its citizens in terminable rational inquiry and debate about
the justification of those political structures. The activity of
inquiry and debate about how to organize and integrate personal
and institutional goods and practices with the common good is
essentially constitutive of politics itself: “Suppose however that
there were a culture with the following conception of political
community: political community exists for the sake of the creation
and sustaining of that form of communal life into which the goods
of each particular practice may be integrated so that both each
individual and the community as a whole may lead a life informed
by these goods.”19
Modern political structures preclude deliberative forums for
the attainment of a common mind that could rationally integrate
private and lesser common goods to a comprehensive common
good all could share. Moreover, and this is the third and final
condition for a rationally justified politics, the “large-scale socalled
free market economies”20 that are inherent in modern
political structures prevent citizens from freely pursuing and
securing their common good. Because of the unjust inequality in
wealth and power they inevitably produce, and the individualistic
ethos that they presuppose, endless conflict “between rival conceptions
of the common good” is the citizens’ inescapable lot.
To MacIntyre’s mind, not even one of these six conditions for
an acceptable political order is met by the modern nation-state.
His radical critique of the modern political order separates
MacIntyre’s political thought from that of John Rawls and Jacques
Maritain, who both accept the nation-state as not only a possible
locus but as the primary locus for a genuinely moral and rational
political activity. Rawls and Maritain, notwithstanding their radically
disparate conceptions of the nature and purpose of political
activity and their differing assessments of this activity as it is
presently practiced in modern secular democracies, are in complete
agreement about one point: the essential legitimacy of the
fundamental structures undergirding modern political activity,
including its most fundamental institution, the nation-state.
MacIntyre, on the other hand, does not simply reject, as does
Rawls, certain explanative theories and justifications of modern
politics, nor does he reject modern political practice insofar as it
fails to live up to its basic Christian principles, as in Maritain.
Rather, he rejects modern politics altogether, in both theory and
practice: “Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative,
radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a
standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the
virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional
forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.”21 For MacIntyre,
liberalism’s claim to provide, in virtue of its ostensibly neutral
stance toward particular conceptions of the human good, the
most free, and hence best possible milieu for individuals to
determine, pursue, and secure their own particular conceptions
of the human good is false. Liberal social orders do indeed
promote and even impose a particular conception of the good,
and it is one that enslaves rather than liberates. Since, for
MacIntyre, the nation-state is the fundamental institution
undergirding all modern Western social orders, the judgment he
makes about the latter applies to the former.
We can examine the reasons for MacIntyre’s assessment of
liberalism in general in terms of his six-fold criteria for legitimate
politics in particular, evaluating the nation-state’s capacity to
enable the learning, on the one hand, and the achievement, on the
other, of both personal and common goods. We begin with the
former. MacIntyre writes, “What is always oppressive is any form
of social relationship that denies to those who participate in it the
possibility of the kind of learning from each other about the
nature of their common good that can issue in socially transformative
action.”22 This is the heart of MacIntyre’s critique of the
nation-state, for it exemplifies his understanding of moral learning
as a social practice and his understanding of social practice as
essentially an activity of learning. The politics of the nation-state
is not a social practice, not a craft, for it is missing what all wellordered
practices possess, the means of learning about and
attaining one’s good. Yet, not every non-practice is oppressive, for
as MacIntyre points out, all practices rely upon institutions,
which are defined as non-practices, for their existence and
sustenance. What is oppressive about the institution of the nation
state is that it pretends to be a practice. Since it is not actually a
practice it cannot afford its participants the knowledge and
possession of internal goods of excellence constitutive of human
flourishing. However, since it must pretend to be a practice, or
else lose both its status as a political structure and the allegiance
of its citizens, most of whom, more or less, seek to live a political
life aspiring to goods higher and more common than the instrumental
and self-interested goods of effectiveness, it must exclude
from public discussion any philosophical arguments that could
expose its true nature. And insofar as it succeeds at this cover-up,
as it were, it prevents the practice of communal deliberation and
argument about the justification of its own political activity, one
of the constituent goods of human flourishing and an essential
feature of any authentic politics:23
What is lacking in modern political societies is any type of
institutional arena in which plain persons—neither engaged in
academic pursuits nor professionals of the political life—are able
to engage together in systematic reasoned debate, designed to
arrive at a rationally well-founded common mind on how to
answer questions about the relationship of politics to the claims
of rival and alternative ways of life, each with its own conception
of the virtues and of the common good. . . . What we have instead
is a politics from whose agendas enquiry concerning the nature
of that politics has been excluded, a politics thereby protected
from perceptions of its own exclusions and limitations.24
As we discussed earlier, practices must be governed by a
“shared understanding of goods, virtues, and rules,” and any
political practice must be governed by the precepts of the natural
law, which “direct us toward and partially define our common
good.”25 However, the nation-state, because of its great size,
complexity, and “ramshackle” nature, precludes any shared understanding
among citizens other than a mutual commitment to
individual self-interest and pragmatic tolerance. Moreover, it
justifies its political authority not by arguments showing that its
norms conform to the precepts of the natural law, for this would
be oppressive and unjust to anyone who denies the existence, let
alone political authority, of the natural law, but by arguments
showing that it enables individuals to attain individualistic, selfchosen
goods. The problem with this mode of justification is that
the absence on the nation-state level of any semblance of a shared
understanding of moral reality prevents the possibility of the kind
of public discussion in which citizens could evaluate whether the
activity of the modern state is indeed justified in its activity an its
rationale for this activity: “What the modes of justification
employed in and on behalf of the activities of state and market
cannot give expression to are the values that inform just those
ongoing argumentative conversations through which members of
local communities try to achieve the goods and their good.”26
Further, the absence of natural-law norms governing its activities
guarantees that the state’s activity will not be conducive to
human flourishing. But if neither the precepts of the natural law nor
any shared substantive values can be authoritative upon the nationstate,
by what authority does it govern its citizens, and itself? “It is
central to the life of the modern state that from its point of view
there can be no appeal to anything beyond its sovereign authority.
When positive law and the natural law conflict, there is no appeal
beyond positive law.”27 Of course, this is a highly questionable
justification for political authority, for it is self-referential. Yet,
MacIntyre does not counsel revolt against the nation state, even
though he considers it indubitably unjust and an unjustifiable
oppressor. His purpose is to unmask, not to eliminate; not “to
reform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communities
to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against the
distinguishing forces of the nation-state and the market.”28
In fact, for MacIntyre the state should not be eliminated, for
it supplies indispensable goods and services for both individuals
and communities, such as the rule of law, public justice, relief of
suffering, and protection of liberty.29 However, it has potential
for great evil, especially when its representatives speak and act as
if it were something it is not, a genuine political entity embodying
the common good and operating with a rational and moral
purpose determined by a deliberative common mind. MacIntyre
articulates here the morally ambiguous nature of the nation-state:
The importance of the good of public security, without which
none of our local communities could achieve our common goods,
must not be allowed to obscure the fact that our shared public
goods of the modern nation-state, are not the common goods of a
genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-state
masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome
is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both. In a modern,
large-scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the
pretense that it is, is always an ideological disguise for sinister
realities. I conclude that insofar as the nation-state provides
necessary and important public goods, these must not be confused
with the type of common good for which communal recognition is
required by the virtues of acknowledged dependence, and that
insofar as the rhetoric of the nation-state presents it as the provider
of something that is indeed, in this stronger sense a common good,
that rhetoric is a purveyor of dangerous fictions.30
In a lecture entitled, “Natural Law Against the Nation-State:
Or the Possibility of the Common Good against the Actuality of
the Public Interest,” MacIntyre portrays the nation-state as
essentially a “common-interest,” as opposed to a “common-good”
organization, meaning that, although it can have a shared aim, it
is one necessarily constituted by a summing of individual aims.
The common-good organization, however, “can only be pursued
by those individuals who are acting as parts of some communal
whole,” and who “understand their individual good as partly
constituted by a good . . . characterizable independently and of
and antecedently to the characterization of their particular individual
good.”31 The nation-state is structured in terms of a
common-interest organization and cannot be otherwise, for its
size, complexity, and impersonality preclude shared deliberation
about goods, and the intimate knowledge of and trust in other
persons that allows each citizen to see another’s good as one’s
own. Therefore, attempting to embody a common good in a
common-interest structure is bound to fail.
Trying to turn the public-interest organization of the nation
state into the common-good organization of a political community
is the misguided project of the communitarian. The problem
with the communitarian proposal is twofold. It rightly advocates
a robustly moral political community based upon a shared culture
and particular conception of the good, but it wrongly deems this
community an unconditional good in itself; it is only good when
it fosters the virtues. Secondly, it exaggerates the possible scope
for such a community. The communitarian is blind to the fact that
a political community exercising shared deliberation can only
exist on a level more local and modest scale than the nation-state,
and that the attempt to embody moral community on the nationstate
level only leads to greater tyranny, as liberals recognize. The
communitarian would empower the nation-state with not just a
moral justification but also a moral imperative to implement its
inherently amoral and apolitical, self-aggrandizing power. The
state, though not an immoral agent in itself, would thus become
immoral by being charged with a moral responsibility it cannot
execute, since it translates, by it very nature, any matter of moral
import into its own non-moral vocabulary: “The contention
underlying it is that whatever the grounds concerning goods may
be upon which certain policies are supported or principles
chosen, the political expression of that support and those choices
will in the context of the modern state have to be understood in
terms of preferences and interests.32
Thus the communitarian project mistakenly perceives a moral,
rational agent where there is only an amoral, irrational animal.
This animal can be tamed and trained, perhaps, but never humanized;
it can be tolerated, but only insofar as it serves those truly
human moral communities that depend upon its bureaucratic
largess. In a famous passage, MacIntyre provides a sardonic yet
sober account of the state:
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and
unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as
a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always
about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money,
and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time
to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. As I have
remarked elsewhere, it is like being asked to die for the
telephone company.33
The communitarian’s non-individualistic conception of the
common good is more in line with MacIntyre’s thinking than the
liberal’s, yet its conception of political community is still inadequate,
for it is not a “community of political learning and enquiry
participation in which it is necessary for individuals to discover
what their individual and common goods are.”34 The communitarian’s
approach to the state, on the other hand, has less in
common with MacIntyre’s than the liberal approach. A liberal
would agree with MacIntyre’s statement that the modern state is
“grotesquely unfitted to be the protagonist of any substantive
conception of the human good”35—however, for an entirely
different reason. The liberal advocates a morally and ideologically
neutral state because he values, above all, the moral and rational
autonomy of the individual, which he judges to be severely
compromised by any political structure, not just the state embodying
a “substantive practical agreement upon some strong
conception of the human good.”36 MacIntyre, on the contrary,
sees rational and moral autonomy as requiring a political community
united on a particular and strong conception of the good.
Since the nation-state can never embody such a community,
political community must be sought elsewhere.
MacIntyre’s view of the nation-state can be distinguished
from the liberal’s in another important respect. According to the
liberal historical narrative, the nation-state was originally created
to stabilize and prevent any possible reoccurrence of the “wars of
religion.” Thus, its raison d’etre, then and now, is to prevent the
development of any political community united in particularist
doctrines, for the sake of preserving the rational and moral
autonomy of the individual and securing the political peace and
stability of society. MacIntyre would agree that the nation-state
poses a great threat to particularist political communities, but far
from celebrating this feature as a positive good, he regrets it as a
most tragic flaw. Although he would prefer the nation-state to stay
within its role of promoting the public interest, of providing the
institutional and instrumental goods without which local political
communities cannot exist and thrive, he is convinced that it
cannot help itself, as it were. In a kind of third-way alternative to
communitarianism and liberalism, MacIntyre prescribes neither
a morally particularistic nor a morally neutral state: “The contemporary
state is not and cannot be evaluatively neutral, and
secondarily . . . it is just because of the ways in which the state is
not evaluatively neutral that it cannot generally be trusted to
promote any worthwhile set of values, including those of autonomy
and liberty.”37 The liberal demands state neutrality towards
particular goods as a requirement for its securing and
protecting the universal goods of autonomy and liberty; however,
according to MacIntyre, such state neutrality is impossible: “The
activities of government are such that they are not in their effects
neutral between ways of life, but undermine some and promote
others.”38 Therefore, since the state is an “ineliminable feature of
the contemporary landscape,”39 since it cannot be evaluatively
neutral, and since its evaluations are bound to cause harm, the
prudent course of action is to make it as evaluatively neutral as
possible. Here, MacIntyre endorses a version of the political
“noble lie”: “Even although the neutrality is never real, it is an
important fiction, and those of us who recognize its importance
as well as its fictional character will agree with liberals in upholding
a certain range of civil liberties.”40
We have explained why MacIntyre advocates the morally
neutral state in theory, but what still needs explaining is why he
judges the morally neutral state impossible in practice. MacIntyre
never answers this question directly, but he does provide an
indirect answer in his understanding of the nature of societal
reality in general. He writes, “Every political and social order
embodies and gives expression to an ordering of different human
goods and therefore also embodies and gives expression to some
particular conception of the human good.”41 MacIntyre applies
this principle in his unmasking of liberalism’s duplicitous establishment
of the “particular good” of “no particular good” as the
non-negotiable basis of political order, excluding, or at least
marginalizing, any other possible political ordering for the state
and for sub-state social and political institutions centered upon
other possible particular goods. Since, as MacIntyre avers, all
social and political orders inevitably propose a particular ordering
of social and political goods, even an ordering based upon the
maximization of the freedom of individuals to order social and
political goods themselves without political interference presupposes
and embodies a particular conception of the good; state
neutrality in this regard is impossible. In sum, if state neutrality
is both impossible and disastrous, then the best we can do is
neutralize the state by limiting its size and scope, charging it with
politically minimal tasks such as providing the material, nonmoral
institutional goods that enable the craft communities of
virtuous acknowledged dependence to do the real political work.
Virtually all contemporary political philosophers, despite their
significant disagreements, are unified in one fundamental way:
they all support the political order of the liberal democratic state.
As we have seen, however, Alasdair MacIntyre rejects it tout
court. For MacIntyre, the nation-state is not a possible locus for
genuine political activity. MacIntyre’s basic argument is that
since a morally based political order requires a tradition-homogenous
citizenry, and since the nation-state is necessarily comprised
of a tradition-heterogeneous citizenry, the nation-state
cannot embody a morally based politics. Insofar as it attempts to
do so, the result can only be tyranny, force, and fraud, and the
attenuation of morally based political activity on the sub-state
level. Insofar as sub-state political communities attempt to embody
their authentic politics on the state-level, the result can only
be the perversion of that politics, as MacIntyre’s pithy remark
suggests: “Those who make the conquest of state power their aim
are always in the end conquered by it.”42
Yet when we examine MacIntyre’s rationale for rejecting
state-based politics, questions arise to which MacIntyre provides
no clear or coherent answers: why precisely is the nation-state
incompatible with genuine political activity? In certain places,
MacIntyre explains it in quantitative terms, its great size precluding
it from embodying a consensus on a particular tradition of
rationality and conception of the good; but in other places, he
speaks in qualitative terms, suggesting that it is the state’s complex,
bureaucratic structure that prevents it from performing
genuine political activity. If size is not the essential problem, then
could the state embody genuine political activity in the event of a
nation-wide consensus on a particular conception of the good? If
a nation-wide consensus is too much to ask, could a state embody
good politics if its size and scope were small enough to procure a
consensus, but still larger than the local communities MacIntyre
prescribes? If the problem is not only quantity but also quality,
could the state’s essential structure be reformed to enable genuine
political activity? Or is there something essentially and
irredeemably anti-political about the state, regardless of accidental
differences like size, scope, and complexity? Is the modern
nation state intrinsically anti-political, or is the state qua state
such? Is the political model of the nation-state necessarily bound
up with the errors and defects of modern, post-Enlightenment
thought and culture? And if the state is irredeemable, why exactly
is that the case?
In my assessment, MacIntyre does not provide a philosophically
adequate and coherent answer to any of these questions. For
example, his judgment that the state cannot embody a genuine
politics is based upon his notion of the state’s incapacity to
embody conceptions of the good. But upon examination, this
notion is confusing. On the one hand, MacIntyre insists that the
state should not embody a conception of the good, but on the
other, he admits that the state cannot help but embody some
particular conception of the good:
Even though that neutrality is never real, it is an important
fiction, and those of us who recognize its importance as well as
its fictional character will agree with liberals in upholding a
certain range of civil liberties. . . . For the contemporary state
could not adopt a point of view on the human good as its own
without to a significant degree distorting, degrading and discrediting
that point of view. It would put those values to the
service of its own political and economic power and so degrade
and discredit them.43
If the state is as amoral a structure as MacIntyre claims it to
be, it is not clear why its “neutrality is never real”; for why could
the desired neutrality not be produced in an essentially moralneutral
structure? If state neutrality cannot be produced, does
that not indicate that the state is not an essentially amoral entity?
If the state’s complexity and bureaucracy render it impervious to
being infused with moral substance, then how could it ever
manage to behave in the morally non-neutral manner MacIntyre
claims it inevitably does? Why not at least try to shape the state’s
non-neutrality in accordance with a true conception of the good,
perhaps by working to lessen its size and complexity to make it
more amenable to moral influence and embodiment; one could
begin with the state’s more modest embodiments, such as local
and municipal governments. It does not seem reasonable simply
to leave a potentially harmful source of immense power to its own
anarchic whims without any attempt to direct it to moral good. If
the explanation for the morally-biased character of the state is
that it is a necessarily immoral bias, then one must conclude that
the state is irredeemably evil. This severe judgment requires both
an adequate philosophical explanation and historical demonstration,
which MacIntyre does not provide.
Keith Breen, Ronald Beiner, and Thomas Hibbs have made
strong arguments that MacIntyre’s notion of the state is problemAlasdair
MacIntyre’s Political Liberalism 285
atic. The state, as MacIntyre admits, is necessary for the existence
and sustaining of MacIntyrean communities of the common
good, but these authors argue that unless the state also embodies
a politics of the common good, MacIntyrean communities cannot
survive. There needs to be some political entity with ultimate
custodianship of the common good, without which there can be no
politics of the virtues of acknowledged dependence, and only some
form of state that can fulfill this role. As Breen points out,
MacIntyre confusedly characterizes the state as both irredeemably
evil and non-political, and yet capable of some good political
activity: “The state supposedly subverts all values and yet he praises
the ‘Americans with Disabilities Act’ for removing obstacles to
‘humane goals.'”44 What this reveals is that, for MacIntyre, the state
can be a bearer of ethical value, at least sometimes. However, if it
is sometimes capable of genuine As moral activity, then it is not
irredeemably evil, as MacIntyre suggests in other places. Breen
notes, “Whether states corrupt values is a matter of contingent
fact, not theoretical generalization.”45 In other words, it is not
clear why, if the state’s moral corruption is only a contingent
phenomenon, it could not be reformed.
Another problematic aspect of MacIntyre’s view of the state
can be seen in the counsel he offers to members of traditional
communities regarding the proper way to deal with the state and
state functionaries. Because the state is a non-moral and selfserving
entity disguising itself as a moral and selfless one,
MacIntyre advises to have as little dealings with it as possible. We
cannot shun the state completely, however, because it provides
goods of effectiveness necessary for the existence and sustenance
of traditionalist communities, such as economic resources and
security from domestic and foreign violence. Thus, traditionalist
communities must “Take from the modern state and modern
corporations no more than what one really needs.”46 The upshot
of MacIntyre’s counsel is, ironically, that traditionalists should
adopt the self-serving, calculative attitude of state functionaries.
Breen notes: “Far from attaining unified lives, virtuous practitioners
must maintain a stark duality of mind, oriented to local
excellence but the canniest of tacticians in their tussles with state
functionaries.”47 The result of such moral schizophrenia can only
be a less robust and integral practice of the virtues of acknowledged
dependence.
These two examples are symptomatic of a fundamental
incoherency in MacIntyre’s notion of the state: “At heart here is
a basic contradiction, the wish for a minimalist state that will,
through some miracle, fulfill the goals of social democratic
welfarism. Collaboration is decried whilst being recommended.”48
If the state can act as a moral agent for the political good, even if
most of the time it does not, then it cannot be characterized as
simply evil, even if it is a necessary evil. Instead of counseling
calculative cunning and withdrawal, which would be the proper
attitude to adopt only when dealing with something irredeemable,
why not encourage the attempt to transform the state into a
location for a politics of the common good? Limiting the scope
of his political vision to non- and sub-state social entities would
only make sense if it were a priori impossible to extend it any
further, but MacIntyre has given us no adequate reason to think
it is impossible. Breen sees a kind of hypocrisy in MacIntyre’s
thinking, a result, he surmises, of his extreme hostility to the
modern state in virtue of its historical dominance by liberalism.
But the liberal dominance of the state, pernicious as the effects
of this dominance might be, is at least consistent with liberalism’s
socially transformative goals. MacIntyre’s error it to conflates
state politics with liberal politics, but he provides no adequate
reason to think that the connection is a necessary one, even
though it has been an historical one. In short, for Breen there is
nothing incompatible about a state politics of the virtues of
acknowledged dependence. Breen’s critique is powerful, and as
we shall soon see, it is incompatible with MacIntyre’s political
ideal not to involve the state in a politics of virtue.
One might argue that while MacIntyre’s rejection of the possibility
of a state politics of the common good is unnecessary, it is, at
least understandable. Though a more extended area for genuine
moral political activity would be better than a less extended one,
the rejection of a state politics is an acceptable price to pay to
prevent the immoral—but perhaps not inevitably so—nationstates
of contemporary Europe and America from corrupting
nascent communities of virtue too weak to defend themselves.
However, the price might be higher than just the loss of the
possibility of a greater scope for political activity. As I will argue,
the price is the loss of any political good whatsoever. MacIntyre is
so careful not to implicate his communities of virtue in the political
machinations of the state that he renders them non-political and
hence vulnerable to those very machinations he seeks to avoid. If
the state is as politically powerful as MacIntyre suggests, and if this
political power will inevitably be used for evil, then why not equip
sub-state communities with some measure of political power to
defend themselves, and to ensure they receive the political goods
they need, such as freedom from external and internal oppression
and violence? Yet, if we examine carefully the constitution of the
MacIntyrean political community, it is incapable of providing
these goods—for it is not really a political constitution at all.
If Breen is correct in his claim that the modern state is
capable of becoming a genuinely political entity, then MacIntyre’s
small-scale political communities should share some of its political
features, such as the authority of law. Yet, because MacIntyre
rejects the political nature of the state, he rejects any state-like
political features in his ideal political communities, and one is left
wondering how genuinely political these communities really are:
The unavoidable question is: What’s political about MacIntyre’s
“politics of local community”? . . . he writes that a community is
“political” insofar as “it is constituted by a type of practice through
which other types of practice are ordered.” He calls this a polis.
But the Greek polis embodied concepts of law, authority, and
citizenship—notions seemingly absent from the local communities
that MacIntyre is calling political.49
Even though it would seem that communities require law,
authority, and citizenship to be genuine political bodes, nowhere
does MacIntyre describe his ideal political communities as affording
the privileges of citizenship, possessing representative
authority, or having any framework of coercive law. The latter is
the most significant, since, at least for Aristotle and Aquinas, law
is an essential component of any political entity. The state in
MacIntyre’s view, however, is the only institution empowered to
make and execute law; but, as Hibbs points out, even if local
communities were permitted the power to make laws, how could
they compete with the enormous law-making power of the state?
Within the confines of the nation-state with its invasive and
seemingly omnipresent legal apparatus, what sort of legislative
self-determination can a local community have? Even if it decides
how to allocate resources and enact local laws, its police force is
still fundamentally committed to enforcing the law of the nation
and its economy is largely dependent on the national and increasingly
the international economy.50
MacIntyre expects his local communities of virtue to order and
rank goods and practices for individual community members, but
their freedom to do so is at the behest of a dangerous and practically
omnipotent state. MacIntyre makes no provision to equip these
communities with the political sovereignty to enact such orderings
with any level of self-sufficiency and autonomy from the state.51
In short, because MacIntyre’s political communities are
insufficiently political, they cannot guarantee the accomplishment
of the moral goods MacIntyre desires of them. Without
possessing the power of law and sovereign self-rule, they can
neither effectively order the practices and goods within their
dominions, nor order the “practice of practices” that is politics
itself. Rather, it is the law-making and law-enforcing state, the
only institution invested with actual political power, that ultimately
orders these by default, and, according to MacIntyre, its
overarching “ordering” of the goods, practices, and communities
under its dominion is inevitably disordered. Beiner pointedly
remarks: “The problem here, of course, is that MacIntyre is left
with no possible site for overarching political community compatible
with the basic condition of modernity—he offers
Aristotelianism without a polis.”52
Paradoxically, the political impotence of the MacIntyrean
community can be traced to the political impotence MacIntyre
imputes to the modern state. If the state is, in reality, not
politically impotent, for it does indeed embody a conception of
the good, however mistaken, and because this conception of the
good inevitably wields an architectonic political influence over all
the institutions under its purview, due to the power of law and its
monopoly of coercive power, for MacIntyre to counsel moral
communities to simply reject the state, or at most, to adopt a selfserving,
utilitarian relationship with it, is to ensure only that the
state will have its political way, as it were, with these communities.
Since the state’s conception of the good is a false one, then no
community, regardless of the vehemence with which it rejects this
false conception of the good, can hope to remain immune from its
influence. The only recourse against a state gone bad, as it were,
would be either to attempt to reform it, or to protect one’s
community through the counter-use of effective political power;
however, neither of these does MacIntyre’s political vision endorse
or make possible. As Breen points out, MacIntyre’s refusal
to grant to the nation-state the capacity of moral activity threatens
the moral capacity of those institutions to which he does:
The state, like any other institution, cannot but embody values.
Living in a network of networks means the character of the
nation-state (liberal, socialist, or fascist) determines to a real
extent what can go on in its constituent towns and villages.
Consequently, liberty and the ability to act persist only when
secured on every level of political and social organization. And
this suggests, too, that MacIntyre and his liberal opponents are
similarly wrong to exclude ethos from national and supranational
political structures, it being an ethos of a highly specific sort that
sustains freedom and sets boundaries to what can and cannot be
done in the name of the common good.53
We have argued that while MacIntyre may desire the social
conditions for the thriving of Thomistic-constituted communities,
he does not effectively prescribe these conditions. In rejecting
the consolidation of any conception of the good within the
social structure of the state, MacIntyre sustains an otherwise
reformable tyrannical liberal state, he secures the political impotence
of just those moral communities that could transform this
tyranny into a moral force for good, and he prevents the traditionhomogenous
communities of virtue from preserving their moral
integrity, self-sufficiency, and political autonomy. Jonathan
Chaplin summarizes the problem with MacIntyre’s rejection of a
normative state: “It [The MacIntyrean ideal community] is parasitic
upon the existence of a ‘regime,’ a democratic political
community. It lacks an account of the nature and normative
purpose of the state as the institutional context which alone makes
political advocacy, whether agonistic or consensual, possible in
the first place.”54
Breen claims that “no theoretical obstacles prevent him
[MacIntyre] from recognizing that a prime way to render the state
less harmful is to transform it from within.”55 As I will argue,
however, there is a theoretical obstacle to MacIntyre’s prescribing
the inner transformation of the state. MacIntyre’s main
critique of liberalism is its inherent dishonesty. Claiming in
theory to be neutral of any particular tradition in order that it may
facilitate the freedom of all, in practice it is a particular tradition
that severely limits the freedom of others. Claiming in theory to
secure a culture, public square, and political order open to all
traditions because embodying, recognizing, and confessing none,
in practice it permits nothing but its own particular conception of
the good to be embodied, recognized, and confessed as authoritative
in culture, public debate, and law. MacIntyre’s primary
strategy against liberalism is to expose its dishonesty. By successfully
narrating the tradition liberalism denies itself to be, by
unmasking the existence and revealing the incoherence of the
liberal conception of the good, and by showing that its tradition
and conception of the good has been embodied socially, culturally,
economically, and politically in the modern nation-states of
the west to the detriment of the freedom and moral integrity of
their inhabitants, MacIntyre demonstrates the need to search for
a non-liberal alternative, both in theory and in practice.
MacIntyre presents his model of the tradition-homogenous
community as the best possible practical alternative to liberalism,
but is it truly the best? As we shall see, there is even doubt as to
whether it is even a genuine alternative to liberalism at all. On the
surface, there is a superficial similarity between liberalism and
MacIntyreanism in that they both restrict the extent of the
consolidation of their beliefs within social structures. However,
the differing extent of their social restrictions, and especially the
radically different rationales they employ for such restrictions,
reveals the similarity to be only superficial. MacIntyre rejects the
consolidation of his beliefs within the political structure of the
state and the large-scale social structure of the nation not because
he rejects the social embodiment of conceptions of the good, but
because he judges that the level of tradition-homogenous consensus
required for such social embodiment, and hence genuine
moral and political activity, cannot exist within the institution of
the modern state and within the large-scale social structure of the
nation as a whole. The liberal, however, rejects the consolidation
of beliefs within all social structures, being unwilling even to
consolidate them within small-scale social structures, because he
considers social consensus on any particular conception of the
good to be both undesirable and impossible. For the liberal, any
social embodiment of a particular conception of the good is more
of a threat than a help to the individual’s exercise of the freedom
to choose and live out a conception of the good on the overwhelmingly
more important individual level. MacIntyre, on the contrary,
endorses without hesitation the social embodiment of
conceptions of the good because he judges that the ability to
choose and live out a conception of the good requires the good’s
social embodiment, and the individual’s active participation in
that social embodiment.
However, notwithstanding their considerable differences in
scope and rationale, both liberalism and MacIntyreanism are
identical in their rejection of large-scale social embodiment of
conceptions of the good, either within the institution of the state
or in the culture at large. It is, of course, quite clear why liberalism
rejects social embodiment of conceptions of the good; it comports
with its overall procedural and non-metaphysical logic.
However, it is not clear why MacIntyreanism rejects is, for it does
not seem to comport with the overall logic of its moral theory.
Regardless of the fact that liberal conceptions of the good happen
to be, against the explicit logic of liberalism, socially embodied on
a large-scale level in virtually all of the contemporary western
nation-states, and embodied to such an extent as to exclude other
social embodiments, these de facto social embodiments do not
square with its theoretically individualist and epistemologically
skeptical theory. Its unwillingness to admit this discrepancy is
problematic, but at least its explicit prescription of the social
disembodiment of all particular conceptions of the good is consistent
with its overall theory. One would not expect someone
denying an interpretation of the good as inherently social, as
encountered, learned, and embraced only through social relationships,
naturally to desire that conceptions of the good actually be
socially embodied. The pertinent question, then, is not why
liberalism endorses the social restriction of conceptions of the
good, but why MacIntyre does. Is it logical for MacIntyre to limit
his aspirations for the social embodiment of conceptions of the
good to small-scale communities with virtually no political power?
Is it consistent with his overall theory to reject large-scale social
embodiment within the culture-at-large and the state?
If one believes a particular, socially embodied conception of
the good to be true, and the practices in accord with this good to
be alone capable of perfecting human beings, then would it not be
consistent with this belief to desire this conception of the good to
have the widest extent of social embodiment possible? The liberal,
who at best would plead ignorance of any knowledge of the “true”
conception of the good, at second best, would deny that anyone
knows which conception of the good is true, and at worst, that the
good even exists at all, should logically desire that any particular
conception of the good attain as little social embodiment as
possible. To be consistent, he should desire either no social
embodiment at all, or at least an equality of social embodiments
of the good in a social structure in which no conception of the
good could ever gain societal advantage over another. MacIntyre,
however, recognizes not only the existence of one, true conception
of the good, but also the necessity of socially embodied
traditions of rationality for the discovery and attainment of this
human good. Moreover, he identifies the Thomistic tradition of
rationality as the embodiment of this one, true good, and affirms
the necessity of participating in the socially embodied practices of
this tradition for the effective discovery and fullest attainment of
the human good. The logic of MacIntyre’s truth commitments
would seem to dictate a desire for at least the necessary social
conditions for the thriving and multiplying of Thomisticconstituted
small-scale communities.
However, to remain consistent with his commitment to
Thomistic-constituted rationality, one could argue that MacIntyre
should desire more than merely the thriving and multiplying of
Thomistic communities; he should desire that these communities
thrive and multiply more than other traditions and attain more
social embodiment than communities embodying other traditions.
For MacIntyre, all traditions except the Thomistic tradition
are rationally deficient to some extent, and hence incapable of
completely fulfilling the moral desi
