CHAPTER 6

MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC COMMUNITARIANISM

"We know what to do....It does not occur to us to do otherwise."

-- Alasdair MacIntyre (1957, 106)

Where the optimistic communitarians take for granted the unquestioned

status of liberal norms, suggesting that only the individualistic

understanding of these norms embedded in liberal ontology (Sandel,

Taylor) or epistemology (Walzer) stands in the way of their full

implementation, MacIntyre is not so sanguine. This is not, however, to

suggest that MacIntyre is any less complacent about the validity of

equal freedom, or any less committed to defending an epistemology that,

by overcoming individualism, will bring equal freedom into existence.

What makes MacIntyre a pessimist is that his alternative to

individualism requires not a change in people's attitudes, but in the

institutional context that shapes their character--a much more

formidable task than merely awakening Americans to the reality of their

"intersubjective being" or to the republican essence of their identity,

as Sandel would do; making Westerners conscious of the social

particularism involved in their nationalism, or of the hypergoods that

constrain their particularism, as Taylor would; or even fundamentally

altering the institutions of distribution, as Walzer would--since the

way Walzer would do so is to appeal to people's already existing

Friedman 243

"shared understandings." For MacIntyre, such solutions are

superficial; and to the extent that they would strengthen the power of

the state, they are steps in the wrong direction.

MacIntyre started out as a Marxist, and he retains the Marxist

de-emphasis, relative to other varieties of "liberal" (in the sense of

the term I have been using), on achieving income equality as a means to

the end of equal freedom. Whereas the point of Rawlsian "primary

goods" is that they are instrumental to whatever ends individuals may

have, and so should be distributed as equally as possible consistently

with increasing the quantity available to the worst off, MacIntyre has

always viewed equal freedom as something much less threatened by

poverty than by interpersonal coercion or manipulation. Therefore,

where the key to the political stratagems of Sandel, Walzer, and Taylor

is found in their critiques of Nozick--their uses of non-individualist

metaphysics to defend social democracy--MacIntyre is and always has

been interested in revolutionizing much more than economic

distribution. Empowering people to pursue their ends is less crucial to

him than ensuring that they do not treat each other as means.

Since the 1960s, MacIntyre believed that a non-coercive community

requires that its members have the same ends, so they need not

manipulate each other to get their way. MacIntyre met the need to

legitimate such a community with a succession of strategic claims

(rarely embroidered with non-strategic argument) for the normative

value of particularist communal ends. These claims are, themselves,

outgrowths of MacIntyre's entirely "political" critique of liberalism

Friedman 244

on the grounds that it makes universal claims that separate facts from

the values--freedom and equality--that he shares with liberals, but

that are, he maintains, ineffective sources of communal moral

authority. MacIntyre would substitute an is-ought bridge consisting of

those communally given ends in which he finds normative authority. Not

only in his intention of solving what he sees as the political weakness

of individualistic liberalism, but in his embrace of liberal values--

albeit with less emphasis on equal economic distribution--MacIntyre's

view is of a piece with those of Taylor, Walzer, and Sandel.

The similarities extend to the likeness of MacIntyre's

intellectual background to that of the other three communitarian

philosophers. Walzer's complacent communitarianism might very

plausibly be seen as a flower of the democratic, anti-Stalinist New

Left. He attended Brandeis University in its great early years of the

mid-1950s, where he studied under such New Left paragons as Irving

Howe, Lewis Coser, and Herbert Marcuse. In this milieu it would be

easy not only to take for granted the unchallengeable legitimacy of

equal freedom-cum-socialism, but to view the question as strategic, not

philosophical: should socialism be pursued in elitist or in democratic

fashion? Sandel, who is younger, received his education when the New

Left was in full bloom, presumably making its liberal normative

assumptions, and its democratic strategic approaches, seem even more

unquestionable. Most importantly, he was a student of Charles Taylor,

whose ideas Sandel would go on to apply to American philosophy and

political history. Taylor, in turn, was present at the creation of the

Friedman 245

British New Left at Oxford in the mid-1950s. There, he contributed to

Universities and Left Review, which in 1960 merged with The New

Reasoner to form New Left Review. Taylor then served on NLR's initial

board--alongside his Oxford friend Alasdair MacIntyre, who had

previously worked on The New Reasoner. MacIntyre had been "a member of

the International Socialists (IS), one of the more intellectually open

and creative of the Far Left groups" (McMylor 1994, 8). He, too, was

immersed from the beginning in a context that took the legitimacy of

equal freedom for granted, and in which the main questions were

strategic, not normative.

Reading Sandel, who cites neither Marx nor Hegel, it is easy to

forget the pivotal role played in the origins of the New Left by the

development of a humanist interpretation of Marx: an interpretation

that brought Marx closer to his Hegelian roots by making individual

freedom, not scientific prediction, the key to Marxism. Taylor was

deeply marked by this interpretation, which prompted him to turn back

to Hegel, whom he de-historicized. This is what renders Taylor's use

of communitarian means to achieve liberal ends incoherent as a truth-

claim, since it deprives his Hegelianism of the historical telos that

ratifies one form of community, the liberal one reached at the end of

history.1

MacIntyre encounters similar difficulties, but he reaches them

directly through Marx. MacIntyre's work has never stopped evolving;

but this renders all the more striking the stability, across the many

stages of his thought, of the liberal-communist ethical commitments

Friedman 246

that, as of After Virtue, stood exactly where they were when he first

found them in Marx.

MacIntyre begins and ends After Virtue with discussions of Marx.

Because these discussions are not uncritical, it is often assumed that

they represent a repudiation of MacIntyre's youthful Marxist

allegiances. But MacIntyre's Marxism was never uncritical. Does this

mean he was never a Marxist? I will not attempt to answer this

question by inquiring into the "essence" of Marxism. I will contend,

however, that the liberal values and the communist vision that animated

the young MacIntyre are intact in MacIntyre's mature communitarianism,

as is a "strategic" approach to justifying them that is just as

politically complacent as that of the optimistic communitarians. If

being a Marxist means accepting Marx's commitment to the proletariat as

the agent of the new society, then MacIntyre was a Marxist for only a

short time; if it means accepting Marx's philosophy of history, then he

was never entirely a Marxist. But if it means dedication to a society

embodying equal freedom by its rejection of capitalism, and to

justifying this society by rejecting "bourgeois philosophy," then

MacIntyre has always been a Marxist, and still was when he produced his

canonical works. The pessimism of these works stemmed from the radical

scope of his communist ambitions, not from any doubts about their

legitimacy.

In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre traces the themes of

the book to two of his preoccupations: first, the conflict between the

historical and the abstract, or in our terms, the particular and the

Friedman 247

universal; second, his ongoing attempt, "since the days when [he] was

privileged to be a contributor to that most remarkable journal The New

Reasoner" in the 1950s, simultaneously to reject both Stalinism and

"the principles of that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism

originated." MacIntyre adds that he "continue[s] to accept much of the

substance of that criticism" (1984a, ix).

This passage demands close attention, for Marx's critique of

liberalism had nothing to do with the liberal aspiration to achieve

freedom for all. Instead, Marx's complaints were that liberal

complicity with capitalism, and the limited liberal definition of

freedom, betrayed liberal normative aspirations. These criticisms,

like the liberal values on which they are based, are shared by

MacIntyre, who goes Marx one better by extending them to Marxism

itself. Although Marxism "is only a marginal preoccupation" of After

Virtue, MacIntyre allows that "the conclusion...embodied in" the book

"is that Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to

which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the

distinctively modern and modernizing world." The implication of these

prefatory remarks, arguably, is that MacIntyre has come to think that

both liberalism and Marxism betray what I have been calling liberal

values.

One indication of this is found in the conclusion of After

Virtue, where MacIntyre considers the "claim that by means of Marxism

the notion of human autonomy can be rescued from its original

individualist formulations and restored within the context of an appeal

Friedman 248

to a possible form of community in which alienation has been overcome,

false consciousness abolished and the values of equality and fraternity

realized." This formulation of the Marxist normative claim takes for

granted the legitimacy of the ideal of equal freedom. MacIntyre

questions only whether Marxism can rescue this ideal from

individualism, and he concludes that it cannot. For Marxism tends to

degenerate "into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or

utilitarianism," due to "a certain radical individualism" that is

"secreted within Marxism from the outset." This radical individualism

is illustrated by Marx's failure to tell us "on what basis" socialist

man "enters into his free association with others....At this key point

in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately

supplied" (1984a, 261).

In identifying the problem with Marxism as the inadequately

specified path to its ideal of free association, MacIntyre assumes the

overriding legitimacy of (MacIntyre quotes Marx) "'a community of free

individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of

the means of production and to various norms of production and

distribution (ibid.)." The defect in Marxism is not the end, but

Marx's failure to explain how to achieve it (ibid.).

MacIntyre concludes his discussion of Marxism by raising a

connected issue, Marx's assumption that capitalism contains the seeds

of its supersession by socialism:

However thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and

Friedman 249

bourgeois institutions may be, [Marxism] is committed

to asserting that within the society constituted by

those institutions, all the human and material

preconditions of a better future are being accumulated.

Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism

is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are

these resources for the future to be derived? (1984a,

262.)

Presumably it is Marx's naive neglect of this question that led him to

omit an explanation of the moral basis for the free association of

socialist man with man. So MacIntyre adds, to his claim that Marxism

degenerates into Kantianism (now dubbed "Weberian social democracy")

and utilitarianism (now labelled "crude tyranny") a third form of

degenerate Marxism: the "Nietzschean fantasy," entertained by Lenin and

Lukacs, that the deficiencies of advanced capitalism can be overcome by

a sort of socialist Ubermensch. The result of Lenin's experiment in

using Marxism as a guide to practice--the Soviet Union--was, according

to MacIntyre, not "in any sense a socialist country....The theory which

was to have illuminated the path to human liberation...in fact led to

darkness" (1984a, 262).

MacIntyre goes on to say that since he accepts the inevitability

of this unfortunate result--given the foundations of Marxian socialism

in capitalism--he is a pessimist. And a Marxist pessimist, MacIntyre

asserts, "would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For

Friedman 250

he would now see no tolerable set of political and economic structures

which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced

capitalism." Thus, although Marxism is "still one of the richest

sources of ideas about modern society," MacIntyre declares that it is

"exhausted as a political tradition" (1984a, emphasis original). From

MacIntyre's pessimism follows his famous conclusion that we are in a

period comparable to the decline of the Roman Empire, in which our task

is to construct "new forms of human community within which the moral

life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might

survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness" (ibid., 263).

There is a certain lack of clarity in MacIntyre's pessimism.

Conceivably, it may be global, such that he is not just claiming that

the moral poverty of capitalism makes it inconceivable that any

"tolerable...political and economic structures" could "replace the

structures of advanced capitalism" (1984a, 262), but that some inherent

unfeasibility of noncapitalist political economic structures makes

advanced capitalism inescapable. But MacIntyre offers no argument to

this effect; and the reasons he cites for his pessimism--the

indictments of Marxism I have just recounted--seem compatible with the

possibility that communism could, at some point in the future, emerge

from a different kind of society than that of advanced capitalism, and

thus gain MacIntyre's support.

Is communism an impossible dream under any circumstances, or

simply under present ones? The latter is much closer to MacIntyre's

view of the truth. MacIntyre's communitarianism is justified, and can

Friedman 251

only be coherently explained, by its role in "supplying the lacuna"

MacIntyre finds in Marxism: its failure to provide the foundation on

which to build a community of free individuals. MacIntyre's project

has always been, and remains, the identification of this foundation.

MacIntyre's Communism

MacIntyre's first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953), published

when he was 24, sets forth the Marxian normative framework that remains

essential to understanding his thought.

The governing ideal of Marxism, as described in this early book,

is of a society in which the freedom of each is compatible with that of

all, inasmuch as the free activity of each is not directed toward ends

that are antagonistic to the ends of his fellows. Each, then,

voluntarily treats his fellows as equals--ends in themselves rather

than means to one's own ends, as MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue

(1984a, 23). MacIntyre does not question the desirability of such a

society. The only question he addresses is how to bring it about. His

initial answer combines Christianity with Lukacs's Hegelian

resuscitation of "strains in Marx's thought whose fullest expression

had been in the Paris manuscripts of 1844" (MacIntyre 1994, 288).

The young MacIntyre follows the young Marx in objecting to

Hegel's rosy picture of the status quo. Hegel's unwarranted "optimism

about the outcome of history" stemmed from his blind acceptance of Adam

Smith's claim that the invisible hand of the market transforms self-

Friedman 252

interest into the public interest; "surely Hegel should have

seen...that rising capitalism did not in fact produce the common good,

but rather the misery of many" (1953, 27). Furthermore, by conceiving

of history as a dialectical progression of conceptual opposites, Hegel

overlooked the concrete sources of social alienation and convinced

himself that contemporary Prussia was the apex of freedom. Still,

MacIntyre endorses "the core of Hegel's thought," which Hegel "takes

from the Bible": "the distinction between man's essence"--freedom--"and

man's existence" (ibid., 28). The flaw in Hegel is his tendency toward

idealization--both of history and of freedom. Just as he comes close

to assuming that to live in Prussia is to be free, he believes that "to

be free...is to understand the laws that necessarily govern nature and

society," a belief with "grave consequences for practice" (ibid., 30).

In short, Hegel's historical metaphysics is to be condemned for

strategic reasons: instead of validating the kind of society MacIntyre

assumes is good, a communist society of true freedom, it indirectly

lays the groundwork for Stalinism.

Rectifying Hegel's metaphysical errors, MacIntyre continues, was

the task of the Left Hegelians, preeminently Ludwig Feuerbach, who put

aside enough of Hegel's scholasticism to return to the young Hegel's

essentially political concerns. Feuerbach accomplished this task by

bringing Hegel down to earth. Man and the universe are not

instantiations of abstract thought patterns; rather, "thinking is a

social activity," and its various forms are (MacIntyre quotes

Feuerbach) "'manifestations or revelations of the human essence.'

Friedman 253

It is worth pausing to notice that MacIntyre takes for granted

the equation of philosophical concreteness with the social, which in

turn reveals what is "normative"--the "human essence." Like Sandel

(1998a, 153 and passim), who equates moral cognitivism with the

cognition of socially constituted ends, MacIntyre gives no argument for

this claim. He simply assumes its truth.

What, then, is the human essence? 'The human essence can only be

found in the unity of man with man,'" or, in MacIntyre's words,

"freedom in community" (MacIntyre 1953, 36, emphasis added). Yet even

Feuerbach is too idealistic, since for him "love is the source of human

community" (ibid., 35). It was left to Marx to find a more realistic

strategy for bringing about communal freedom.

For Marx, too, "the ideal state was to be the expression of the

free society of men" (MacIntyre 1953, 41), but Marx recognized that

neither the Prussian state nor the British economy were realizations of

this ideal. "On the one hand Hegel and Feuerbach have reinterpreted

for him the Christian vision of human freedom in the free society; on

the other hand, he cannot but see the reality of work, degradation and

suffering which is the lot of the majority." Marxism answers two

questions: "How did this contrast arise? And, how is it to be ended?"

(ibid., 45). The answers to both questions revolve around labor.

Heretofore, as MacIntyre glosses Marx, labor has not been enjoyed as a

part of "man's essential humanity, but rather merely [as] an

opportunity to earn a living, a bare physical subsistence, which will

enable him to go on working" (ibid., 51, 50). We do not labor freely,

Friedman 254

but out of necessity; far from embodying equal freedom, the society

built on such labor is torn by antagonisms of interest. MacIntyre

quotes Marx: "'The estrangement of man from his own essential being

means that a man is estranged from others, just as each is estranged

from essential humanity'" (ibid., 51).

Implicit in Marx's view, MacIntyre claims, is Hegel's equation of

the human essence with individual freedom, and a recognition of the

egalitarian pressupositions of freedom. Individual liberty is possible

only where there is a community of interests--which is to say, where

there is communism. When interests are common, as among equals, my

freedom of action does not impede others, nor does theirs impede me:

equality enables freedom. Socialist equality is, in fact, an ethical

but not an economic return to the state of nature:

In the beginning there is simply the community of

men, producing to satisfy their basic needs...living

together in families and working together as need

demands. The bonds between them are the social bonds

of material need and of language. In its [sic]

earliest simplicity man is still largely animal in his

social life. But here the division of labour intervenes.

...It makes of each individual a hunter, a fisherman,

a shepherd and so on, who to maintain his livelihood

must fulfil the demands that the community makes upon

his calling rather than the demands of his own nature.

Friedman 255

Hence we find for the first time a clash between the

interest of the individual and that of the community:

it is the latter interest which takes political form

in the state, an instrument for the coercion of the

individual. (MacIntyre 1953, 62-63)

What communism means, then, is the abolition of the coercion that has

been brought about by the division of labor.

The early Marx saw human beings in their essence as free because

they had no antagonistic interests. Communist society will be natural

--true to the human essence--in that it will reinstate this freedom.

Communist man will not be compelled to labor; instead he will do so

freely, to meet his needs, and the abundance created by the previous

stage of history, capitalism, will make it possible to do so without

falling into a division of labor and of interests, with the attendant

hierarchical and inegalitarian power relationships. Under communism,

men will once again be able to "deal with other men, neither as with

capitalists nor as with proletarians, but as with men"--beings whose

freedom does not conflict with community because the latter embodies

concretely what was in Feuerbach only an idea: "philanthropy, love of

men" (MacIntyre 1953, 55).

What, then, is the young MacIntyre's criticism of Marx?

Marx, according to MacIntyre, failed to recognize that the

ethical imperative at the heart of his vision--the impetus to equal

freedom-- comes from Christian myth. Feuerbach, MacIntyre (1953, 36)

Friedman 256

noted, in positing man's essence as "freedom in community," had

"retain[ed] the biblical conception of human nature" as essentially

free. But in trying to "rid [Christianity] of myth," he had

sidestepped the question of what foundation could otherwise undergird

"the true community of Feuerbach's humanistic version of Christianity."

Marx's attempt to expel religion from his system similarly deprived it

of its foundations: how can he justify a free society simply by

describing historical progress toward it? The attempt to do so also

robbed Marxism of plausibility when its historical predictions were

falsified. This, in turn, transformed Marxism into a force for evil,

since it required Marxists to impose an oppressive orthodoxy on

themselves in order to keep on fighting for a future that was patently

failing to materialize. In short, like Hegel and then Feuerbach, Marx

had failed to provide an effective strategy for achieving freedom.

MacIntyre condemns Marx for writing, in The German Ideology, that

"'the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,

but real premises...verified in a purely empirical way'" (MacIntyre

1953, 69). To this, MacIntyre responds that morality

can never have the kind of certainty that scientific

method can give us. Morality is always to some degree

ambiguous, metaphysics a commitment that can never be

fully justified. The tragedy of Marxism is that it

wished to combine the scope of metaphysics with the

certainty of natural sciences. It was therefore forced

Friedman 257

on the one hand to reject religion...and on the other

hand to oversimplify all questions of technique. (Ibid.,

71.)

What MacIntyre means by "technique" is what he will, nearly 30 years

later, single out as the lacuna in Marxism: the absence of a plausible

path to a free society. Marx predicts that freedom will be achieved,

but MacIntyre points out that such a prediction requires, for its

realization, that a great many human beings will first accept the

theory behind it as the motive for their action. That this will

necessarily occur is simply an unwarranted assumption, especially since

"those structures of power which man in society has created" are too

strong to be assumed away. There is moreover "an unpredictability" to

history that makes it resistant to "human rationality" (ibid., 71). In

short, Marx's error is that he "wishes now to speak of what is rather

than what ought to be." Marx's decision "to eliminate from his

doctrines the last traces of the biblical and Hegelian theme of

estrangement...leads Marx to deny any moral foundation to a vision

whose whole origin lay in moral concerns" (ibid., 69-70, emphases

original). This decision leads Marx to substitute prediction for

prophecy.

Prophecy is a call to action, a vision of what the future could

be, based on a recognition of present estrangement. The Paris

Manuscripts were prophetic; The German Ideology and Capital are not.

"Prophecy does not bear a date, prediction does. Moral denunciation

Friedman 258

does not wait on the completion of processes, prediction must" (1953,

75). What happens if, on the predicted date, capitalism does not

collapse? Either Marxism is abandoned, as it was by Germany's Social

Democratic Party at the end of the nineteenth century; or it is made

into an orthodoxy. In the latter case, the process of defending the

prediction from falsification turns the doctrine justifying the

prediction into an object of veneration. As well, the scope of

salvation is narrowed down from humanity as a whole to the ranks of

those who accept the doctrine. This narrowing eventually sanctioned

Lenin's use of "a small highly-disciplined group bringing the truth to

the masses" (ibid., 102, 103). "The concomitant of orthodoxy is the

persecution of heretics" (ibid., 103).

Prophecy as the Is-Ought Bridge

Christianity, MacIntyre maintains in 1953, is a corrective to "the

worst in Marxism." Far from being, as Marx assumed, a superstitious

explanation of the natural phenomena investigated by science,

Christianity is a critique "of every social order," based on the

recognition "that no human order can ever be adequate to the perfection

which God ordains and which is displayed in Jesus Christ" (1953, 77).

True religion perceives "the corruptibility of communist society as

clearly as that of any other society. Such a religion can see the

reality of redemption only in a society which is able continually to

question and to criticise in radical terms its own achievements"

(ibid., 83).

Friedman 259

Tragically, the "a priori canons of rationality" (MacIntyre 1953,

84) that Marx inherited from the Enlightenment via Hegel and Feuerbach

led him to equate the 'free association of producers' under communism

with the existence of "some standard of rationality and intelligibility

to which human relations should conform," a standard that is to result

in "'perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations as between man and

man and as between man and nature'" (ibid., 85, quoting Marx). Because

"religious beliefs do not accord with these standards," relying as they

do on "myth and image," Marx repudiated religion indiscriminately. But

"human relations have in them something more than the merely human,

something which demands that allegiance for which only God can ask"

(ibid.). This something is invoked "when a man prays," for he then

"envisages himself in a dramatic, rather than a speculative,

relationship to God. The drama which he envisages takes the form of

religious myth," and religious myth inspires "the vision of a unifying

pattern in history" (ibid., 86, 87). Such a vision is the basis of

prophecy and therefore of what is good in Marxism: "Marxism begins with

the mythological vision of the good society which it finds in

Christianity" (ibid., 88). In his "transition from prophecy to

prediction," Marx lost sight of the fact that "some things can only be

said obscurely in extended metaphors" (ibid., 89).

It may seem that the distance between the young and the mature

MacIntyre is even greater than that which MacIntyre thinks separates

the young and the mature Marx. Social practices, virtues, and

traditions play no role in Marxism: An Interpretation. But that is

Friedman 260

just the point. MacIntyre does not begin from the preoccupations that

would signal a philosophical communitarian in the making. His

communitarianism is eventually devised as an initial solution to the

strategic problems of a political theory, Marxism. These problems

ultimately derive from Marxist concessions to the same enemy that

preoccupies MacIntyre in After Virtue: emotivism. And the solution to

them is narrative, not because narratives make our lives satisfying

wholes, as one might be tempted to conclude from After Virtue, but

because narratives convert facts into values.

"Moral judgments," the young MacIntyre writes, "announce our

decisions. The problem is, what kind of argument do we use to solve

problems of decision? The emotive theory suggests that it is all a

question of feelings and that no rational pattern can be discerned in

such an argument." But emotivism rests on a disjunction between facts

and values that is disproven by "the description of the novelist or the

dramatist," (1953, 114), which

is always itself the evaluation....It is not the

case that we read Engels' description of England in

1844 and then draw the conclusion that this system

ought to be condemned. Any such conclusion would be

superfluous. The description itself is the

condemnation. (Ibid., 114-15.)

Now we gain a clearer idea of what MacIntyre meant by comparing

Friedman 261

prayer to a drama, and by chiding Marx for shunning the extended

metaphors in which alone some things can be adequately said. The is-

ought gap presupposed by the emotivist is bridged by the prophet or the

novelist, who confers meaning on the world by picturing it as a

dramatic narrative. In the context of such a narrative, moral

obligations follow directly (if not always unambiguously) from facts.

When Marx decided to speak only of what is, not what ought to be, the

problem was not that he spoke of what is, but that he spoke only of

what is. We do need to start with what is, but we need to derive from

it what ought to be, and Marx forgot this when he exchanged prophecy

for prediction.

The nonhuman "something" to which we appeal in prayer makes

morality compatible with reason, albeit a different form of reason than

the a priori, transparent, Enlightenment version. The nonhuman

something is not God but a religious myth, a normative narrative, which

has moral authority because it is built on what "is." This myth is

what gave rise to the young Marx's critique of capitalism. MacIntyre's

first attack on emotivism, and his narrative alternative to it, spring

from his effort to remedy the defect of Marxism by returning to Marx's

prophetic inspiration.

The defect of Marxism is that its emancipatory, egalitarian

aspirations have somehow resulted in tyranny. Marxism turns out, in

short, to be a worse-than-ineffective strategy for achieving the "true

community" of freedom. The young MacIntyre's explanation of this

problem, and his solution to it, rest on his discernment in Marx's

Friedman 262

thought of a scientistic deviation from its religious origins, which

produces in Marxism a gap between what is and what ought to be. In

turn, MacIntyre develops an understanding of religion as able to close

the is-ought gap by deriving value from fact in the form of myth. This

makes religion profoundly antiscientistic, although not antiscientific.

Science uses facts to predict; religion uses facts to prescribe. The

problem with prediction is not that it is an attempt to bridge the is-

ought gap. Rather, the problem is that it subordinates the ought to

the is, in the form of the is that will be. Confidence in what will be

slides easily into orthodoxy and tyranny when history does not

cooperate. Reconfiguring Marxism as a prophetic vision, then, will

rescue Marx's normative impulses from the Stalinist form they had taken

by MacIntyre's day. A prophetic vision bridges the is-ought gap in a

way that avoids the subversion of communal freedom that follows from a

predictive is-ought bridge.

As early 1953, then, we can find in MacIntyre's thought a number

of suggestions for the proper interpretation of After Virtue.

Foremost, of course, is MacIntyre's endorsement of the vision of

human freedom that he finds explicit in the young Marx and implicit in

the mature Marx. MacIntyre objects to Marx's attempt to predict the

future, but not to the kind of future he predicts. From the very

beginning, MacIntyre embraces the liberal ends pursued by Marx while

criticizing the means of obtaining them: Marx's philosophy of history.

Second, MacIntyre's unquestioning adherence to Marx's normative

vision enables him to subordinate epistemic to strategic

Friedman 263

considerations. Taking for granted the legitimacy of his communist

aspirations, the only question becomes how to enact communism, not how

to justify it. It is obvious to MacIntyre that capitalism is unjust:

merely to describe it is to prescribe its antithesis. Even to have to

condemn capitalism "would be superfluous. The description itself is

the condemnation" (1953, 115). By giving certain facts (such as the

conditions in Manchester described by Engels) the aura of values,

MacIntyre's normative self-assurance will make him a lifelong builder

of is-ought bridges. These bridges are a means to a predetermined end,

equal freedom as embodied in communism. The means to that end are as

indisputably true as the end is good.

Immersed in the world of British communism, MacIntyre is

understandably preoccupied with differences between advocates of

various strategies for achieving the socialist utopia. By 1953 he has

already chosen the side of the anti-Stalinists, so he tailors his

philosophical conclusions to produce a new form of Left politics that

will bring communism without repression. If the root of Stalinism is

Marx's proclivity to predict the future, then a different form of is-

ought bridge must be sought--and if found, it must be valid, not just

expedient: that is the nature of is-ought bridges. They collapse the

distance between valid ends and expedient means.

In 1953, MacIntyre locates the bridge in religious prophecy,

since it retains enough of a normative edge, derived from the

perfection of God, to serve as a platform for criticizing Stalinist

orthodoxy. In truth, however, this means that the "ought" overwhelms

Friedman 264

the "is"--as, conversely, when the bridge is predictive, the "is"

obliterates the "ought." Religious prophecy of the sort MacIntyre has

in mind is, in fact, "moral denunciation" (1953, 75) that is so self-

assured that it presumes to be a mere statement of fact. No mere

statement of fact, however, reveals what ought to be--although it can

reveal the complacency of the prophet who equates his norms with facts.

Third, MacIntyre's initial critique of emotivism is as strategic

as is his proposed "factual" alternative. MacIntyre condemns emotivism

precisely because it would call the morally obvious into question.

Certainly MacIntyre's opposition to emotivism, at least as of 1953, has

nothing to do with any worries about psychological consequences that

might follow from value uncertainty, worries that such commentators as

Holmes (1993, 92) detect in MacIntyre's mature thought. And the idea

of narrative that reappears in After Virtue is, when first employed in

Marxism: An Interpretation, unrelated to any psychological benefits

associated with being able to view one's life as a unified whole.

Indeed, narrative unity is, at least in 1953, wholly compatible

with the possibility that different people's views of moral truth will

be incommensurable with each other. It is even compatible with

relativism. The purely strategic foundations of MacIntyre's early

endorsement of is-ought bridges (as opposed to the truth-conclusions

MacIntyre unwarrantedly draws from them), like the strategic

foundations of his parallel condemnation of emotivism, are revealed

definitively by the subjectivism that afflicts his alternative to

emotivism. This comes out in an essay MacIntyre published in 1957,

Friedman 265

"The Logical Status of Religious Belief," a critique of that variety of

emotivism embodied in the logical positivist thesis that religion, as

distinguished from morality, merely expresses emotions.

MacIntyre (1957, 189) answers this form of emotivism by asserting

that the truth-claims made in the course of worship "always occur as

part of a total narration in which a dramatic wholeness of vision is

presented." Such narratives, "commonly denominated myths...are

stories...with a plot and a culmination," in which "God figures as the

predominating character" (ibid., 189-90). To place God in the

narrative in this way, each religion relies on "an authoritative

criterion" that has "no logical justification outside" itself (ibid.,

199, 198). In accepting this authority, "we discover some point in the

world at which we worship, at which we accept the lordship of something

not ourselves" (ibid., 202). Echoing Sartre and explicitly following

Kierkegaard, MacIntyre writes that "the only apologia for a religion is

to describe its content in detail: and then either a man will find

himself brought to say 'My Lord and my God' or he will not" (ibid.,

205). There can be no justification of religion apart from such a

radical individual choice; religion is "beyond argument" (ibid., 211).

This is, it seems, why MacIntyre had earlier juxtaposed, against Marx's

scientism, the uncertainty and ambiguity of ethico-religious judgments.

Prophecy as an is-ought bridge allows for a multitude of conflicting

moral codes based on individuals' acceptance of a variety of competing

prophecies, each with its own narrative authority.

MacIntyre has, in short, produced an individualistic version of

Friedman 266

pure, relativistic communitarianism. The individual rather than the

community is the one whose perception of morally charged facts is

unchallengeable, making disagreements between individuals unbridgeable.

This brings out an instructive aspect of MacIntyre's thought: its

tendency toward relativism precedes, and is independent of, his

communitarianism. Communitarianism is but one version of the

relativism that flows from the equation of facts with values--at least

when the facts in question are subject to plural interpretation.

In the schema implicit in MacIntyre's 1957 paper, each

individual's choice among contradictory religious commitments is both

arbitrary and valid. The validity of the individuals' potentially

contradictory choices, however, is proved not by any argument about the

nature of religious or moral truth, but by the assumption that morality

is an obvious matter, akin to the perception of a fact. By

generalizing his own moral complacency into a general account of moral

epistemology--by moving from a specific moral conviction about the

indubitable evil of capitalism to a generalized prophetic alternative

to emotivism--MacIntyre goes beyond the strategic purpose of his

critique of Marxian predictivism, but at the price of inadvertently

relativizing all values. On the one hand, prophetically deriving value

from fact serves to allow dissent from Stalinist orthodoxy, the better

to achieve the unquestioned goal of communist freedom. On the other

hand, by failing to perceive this move as strategic, MacIntyre makes a

truth-claim that, ironically, produces relativism.

Friedman 267

Essential Desire as the Is-Ought Bridge

In Marxism: An Interpretation, MacIntyre had attributed the

degeneration of Marxism to Marx's shift from prophecy to prediction.

In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," a two-part article published in

1958 and 1959 in The New Reasoner, MacIntyre blames this shift not on

Marx, but on Stalin's response to Marx's failure to describe the

transition to socialism. In order to make the transition happen,

Stalin built a socialist economy on the basis of the tyrannical

"manipulation of the economic and industrial arrangements of society"

(MacIntyre 1958, 97). In MacIntyre's earlier view, Stalinist tyranny

is a defense against the falsification of Marxist predictions; now it

is an attempt to make good on them.

It cannot possibly be a successful attempt, though, since the

point of socialism "is a freeing of our relationships from the kind of

determination and constraint hitherto exercised upon them....Socialism

cannot be impersonally manipulated into existence, or imposed on those

whose consciousness resists, precisely because socialism is the victory

of consciousness over its previous enslavement" (1958, 99-100). While

in MacIntyre's earlier view, Marxist inevitabilism was merely liable to

be false and thence--through the indirect and contingent process by

which orthodoxy was defended--to result in tyranny, MacIntyre now

argues that inevitabilism is necessarily antithetical to Marx's

emancipatory vision, since it rests on deterministic predictions based

Friedman 268

on "laws governing human development independently of human wills and

aspirations," whereas the socialist era "is to be characterised

precisely as the age in which human wills and aspirations take charge

and are no longer subservient to economic necessity and to the law-

bound inevitability of the past" (ibid., 100).

A Marxism that attempts to liberate "human wills and

aspirations," however, suggests a new, nonreligious bridge over the is-

ought gap. Previously, religious prophecy revealed to us the normative

import of facts, in the same way novels and prayers supposedly do; but

this suggested a radically individualist view of the translation of

facts into values--one that could issue in interpretations of the facts

that might be at odds not only with each other, but with the

interpretations MacIntyre finds so obvious. Now MacIntyre replaces

religious narrative with a more strategically useful is-ought bridge:

"the more permanent and long-run of human desires" (1959, 90).

According to "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," the moral vision

of free community springs naturally from these permanent desires; the

only reason this is not obvious to us is that we live in a society that

frustrates and even remolds these desires. In capitalist society,

then, desire seems "purely individual" and self-interested; "desire as

a driving force is stripped of all those qualities which unite men,"

and morality comes to be seen as an oppressive but necessary restraint

on anarchic desire, just as on another level the social contract

restrains anarchic individuals (MacIntyre 1959, 93). Under capitalism

even Christians come to accept the inevitability of "inequality and

Friedman 269

disunity" instead of being scandalized by them; "human rights" are

proclaimed, yet are thought to be compatible with "poverty and

exploitation" (ibid., 94).

Under current conditions we fail to see that what we really

desire is what we now assume contradicts desire: morality. What we

really wish is "to be fundamentally at one with mankind" (1959, 98).

Once the desire for social unity has been liberated in us, we shall be

able to live together in complete freedom, not only because we will

lack any interest, originating in the division of labor, that would be

served by treating another as our means; but because we will be

informed by an overpowering inborn motive to refrain from such

oppressive behavior.

The desire for unity is not an arbitrary preference: our "common

shared humanity" is a fact (MacIntyre 1959, 94). We discover this fact

not through individual commitment but by participating in "the history

of class-struggle"--that is, "the experience of human equality and

unity that is bred in industrial working-class life" (ibid., 95).

"When Communist workers meet, they have as first aim

theory, propaganda and so on. But they take for their

own at the same time and by this token a new need, the

need for society, and what seems a means has become an

end." So Marx. One meets the anarchic individualist

desires which a competitive society breeds in us, by a

rediscovery of the deeper desire to share what is common

Friedman 270

in humanity, to be divided neither from them nor from

oneself, to be a man. And in this discovery moral rules

reappear as having point. For their content can now be

seen as important in correcting our short term

selfishness, and thus helping to release desire.

(Ibid.)

Capitalism provides a form of life in which men

rediscover...that what they want most is what they

want in common with others; and...that certain

ways of sharing human life are indeed what they

most desire. (Ibid.)

Deriving norms from our historically revealed permanent desires

not only requires MacIntyre to repudiate the almost existentialist

understanding of human value acquisition evident just a year earlier,

in "The Logical Status of Religious Belief"; it enables him, by doing

so, to link his now-disowned existentialist subjectivism to

individualism; to liberalism (as an individualistic and a

universalistic ideology); to emotivism; and to Stalinism. "Notes from

the Moral Wilderness" therefore suggests the possibility that

MacIntyre's mature critiques of emotivism, liberalism, and Marxism are

compatible with an overaching communist (but anti-Stalinist) normative

and philosophical framework. For in this essay MacIntyre is able to

group together "liberals" and Stalinists on the grounds that, as

Friedman 271

emotivists, they fail to bridge the is-ought gap--unlike true

communists, who recognize the normativity of our permanent desires.

In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," MacIntyre's immediate

targets are those ex-communist liberals who, like Leszek Kolakowski,

"repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle" (1958, 90).

Where "the Stalinist identifies what is morally right with what is

actually going to be the outcome of historical development," swallowing

up "the 'ought' of principle...in the 'is' of history,"

the moral critic puts himself outside history as a

spectator. He invokes his principles as valid

independently of the course of historical events.

...The 'ought' of principle is completely external

to the 'is' of history....The question of the course

of history, of what is actually happening and the

question of what ought to happen are totally

independent questions. (Ibid., 91.)

Thus, "the moral critic's standpoint" is "a kind of photographic

negative of Stalinism." But what clinches the case against Kolakowski

is that he mirrors not only Stalinism but "the pattern of liberal

morality which prevails in our society. For it is of the essence of

the liberal tradition that morality is taken to be autonomous" (ibid.).

It cannot be overemphasized that the "liberalism" MacIntyre has

in mind, as in all his subsequent work, is not the belief in the

Friedman 272

desirability of individual freedom. It is instead the moral

epistemology, which he attributes in 1959 (89) to Kant, that holds

individuals to be radically free in choosing their moral commitments:

the view that "in the end our most general and ultimate principles

...stand beyond any rational justification"--particularly beyond "any

appeal to facts, historical or otherwise." It is the view that in

exercising our freedom, "we cannot argue, we can only choose. And our

choice is necessarily arbitrary in the sense that we cannot give

reasons for choosing one way rather than another" (ibid., 92). The

"liberalism" MacIntyre now attacks is, in short, very close to being

his own position from 1953 to 1957, when he had equated true

rationality with the embrace of religious myth. The key difference is

that MacIntyre had grounded this radical decisionism on the

individual's normative interpretation of "facts," while MacIntyre now

condemns liberal decisionism as being ungrounded by any facts because

of its individualism.

The liberal sees himself as choosing his values.

The Marxist sees himself as discovering them.

He discovers them as he rediscovers fundamental

human desire; this is a discovery he can only make

in company with others. The ideal of human

solidarity, expressed in the working-class

movement, only has point because of the fact of

human solidarity which comes to light in the

Friedman 273

discovery of what we want. (Ibid., 96.)

Here MacIntyre can once again be seen to project onto the world his

confidence in the justice of communism, such that it is not a value he

chooses but one that, as it were, forces itself upon him. "We discover

rather than choose where we stand as men with particular aspirations at

a particular point in history" (1959, 97), and this discovery, like the

unearthing of an empirical fact, gives MacIntyre a crucial strategic

advantage over the prophetic is-ought bridge he proposed in 1953: it

catches Kolakowskian liberals in the same net as Stalinists.

To do so, it identifies both schools with an "emotivist" failure

to link facts and values. On the one hand, Stalinist emotivism is

undesirable because it traduces equal freedom. Driven only by the

desire to achieve the predicted future, the Stalinist uses any means

necessary to get there. In practice Stalinist "means-end morality"

leads to an unleashing of "desire as it is, random and anarchic,

seeking power and immediate pleasure only too often"--a form of "crude

utilitarianism" that sacrifices living human beings in the name of the

inevitable future (1958, 95; 1959, 98; ibid.). On the other hand, the

liberal version of emotivism is undesirable because its protests

against Stalinism are ineffectual. The liberal, according to

MacIntyre, turns "'ought' into a kind of nervous cough with which we

accompany what we hope will be the more impressive of our injunctions"

--rendering the declamations of "the liberal moral critic of

Stalinism...unintelligible"--and thus void of persuasive power--to

Friedman 274

those who have chosen different ultimate values (1959, 90, 96). In

short, the individualistic version of the is-ought bridge that

MacIntyre had himself advocated as recently as 1957 is now condemned

for being unable to persuade other individuals of desirability. The

"fragility" of "the ex-Communist" Kolakowski's "appeal to moral

principle," according to MacIntyre, "lies in the apparently arbitrary

nature of that appeal. Whence come these standards by which Stalinism

is judged and found wanting and why should they have authority over

us?" (1958, 90-91). The problem, in MacIntyre's mind, is the

appearance, not the reality, of arbitrariness, since that is what

renders Kolakowski's liberalism impotent. But like the other

communitarians, MacIntyre has a regrettable tendency to confuse

strategically inconvenient appearances with philosophical defects, and

strategic remedies with metaphysical improvements.

The moral epistemology common to Stalinists and liberals alike,

according to MacIntyre, is politically counterproductive. In

attempting "to treat his fundamental moral principles as without any

basis," MacIntyre writes, the "believer in the autonomy of morality"

claims "that neither moral utterance nor moral action can be vindicated

by reference to desires or needs. The 'ought' of morality is utterly

divorced from the 'is' of desire"; liberal emotivism renders morality

"unintelligible as a form of human action" because it makes "our moral

judgments appear like primitive taboos, imperatives which we just

happen to utter" (1959, 89-90).

It is important to notice not only the strategic motivation of

Friedman 275

MacIntyre's rejection of emotivism, but the strategic foundation of his

alternative to it. His claim that "it is obvious" that divorcing is

from ought makes morality "unintelligible" (1959, 90) is credible only

to the extent that one finds the derivation of values from facts

through participation in class struggle plausible; and the only thing

that renders this derivation plausible is belief in the obvious

desirability of its normative upshot: communism. MacIntyre finds in

"permanent human desires" for what I have been calling a "liberal"

society a way to condemn Stalinism without abandoning communism--and

without ceding to Kolakowski a supposedly individualistic basis for

reaching anti-Stalinist conclusions, since this basis seems powerless

to bring about the obviously desirable utopia. But the conclusion that

the permanent desires are "moral absolutes" (granting that they exist)

is warranted only by MacIntyre's prevenient dedication to communism

(ibid., 96). Thus, in asserting that "the separation of morality from

history, from desire discovered through the discovery of that common

human nature which history shows as emerging, leaves morality without

any basis" (ibid., 97), MacIntyre presupposes what is at issue: whether

such a desire would provide a sound basis for moral judgments in the

first place.

As far as I can determine, MacIntyre only twice2 in his entire

career tries to argue for the validity of an is-ought bridge in a way

that does not substitute strategic for epistemic considerations. The

second attempt is presented in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

(1988), and will be discussed below. The first attempt occurs in After

Friedman 276

Virtue's justly maligned treatment of such "functional concepts" as

"watch" and "farmer." "We define" such concepts, MacIntyre observes,

"in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or farmer are

characteristically expected to serve" (1984a, 58). This observation is

intended to vindicate the Homeric tradition's assumption that "to be a

man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and

purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of

God" (ibid., 59). But the conclusion follows only if we conflate terms

of functional evaluation ("a good watch," "a good farmer") with terms

of moral evaluation ("a good man"). Functional evaluation stipulates

the very thing that is put in question by moral evaluation. MacIntyre

overlooks the fact that a functional evaluation can be turned into a

moral one by challenging rather than accepting the stipulated criterion

of good functioning. Perhaps you want a watch that looks good on your

wrist, not one that tells accurate time; then you may challenge the

"characteristic" assumption that the more accurate the watch, the

better it is. You and I may then argue about what the criterion of a

good watch should be. Which end is better: the usual one, which

allowed me to evaluate different watches as means to efficient time-

keeping; or the aesthetic one that you propose? There is nothing

inherent either in watches or in people's "characteristic" judgments

about them--the "facts" in question--that could decide such an issue of

values. Stephen Holmes is right to call MacIntyre's argument here

"patent[ly] feebl[e]" (1993, 99).

In 1959, however, MacIntyre privileges not the functions people

Friedman 277

"characteristically" assign watches or human beings, but

"characteristically human desires, needs and the like"3 (1959, 89), not

through philosophical argument, no matter how flimsy; but by means of

(i) the implicit and illicit assumption that such desires are

dispositive; and (ii) the explicit but entirely strategic claim that

such desires fill the lacuna in Marxism--specifying, as MacIntyre would

later say, "on what basis" socialist man "enters into his free

association with others" (1984a, 261). Between 1953 and 1957,

MacIntyre's political strategy was to propose a view of moral and

religious "facts" that would recover a Marxism that is prophetic rather

than predictive, serving the aim of achieving communal freedom while

avoiding the horrors of Stalinism. In the short time separating "The

Logical Status of Religious Belief" (1957) and "Notes from the Moral

Wilderness" (1958-59), however, prophecy is supplanted by a deep-rooted

human desire to live harmoniously in a free community. This change in

the content of the is-ought bridge replaces the "emotivist,"

individualist separation of facts and values implicit in Kolakowski's

allegedly ineffectual liberalism with supposedly objective,

transhistorical, yet historically discoverable facts. But MacIntyre's

shift in strategy is not justified by any demonstration that

individualism is invalid, or that the notion of an is-ought bridge is

valid.

The journal in which "Notes from the Moral Wilderness" appeared,

the New Reasoner, was "produced by a group of Marxists who had broken

with the British Communist Party over the invasion of Hungary in 1956"

Friedman 278

(McMylor 1994, 19). MacIntyre's strategic complaint is not that

Kolakowski is wrong to criticize Stalinism, but that Kolakowski will

not persuade very many Stalinists--such as, we may infer, those in the

British Communist Party--that he is right by appealing to universal

moral principles, abstracted from such facts as those of history and

human desires. On this basis, plus the unargued acceptance of these

facts as valid, MacIntyre has produced, by 1959, the essentials of his

mature position on emotivism, liberalism, and Marxism. Without any

recourse to narratives (which have dropped from sight, at least

temporarily), practices, virtues, or traditions, or more generally to

any epistemological or metaphysical arguments for communitarianism,

MacIntyre has developed a link between emotivism, liberalism, Marxist

historical determinism, and tyranny that enables him to "revive the

moral content within Marxism" (1958, 93)--the ideal of a community of

equal freedom--while staving off the totalitarian extirpation of this

ideal.

As he does in After Virtue, MacIntyre holds in "Notes from the

Moral Wilderness" that a commitment to equal freedom that does not

bridge the is-ought gap (i.e., one that does not explain how we are to

get from the capitalist present to the communist future, filling the

strategic void in Marxism) devolves into either Kantian abstraction or

Stalinist "utilitarianism" (by which he means not the greatest good for

the greatest number, but the satisfaction of the commissars'

appetites). MacIntyre has also added, to his earlier definition of

what he is for (communist freedom), a description of what he is against

Friedman 279

(individualism); both of these descriptions, I will contend, remain

accurate in After Virtue (and thereafter). Yet what he is against has

been determined on the basis of its political usefulness in bringing

about what he is for. Far from being anti-individualistic on

epistemological grounds, he himself had advanced a radically

individualistic epistemology as recently as 1957. The only apparent

rationale for his change of heart is the notion that individualism puts

the proponent of equal freedom in the position of fruitlessly waving

protest placards against the armored columns of the Warsaw Pact, unable

to enlist legions of followers because his moral objections to

Stalinism are not anchored in some objectivity-conferring fact.

The Beginnings of MacIntyre's Communitarianism

What remains for MacIntyre is to refine his strategy for fighting

against individualism and for communism, to sharpen his appreciation of

the threat the former poses to a free community, and to start replacing

his universalistic "permanent desire" for communism with a

particularlist communitarianism--which must then be constrained so as

to lead only to communist results. He makes significant strides in all

of these directions in his 1960 essay, "Breaking the Chains of Reason."

Here MacIntyre affirms the essentialist take on equal freedom

elucidated in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness": we are to "live out"

the "Hegelian and Marxist" alternative to the status quo, he writes,

"not by manipulation of people so that they will move in some direction

Friedman 280

that we desire, but by helping them to move where they desire. The

goal" of ratifying our permanent desires "is not happiness, or

satisfaction, but freedom"; "freedom is the core of human nature"

(MacIntyre 1960, 235, 200). Marx shows us that "the concepts of

intention, deliberation and desire...are essential to understanding men

as agents and not as mere passive reflexes of non-human forces" (ibid.,

218). This Marxian insight precludes a predictive approach to human

history or a manipulative approach to achieving communism.

What is new in this essay is MacIntyre's insistence, first, that

rationality is essential not only to morality in general but to freedom

in particular; and, second, that rationality is essentially social.

"The growth in reason and the growth in freedom are inseparable,"

MacIntyre argues, because "only in so far as reason guides action are

men free to discern alternative possibilities and to frame purposes"

(1960, 200-201). MacIntyre makes this point (anticipating Taylor's

version of positive freedom) so as to distinguish his desirous is-ought

bridge from utilitarianism--not the Stalinist version of

utilitarianism, but the capitalist one. Capitalist utilitarians, in

MacIntyre's view, equate freedom with the desires people happen to have

under current social conditions. This is unacceptable not, as one

might expect, because it legitimates contradictory subjective value-

claims, but because it suggests that despite class antagonisms, there

is in capitalist society a common interest in desire-satisfaction--a

mystification that stands in the way of revolutionary thinking.

Against this type of utilitarianism, MacIntyre argues that true freedom

Friedman 281

of desire is freedom of rational desire.

What, then, constitutes rationality? MacIntyre answers this

question indirectly. He turns to Hegel to remind us of "the essential

connections between the concept of human action and the concepts of

reason and freedom," a connection that has been lost to "the

contemporary academic mind." The academic view is that "human activity

can be reduced to patterns of response to the stimuli of conditioning"

(1960, 203). From this positivistic perspective, there can be no

"concept of a common human nature" (ibid., 206). Such a concept,

presumably, appears to positivists as a piece of meaningless

metaphysics. To tell us what reason is and therefore what are the

rational desires that need to be liberated, MacIntyre must therefore

rebut the positivist understanding of human activity.

Picking up a theme he had sounded in his critique of predictive

Marxism in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness," MacIntyre denies that

human action can ever be understood if it is "equated with physical

movements," since "the same physical movements may be involved in

indorsing a cheque, signing a peace treaty or putting my name to a

proposal of marriage" (1960, 212). But since he is now attempting to

define what rational desires are, MacIntyre cannot, without falling

into vicious circularity, point to motivation by those very desires as

the criterion that marks "a given piece of human behaviour as a human"-

-i.e., an "intelligible"--action, as he had done in the earlier essay

(1959, 89). Instead, MacIntyre turns to Wittgenstein's social-language

thesis, enunciated in Philosophical Investigations (1953). What

Friedman 282

distinguishes between the physical movement that in one instance

constitutes check signing and in another treaty signing is, MacIntyre

writes, "the socially recognised conventions, the rules, in virtue of

which the movement is taken as signifying this or that....Human

activity is intelligible and explicable only in a social and only in an

historical context" (1960, 212-13). Wittgenstein rebuts positivism by

showing that reason is inherently social. It seems that MacIntyre

wants us to infer from this rebuttal the same thing Taylor suggests by

conflating positively free strong evaluation with social expressivism:

support for the thesis that rational choices--free choices illuminated

by reason--are necessarily communal in origin. The community in

question is the proletariat engaged in an historical struggle (ibid.,

218) that unearths our permanent desire for freedom in community. At

the same time, MacIntyre denies that "positive freedom" justifies

"tyrannis[ing] over" people "for their own good" (ibid., 201).

MacIntyre's appropriation of Wittgenstein will in short order

transform his ideas into communitarian ones. The proximate effect,

however, is not only to distinguish his position from utilitarianism,

but to link "the spirit of welfare capitalism" (1960, 238) to Stalinism

more directly than he did in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness." In the

earlier essay, contemporary Western ideology shared Kolakowski's

"Kantian," i.e., emotivist, i.e., individualistic moral methodology:

the Western mainstream agreed with Stalin that morality is distinct

from history, ought from is, such that the individual chooses her

values with no factual "basis." In "Breaking the Chains of Reason,"

Friedman 283

however, MacIntyre begins to speak of liberal-capitalist ideology as

primarily positivistic rather than moralistic. Positivism no less than

moralism presupposes an is-ought gap; but since it tries to understand

people without reference to their socially originated, positively free

agency, mainstream social science operationalizes positivism in such a

way that "to understand is to be in a position to manipulate." Thus,

"the theorising of those self-appointed therapists of our culture, the

social scientists," is implicitly coercive; Stalin is merely more

explicit than they are (ibid.).

To carry through the positivist program would require "possession

of that power the exercise of which is depicted in Brave New World and

1984" (1960, 211). But since "for Wittgenstein language is essentially

social, essentially a matter of human activity and not at all to be

understood mechanistically"--recalling "Marx's assertion that 'language

is practical consciousness'"--"Wittgenstein's thought...might help us

to break through the prevailing [positivist] miasma" (ibid., 234). For

rational debate over the application of moral, indeed,

more generally, of evaluative concepts, requires that

there be some standard, independent of the desires,

preferences, and wills of the contending parties, to

which appeal can be made in trying to show why the

reasons supporting one point of view are superior to

those supporting another. In the absence of such a

standard, there is nothing to distinguish genuinely

Friedman 284

rational moral or evaluative disagreements from any

other clash of conflicting desires, preferences, and

wills. (MacIntyre 1991a, 97.)

If the contending parties are individuals, and language is, as

Wittgenstein (allegedly) establishes, inherently social, then the free

community that has been MacIntyre's normative given all along can be

seen as something more than his own "emotivist" goal, untethered from

facts. The communal nature of language can confer on community itself

a factuality that gives the "appearance of" objective rationality to

the extinction of interpersonal coercion that is possibly only when we

share common ends.

Wittgenstein, however, creates problems of his own. In a 1964

essay, "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?",

MacIntyre first takes note of the question of relativism--although not,

it should be added, the subjectivist relativism of his liberal

emotivist enemies. MacIntyre has, to this point, objected to liberal

emotivism not as subjectivistic, but as politically impotent. But what

in 1964 he calls Peter Winch's "Wittgensteinianism in philosophy of

religion" raises for MacIntyre the question of whether his own

Wittgensteinianism, beneath the appearance of objectivity that it

confers on a language community, actually has relativistic implications

as between language communities.

Winch (1958) contended that attention to the "'many and varied

forms'" taken by "'intelligibility'" in different cultures and contexts

Friedman 285

shows that "there is no 'norm for intelligibility in general'"--a

contention that leads, according to MacIntyre, to "total relativism"

(1964a, 119-20). This result, however, can be avoided. What Winch

ignores is that criteria of intelligibility "have a history";

conceptual change over time "suggests strongly that beliefs and

concepts are not merely to be evaluated by the criteria implicit in the

practice of those who hold and use them" (ibid., 120-21). For example,

Polynesian taboos may express superseded criteria of intelligibility;

"sometimes to understand a concept involves not sharing it. In the

case of 'taboo' we can only grasp what it is for something to be taboo

if we extend our insight beyond the rules which govern the use of the

expression to the point and purpose which these rules once had, but no

longer have, and can no longer have in a different social context"

(ibid., 122-23).

Historicism thus rescues MacIntyre from Wittgensteinian

relativism, at least for the moment, by allowing him to criticize the

"intelligibility" of other cultures retrospectively. On the pure-

communitarian side of the ledger, MacIntyre writes that "all

interpretation has to begin with detecting the standards of

intelligibility established in a society"--anticipating by decades

Walzer's tautological "have to." On the constraining, universalist

side, MacIntyre maintains that with the passage of time, we are able to

"detec[t] incoherence" in the criteria of intelligibility employed by

"primitive" cultures (1964, 126, 121). Inasmuch as this historicist

notion serves to rein in the relativism inherent in MacIntyre's

Friedman 286

newfound communitarianism, it is the first of several versions of what

may be called MacIntyre's historical proviso.

A second work of 1964 indicates that MacIntyre's Wittgensteinian

turn completes the critique of Marxian strategy later sketched in After

Virtue. Recall that the main target of After Virtue's critique of Marx

--Marx's failure to establish the "technique" by which freedom could be

achieved--had already been criticized by MacIntyre in 1953. By 1958

MacIntyre had anticipated his claim, in After Virtue, that Marxism

degenerates into Kantianism and utilitarianism; but this claim was, in

its 1958 version, premised on Marxists having forgotten the human

essence: the permanent desire for social unity. At that stage,

MacIntyre still entertained the hope that class struggle could recover

the perception of this desire, and it seems fair to couple his optimism

in this regard with the supposition, in line with his critique of

Winch, that such an awareness would, by virtue of coming late in

history, invalidate previous communally held normative perceptions.

In Secularization and Moral Change (1967), however, which

consists of a series of lectures on British religion and society that

MacIntyre delivered in 1964, he shifts toward the pessimism about the

transition to communism evident in After Virtue. This somber outlook

is based on MacIntyre's low estimate of the ability of capitalism to

provide the requisite conditions for Wittgensteinian intelligibility.

MacIntyre's central allegiance in these lectures is a normative

Wittgensteinian communitarianism that is, once again, asserted rather

than being defended. "There being an agreed right way of doing

Friedman 287

things," he claims, "is logically prior to the acceptance of authority

as to how to do things" (1967, 53). For instance,

the game of chess exists as a set of established and

agreed practices....Were it not for this prior social

agreement the notion of an authority in chess would be

a vacuous one. What is true of chess is also true of

morality; unless there is an established and shared

right way of doing things, so that we have social

agreement on how to follow the rules and how to

legislate about them, the notion of authority in

morals is empty. (Ibid.)

But why think of morality in terms of "the notion of authority" in the

first place? Why view what is good as being whatever some authority

designates as good, rather than as something that inheres in the object

or action in question? And why does "social agreement" establish such

authority? MacIntyre does not say.

It is one thing to allow that "an individual can only act

intelligibly in the eyes of others if in large part at least his or her

actions can be interpreted as flowing from good reasons" (MacIntyre

1986c, 93). It is plausible that social consensus about what

constitutes such reasons will be a prerequisite of intellegibility in

the eyes of others; but why is this type of intelligibility so

important (we are, after all, often opaque to each other)? And why

Friedman 288

should the resulting consensus be not only a source of mutual

understanding, but of normative obligation? The only reason MacIntyre

has given (in 1960) is strategic: achieving a free society will require

liberation from not only Stalinist "utilitarianism," but from

positivistic social science, with its manipulative tendencies subtly

disguised by pretensions to value neutrality; and both forms of

liberation can be attained only by privileging what is rendered

communally "intelligible"--including, apparently, the permanent desire

for interpersonal unity that becomes visible in the course of class

struggle. This desire, unlike the diverse individual desires that are

the object of utilitarian satisfaction in emotivist society, has moral

"authority" only if (for some reason) what is agreed upon communally

is, ipso facto, dispositive.

MacIntyre's offhand remarks suggest that he finds Wittgenstein

persuasive for strategic reasons that will be familiar from his

critique of Kolakowski. MacIntyre equates intelligibility with moral

authority because an unintelligible moral standard will not be

effective in gaining others' compliance through reasoned discussion,

there being no shared moral premises to guide the reasoners. As a

result, dishonesty--manipulation--will have to be used to gain

compliance instead. The "distressing fact about our own society,"

MacIntyre contends, is that while "the effective and honest use of

moral predicates does presuppose a shared moral vocabulary in an

established moral community," we "do not as a whole community share

such a single moral vocabulary" (1967, 52). Social consensus has the

Friedman 289

(alethic, objective, rational) "authority" MacIntyre attributes to it

only if one has already concluded that a noncoercive, consensual

society is (objectively, rationally) good.

This situation originated in the destruction of traditional forms

of social order. British urbanization uprooted "the older forms of

community...to which religion had given symbolic expression," and the

subsequent use of religion in appeals to the workers to refrain from

class warfare had made it "only too obvious...that the alleged

authoritative norms to which appeal is made are in fact man-made, and

that they are not the norms of the whole community to which in their

own way men of every rank are equally subject" (MacIntyre 1967, 12, 14,

emphases original). The religious beliefs that have survived this

disillusionment are "only fragments of a vocabulary in which to ask or

answer" ethico-religious questions (ibid., 30).

Marxism, which provided a secular answer to such questions, has

been doomed to irrelevance in the contemporary world for the same

reason that religion is withering away. While in Germany the failure

of Marx's prediction that capitalism would collapse led to Bernstein's

revisionism and thence the cooptation of the SPD by the welfare state,

in Britain workers were uninterested in Marxism in the first place

because, deprived of a meaningful religious outlook by the class

divisions of their community, they were never much "concerned with

advancing the claims of one way of life against another; they were

concerned with making claims for so much an hour" (1967, 27.)

Instead of being, as before, the result of the philosophical

Friedman 290

acceptance of an is-ought gap, emotivism (as well, presumably, as the

acceptance of an is-ought gap) is, in MacIntyre's new account, a

consequence of social conditions that have deprived us of "any over-all

social agreement as to the right ways to live together" which might

render "intelligible" social "claims to moral authority" (1967, 54).

"The impact of industrialism and of a liberal and individualist ethos

destroys" the earlier association of "a man's duties" with "his

specific role or function in society" (ibid., 72). Such a notion of

duty, or something to take its place, is needed because the "activity

of appealing to impersonal and independent criteria only makes sense

within a community of discourse in which such criteria are established,

shared. Outside such a community the use of moral expressions is only

a kind of private gesture" (ibid., 52), an ineffectual protest of the

sort launched by liberals such as Kolakowski. MacIntyre's appeal to

impersonal--and thus, MacIntyre assumes, objective and rational--moral

criteria, however, is now grounded not in facts of history or of

psychology, but of community: Wittgenstein allegedly shows that moral

"authority" is to be found in "established, shared," "agreed" communal

criteria.

Once class conflict has made such criteria unavailable, however,

emotivist attitudes follow in due course and Marxism is prevented from

making headway. Wittgenstein's perspective has now become

indispensable to MacIntyre, for it provides something that the notion

of a permanent desire for community activated by working-class politics

not only lacked, but precluded: an explanation for why it is that

Friedman 291

working-class politics has not eventuated in socialism. Moreover,

Wittgenstein turns MacIntyre's unwavering normative goal, "the

Christian vision of human freedom in the free society" (1953, 45), into

the method of its own achievement. Free community is now not only the

end, but the means by which that end may be both reached and therefore

(since to MacIntyre they are the same thing) legitimated: it is not

only an ideal of uncoerced life, but its attainment flows from the

shared values that make such a life uncoercive; and the

"intelligibility" made possible by such values is the closest thing

MacIntyre will ever offer to a reason for privileging the resulting

freedom. On the other hand, the dual nature of community in

MacIntyre's thought circa 1964--as both end and means--makes it hard to

see how, in the absence of such a community brought about by class

conflict, it could be constructed. Hence MacIntyre's ongoing

pessimism.

MacIntyre now contends that in light of the damage capitalism has

done to earlier forms of communal moral authority, it was foolish for

Marx to assume that the proletariat would automatically achieve a free

society. MacIntyre writes, in yet another article published in 1964,

that Marx "never rid himself entirely of the notion of an inevitable

progress" that he had inherited from Hegel; in Marx's later work this

notion assumes the form of "inevitable and necessary laws governing

human affairs and bringing them to their goal" (1964b, 106-7). In

After Virtue MacIntyre describes the idea of leapfrogging over the

deficiencies of capitalism as a "Nietszchean fantasy," but the reason

Friedman 292

for this characterization of Lenin's and Lukacs's confidence in the

Party had emerged 17 years prior. The Party-state is a tyranny rooted

in the attempt to do the impossible: retrieve from capitalism the basis

for moral community that it has destroyed.

MacIntyre has, by 1964, passed all the judgments on Marxism

contained in After Virtue. Marx was too optimistic. This optimism

stemmed from his failure to explore the basis on which socialist man

"enters into his free association with others" (1984a, 261). This

lacuna leads to the three degenerate forms of Marxism: "crude tyranny,"

i.e., Stalin's "crude utilitarianism"; "Weberian social democracy,"

i.e., revisionist welfare statism, which relies on a positivist social-

scientific rationale and leads to manipulative policies; and now

"Nietzschean fantasy." These defects signify a radically

individualistic element in Marxism, because they suggest Marx's

obliviousness to the destruction of the communal setting required for

any moral vision to achieve legitimacy (i.e., collective

intelligibility).

Despite his disagreements with Marx, however, MacIntyre continues

to take for granted the normative legitimacy of communism. His

criticisms of Marx's determinism and individualism call into question,

as they have from the first, how to achieve the transition to a society

of equal freedom, and now whether such a transition is possible--but

not its desirability. MacIntyre's pessimism stems from the chasm

between the status quo and the conditions needed for the transition to

socialism, given a Wittgensteinian understanding of those conditions.

Friedman 293

At no point before 1965 (or after) has MacIntyre been anything less

than hostile to capitalism. Given the advent of capitalism, however,

he now thinks that Marxist hopes for automatic progress to communism

are profoundly unrealistic.

From Wittgenstein to Homer

Community--whether established by prophetic, desirous, or

Wittgensteinian means--has been valuable in all versions of MacIntyre's

thought thus far because it serves to harmonize people's desires. When

antagonistic interpersonal ends somehow give way to social unity, so,

too, will relationships of power: people can be free to do as they

wish, for what they wish will not require pushing each other around.

But what makes MacIntyre a "communitarian" is not his commitment to a

community of freedom, which is but a utopian version of the preeminent

liberal commitment to individual liberty. What is distinctively

communitarian in MacIntyre's thought first appears in 1960, with his

Wittgensteinian turn. Only then, as strategic concerns make it

attractive to begin deriving a community of freedom from the allegedly

social nature of reason, does MacIntyre seize on social facts to bridge

the is-ought gap. Thus, for example, in Secularization and Moral

Change (1964), MacIntyre equates the particularistic "established"

norms of "a single moral vocabulary"--which make possible a "common

life" possessing "moral authority"--with freedom: such "shared" norms

are based on social "practices," and the moral rules governing these

Friedman 294

practices rely on "social agreement on how to follow the rules" (1967,

12, 52, 53, 53, 53, 53, emphasis added).

MacIntyre continues to make these equations in A Short History of

Ethics (1966). There he insists, for example, that "the concept of

legitimate authority has application only within a context of socially

accepted rules, practices, and institutions. For to call an authority

legitimate is to appeal to an accepted criterion of legitimacy" (1966,

137). "Where there is no such criterion there can only be power or

rival powers"; this is the problem with Hobbes's politics--it

represents the coercive alternative to communitarian moral authority.

MacIntyre faults Plato's elitism on similar grounds: "the social order

which the Platonic concept of justice enjoins could only be accepted by

the majority of mankind as a result of the use of nonrational

persuasion (or force)" (ibid., 49). Now, however, MacIntyre is in

Munchhausen's position of needing to establish a community free of

manipulation or force by means of a consensus that can issue only from

the authority of such a community. Without the historically generated

recognition of a transhistorical desire for free community, how can

that community be achieved?

MacIntyre here confronts the very problem he would later tax Marx

for failing to solve: the strategic Ur-problem of communism, how to get

from here to there. But in A Short History of Ethics, MacIntyre hits

on an answer that gets him almost all the way to his mature position.

This achievement stems from MacIntyre's turn to Greek thought, as

embodied in Homer and articulated in Aristotle. The central idea is

Friedman 295

that being raised in the practices of a community can educate human

desires to communal ends, solving the conundrum of how people are to

achieve a consensus around values. Desire is, in classical thought, a

malleable means to the end of shaping people's interests; MacIntyre

seizes on this means as a way to make people's interests dovetail in a

manner that makes interpersonal manipulation unnecessary. This is made

possible by the Greeks' implicit recognition of the factor that must

cause pessimism about communism emerging from capitalist social

conditions: the necessary basis of "intelligible...claims to moral

authority" (1967, 54) in shared social norms.

In "a well-integrated traditional form of society," MacIntyre

(1966, 103) writes,

the rules which constitute social life and make it

possible and the ends which members of the community

in question pursue are such that it is relatively

easy to both abide by the rules and achieve the ends.

...To achieve the personal ideals of the Homeric hero

...and to follow the social rules...cannot involve

fundamental conflict. At the other end of the scale,

we might cite as an example the kind of society which

still sustains traditional rules of honesty and

fairness, but into which the competitive and

acquisitive ideals of capitalism have been introduced,

so that virtue and success are not easily brought

Friedman 296

together.

MacIntyre's point is twofold. First, classical ethics made

virtue easy, because social norms worked with individual desires rather

than against them. By acting as one's inclinations dictate, one could

freely do the "right" thing (what one ought to do) because social norms

(what is--the socially given) had trained those inclinations. One grew

up agreeing with one's peers and being trained to feel accordingly, so

that to act in free accord with one's desires would not be to act

antisocially. One can imagine MacIntyre being struck by the lack of

tortured self-doubt in the deliberations of Homer's heroes: here are

people whose ends are completely "intelligible" to them, and why?

Because their obligations rest on their social position, and their

rearing has made the obligations of each social position crystal clear

to one and all.

Second, capitalism makes virtue difficult, because it pits

individual inclination against social norms. This is because

capitalism's "acquisitive ideals" orient each individual toward

himself, undermining the social basis of any "authoritative" moral

claim. Individual

ends become dissociated from the requirements of the

public domain. They provide other and rival private

ideals. It will be natural in this situation to

conceive of the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit

Friedman 297

of virtue as mutually exclusive alternatives.

(Ibid., 104.)

When "the individual no longer finds his evaluative commitments

made for him, in part at least, by simply answering the question of his

own social identity," then "from the facts of his situation as he is

able to describe them in his new social vocabulary nothing at all

follows about what he ought to do" (1966, 126). By contrast, in

Homeric society, where obligations follow automatically (MacIntyre

claims) from social functions, "the logical gulf between fact and

appraisal is not so much one that has been bridged" as "one that has

never been dug" (ibid., 7).

The is-ought bridge provided by socialization into agreed norms

is, as all of MacIntyre's previous is-ought bridges were intended to

be, the path to personal freedom, rectifying the strategic deficiency

bequeathed to communists by Marx. But the problem with which MacIntyre

haltingly dealt in the course of his confrontation with Winch's

Wittgensteinian relativism haunts A Short History--although not as much

as it will haunt After Virtue, where MacIntyre goes beyond inserting

his perspective into the history of thought and tries to defend his

alternative expressly. In A Short History MacIntyre continues to deal

with the problem of relativism he had previously addressed in the form

of Winch's intercommunal relativism, but with our "permanent desires"

playing the role of a psychological proviso that he would soon fold

into the historical one.

Friedman 298

MacIntyre's initial interest in Aquinas stems not from Thomistic

insights into the nature of God or His world, but from the fact that

Aquinas's "Aristotelianism...is concerned not with escaping the snares

of the world and of desire, but with transforming desire for moral

ends." Aquinas, however, is not just another Aristotelian. He

constrains the relativistic possibilities of Aristotelianism, "showing

how the conceptual links between virtue and happiness forged by

Aristotle are a permanent acquisition for those who want to exhibit

these links without admiring" the benighted, illiberal values and

social institutions of Aristotelian Athens (1966, 117-18). For unlike

Aristotle, who assumed that "the virtues of the polis" are "normative

for human nature as such," Aquinas "describes the norms of human nature

as such, and expects to find them exemplified in human life in

particular societies" (ibid., 118). "Quite clearly," MacIntyre writes,

"our desires as they are stand in need of criticism and correction";

and he praises Christian egalitarianism for establishing "the dividing

line between all moralities which are moralities for a group and all

moralities which are moralities for men as such" (1966, 148, 149).

But in the same breath, MacIntyre maintains that the way to

criticize our desires as they stand is to appeal to "the ideals which

are implicit...in the very way actions may be envisaged in a given

society" (ibid., 149). Utilitarianism allows each individual to take

her desires as given, but this "ignore[s] both the possibility of

transforming human nature and the means available for criticizing it in

the ideals which are implicit...in the very way actions may be

Friedman 299

envisaged in a given society" (ibid.). Does MacIntyre mean to say that

the ideals "given" in individuals' desires should be replaced by those

of various "given societ[ies]"? Apparently not, because Christianity

is to be applauded for amending Aristotelianism with the notion, as

"alien" to Aristotle as to Homer, that "somehow or other all men are

equal in the sight of God"--ruling out communal visions of the good

that do not go beyond the "local and particular" to embrace the "cosmic

and universal" (1984a, 148), as MacIntyre would put the point in After

Virtue. But how can this universalism be reconciled with MacIntyre's

overarching particularism?

The idea of "permanent desire" seems to provide the answer.

MacIntyre concludes that "it is not necessarily the case that the

desires elicited by a particular form of social life will find

satisfaction within that form" (1966, 200).4 "The individual discovers

his aims and his desires from within a set of rule-governed

relationships to others," but only from within the rule-governed

relationships to others that are appropriate to "men as such" (ibid.,

244-45, 149)--relationships not only of freedom, but of equality.

Originally, the notion of a permanent desire was MacIntyre's is-ought

bridge; it is what enabled his communist convictions to appear more

persuasive than Kolakowskian liberalism. But now a Wittgensteinian

picture of intelligibility-cum-normativity is serving that community-

legitimizing function in MacIntyre's thought. The problem is that it

brings in its train the same conundrum Winch confronted. Although he

is less than clear about the subject in A Short History of Ethics,

Friedman 300

MacIntyre seems now to deploy permanent desire not as the "factual"

rationale for his vision of free community, but as a constraint against

such communities' relativism. All communities confer intelligibility,

but only those that are in line with our permanent desires are

normative.

Although Wittgenstein was originally brought on board to

differentiate between MacIntyre's posited social desire and the given

desires satisfied by utilitarians, Wittgenstein alone has thus far

proven inadequate to the task, precisely because the prerequisite of

Wittgensteinian community--the existence of socially shared languages--

is so broad as to be (nearly, in MacIntyre's interpretation)

coextensive with given desires, ill serving the aim of privileging a

society in which socially educated desires make free relationships

among equals possible. Hence MacIntyre's continued reliance on a

permanent desire for social freedom. This desire provides a standard

apart from "intelligibility" against which various societies can be

judged.

Thus, MacIntyre gives us two kinds of freedom: the freedom from

interpersonal conflict conferred by socially instituted rules of

whatever type, and the freedom instantiated in a community that meets

our permanent desire for the freedom of equals; two kinds of happiness:

"the satisfaction to be gained from achieving...socially established

ends" (ibid., 196), no matter how privatistic, and the happiness

produced by free actions that reflect our social desires; and two

bridges over the is-ought gap: the one provided by socially established

Friedman 301

rules, and another by our social desires. Clearly MacIntyre endorses

the latter varieties of freedom, happiness, and "socially agreed,"

impersonally chosen values; what is less clear is how this endorsement

is positively connected to the former, Wittgensteinian varieties,

rather than being at odds with them--universalistic constraints on

social particularity.

A New Historical Proviso

In 1968 MacIntyre issued a revised version of Marxism: An

Interpretation entitled Marxism and Christianity, in which, despite the

title, the theology has been removed but the normative liberalism, if

anything, has been strengthened. Marxism is, for instance, now

described as an attempt to "enable men to self-consciously and

purposefully achieve such transformations of social life as they wished

to see" (1968, 5, emphasis added); the ideal society could not any more

clearly be described in terms of (negative) freedom. In the new

volume, the problem with Marxism that had been identified in Marxism:

An Interpretation--as in A Short History of Ethics--is Marx's failure

to live up to this ideal. As in the earlier books, this problem has

two sources. First there is Marx's predictive attitude toward the

transition to socialism (1968, 85; cf. 1966, 214). Marx failed to see

that because "the form of society" the workers "will construct in the

course of emancipating themselves cannot be prescribed to them by

anyone else," it "cannot be predicted" (1968, 92). Second, there is

Marx's assumption that capitalism will give birth to socialism; in

Friedman 302

reality, "the conditions which are inimical to religion seem to be

inimical to Marxism too" (ibid., 111). These conditions--the social

factors that have destroyed the Wittgensteinian intelligibility of

religion--have made of Marxism a mere "set of 'views' which stand in no

organic relationship to an individual's social role or identity, let

alone his real position in the class structure" (ibid., 122-23).

Just as redolent of MacIntyre's earlier works is his attack on

the liberal inability to link facts to values:

Not only are the moral attitudes of Marx, or the

analysis of past history, or the predictions about

the future abandoned; so is the possibility of any

doctrine which connects moral attitudes, beliefs

about the past, and beliefs in future possibility.

The linchpin of this rejection is the liberal

belief that facts are one thing, values another--

and that the two realms are logically independent

of each other....But for Marxism and Christianity

only the answer to questions about the character and

nature of society can provide the basis for an answer

to the question: 'But how ought I to live?' For the

nature of the world is such that in discovering the

order of things I also discover my own nature and

those ends which beings such as myself must pursue

if we are not to be frustrated in certain predictable

Friedman 303

ways. (Ibid., 124.)

However, there is something new in the critique of liberalism

embodied in the curious phrase "future possibility" (cf. MacIntyre

1968, 92, 115-116, 142). Evidently, these words are intended to

suggest criticisms of social particularity--i.e., of "the past." The

criterion of criticism is, as with MacIntyre's rejoinder to Winch, once

again retrospective--but the perspective from which one looks back

critically on the past is the future, enabling present as well as past

socially given rules to be criticized. The "Marxist attempt to

envisage societies from the standpoint of their openness to the

future," MacIntyre writes, embodies "the virtue of hope...in a secular

form" (ibid., 142). Reviving this virtue will allow particular

societies to be critically evaluated--but without (MacIntyre seems to

think) reverting to a universalistic "ought" deprived of any persuasive

grip on what "is." The now-revised historical proviso obviates the

need for a permanent desire for social unity as a check on

communitarian relativism--although, in arguing that the end result of

historical criticism is to avoid human "frustration," it seems possible

that MacIntyre still sees a psychological desire for social unity as

the ultimate standard of future "hope."

As early as 1970, however, it becomes clear that MacIntyre has

expressly abandoned the social-desire thesis. The occasion for

MacIntyre's reversal on this point is his book-length assessment of

Herbert Marcuse, himself a New Left theorist of desire fulfillment.

Friedman 304

"According to Marcuse," MacIntyre writes, "freedom and happiness were

intimately connected"; but he hotly disputes Marcuse's suggestion that

"part of the difference between Hegel and Marx" is that, to quote

Marcuse, in Marx "the idea of reason has been superseded by the idea of

happiness" (1970, 10-11). Not only does Marcuse fail to give textual

evidence for this "gratuitous falsification of Marx," but the fact is

that "freedom is a goal which may be incompatible with the goal of

happiness" (ibid., 37).

MacIntyre had made a version of this argument in 1966, but only

as a way of condemning totalitarians and paternalists who sacrifice

freedom for short-term, individualistic happiness, as opposed to the

long-term happiness that will come from the satisfaction of our social

desires. But in 1970 MacIntyre writes that "the gap between aspiration

and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that

tragedy will be permanently relevant to contemporary human experience"-

-as Marx and Trotsky knew, according to MacIntyre. For "the acceptance

of freedom as a goal is the acceptance of the possibility that in

utilizing their freedom men will produce situations which invoke

frustration, sacrifice, and unhappiness" (1970, 37).5 To explain why,

if socialism would make us happy, we have not already thrown ourselves

into socialism, Marcuse must distinguish between true and false needs

and must claim that the stimulation of the latter has distracted us

from pursuing the former--just as MacIntyre had done since 1958. But,

MacIntyre asks, "How has Marcuse acquired the right to say of others

what their true needs are?" Marcuse's position, MacIntyre concludes in

Friedman 305

Walzerian fashion, is "inescapabl[y] elitist" (ibid., 72).6 It may be

that in reading Marcuse, MacIntyre realized that his own attempt to

supply the basis for communism had been developing in a direction that

was antithetical to the goal of equal freedom. If we are capable of

failing to recognize our own "permanent desires," perhaps a vanguard

party should feel entitled to act on these desires on our behalf.

In any case, MacIntyre's critique of Marcuse marks a watershed in

his thought. By jettisoning the distinction between true and false

needs, and by inference that between permanent and culturally specific

desires, he completes his Wittgensteinian turn. This deprives him,

however, of psychological criteria for distinguishing good from bad

communities. How, then, can MacIntyre presume to criticize capitalism-

-which, after all, might be thought to have some basis in social

agreeement?

MacIntyre's response to this predicament is to deny that

capitalism satisfies Wittgensteinian criteria of intelligibility. To

this end, he deploys the historical proviso against managerialism and

positivistic social science in such papers as "Social Science

Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority" (1975). This

critique is central to MacIntyre's ongoing attempt to elaborate what he

called, three years before the publication of the first edition of

After Virtue, a "general post-Marxist ideology of liberation" that

would achieve "socialism with a human face" (1978, 94), because it

allows him to portray would-be scientific managers as, in reality,

implementing not techniques that might command widespread agreement,

Friedman 306

but their own wills or those of others--wills that command no social

agreement. Managerialism is, in reality, the institutionalized form in

which, when "the individual qua individual...is taken to be the unit of

moral discourse," social life becomes "an arena in which self-

interested individuals contend for advantage and aggrandizement"

(MacIntyre 1985, 245). Under these circumstances "modern bureaucratic

organizations characteristically arise" (MacIntyre, 1975, 57). What

MacIntyre in 1975 begins to call the "Weberian view of bureaucratic

authority" (ibid., 54)--by which he apparently means the view that

bureaucracy is the most effective form of social power--came into being

to provide some kind of predictability to a social world that would

otherwise be atomized to the point of "unintelligibility." In claiming

that her expertise provides "levers for effective manipulation" of her

subordinates (ibid., 75), the bureaucrat justifies dealing with others

coercively rather than in the rational terms that would be available

within a shared "narrative" (1973b, 325).

The manager is, of course, one of the prototypical personalities

through which MacIntyre, in After Virtue, condemns emotivist society.

For MacIntyre in the 1970s, emotivism is what it was in 1958, and what

it will be in his mature work: a legitimation of clashing individual

wills. Only the identity of the individuals changes. No longer are

they (at least not primarily) the commissars of the Second World; now

they are the bureaucrats, government and corporate, of the First.

Their power is legitimate only (MacIntyre believes) if postivist

managerial ideology is valid. If it is not, then there is no agreement

Friedman 307

on the social rules promulgated by the managers, and modern society

becomes unintelligible: that is, it loses its legitimacy. On the basis

of a critique of managerialism, then, capitalism can be criticized

without reference to eternal human desires.

Thus, in "Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution" (1973),

MacIntyre contends that positivists rely on factual claims about

"illusion, distortions of thought, and the like" that "can in general

be made only from the standpoint of..a privileged exemption from such

distortions"; MacIntyre calls this standpoint "epistemological self-

righteousness" (1973b, 322), also known as universalism. The

universalist diremption of is from ought culminates, among

"revolutionary theorists," in "predictions of the course of history";

but among "orthodox social scientists" and "industrial managers," it

leads to "a parallel elitism": "a claim to privilege with respect to

power" (ibid., 341-42).

MacIntyre invokes the historical proviso to render this

managerial elitism implausible. The ambition to make lawlike

generalizations about human behavior overlooks the fact that the same

physical action can have a variety of meanings; and we "make our

actions intelligible not only in relation to what has gone before, but

also to future possibilities," by placing them in the context of

"historically idiosyncratic, interrelated narratives" which are

therefore unpredictable by means of general laws (MacIntyre 1973b, 325;

cf. idem 1975.) "Intelligibility" is to be found only in socially

constructed "dramatic and narrative forms." "The production of

Friedman 308

dramatic and narrative forms through which we make our actions

intelligible to ourselves and others is of course," MacIntyre asserts,

"a cooperative affair" (1973b, 325). The narrative basis of

intelligibility is ignored by revolutionary theorists and managers

alike. But our freedom to alter the course of the narratives in which

we are involved dooms any attempt to predict their outcome.

In another paper from 1973 MacIntyre writes, of "social

particulars" that are characterized by "a certain kind of continuity in

belief and in practice informed by belief," that "part of the

continuity and identity both of such a form of social practice and of

such a form of social organization is the continuity of

institutionalized argument, debate, and conflict" (1973a, 57). In a

single stroke the notion of future possibilities--which MacIntyre will

later embody in his notion of a tradition--fends off the danger of

relativistically defending whatever is socially agreed upon by allowing

it to be criticized retrospectively, even while it delegitimizes the

apparent social agreement found in capitalist societies, based as it is

on a predictive managerialism that is as spurious as predictive

Marxism.

We have now arrived at the doorstep of After Virtue--without

MacIntyre abandoning the normative commitments that had led him to

Marxism, and without him making any epistemological or otherwise

metaphysically communitarian claims that are unmotivated by these

commitments.

Friedman 309

MacIntyre's Mature Communitarianism: Constrained Wittgensteinianism

MacIntyre opens After Virtue with the same Homeric traditionalism he

had praised in A Short History of Ethics, which he now sees as one of a

variety of "heroic" ethics found in premodern societies, in which one's

social position dictated one's obligations. Presenting the

unreflective correspondence between individual duty and one's place in

the social order displayed in the Iliad as the polar opposite of modern

emotivism, MacIntyre preserves this unreflectiveness in the pure

communitarian thread running through his canonical book. Thus, he

admires how "the self of the heroic age lacks precisely that

characteristic which...some modern moral philosophers take to be an

essential characteristic of human selfhood: the capacity to detach

oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step

backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of

view from the outside" (1984a, 126). Heroic versions of embedded

selfhood begin, MacIntyre writes in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

(1988), from "some condition of pure historical contingency, from the

beliefs, institutions, and practices of some particular community which

constitute a given. Within such a community authority will have been

conferred upon certain texts and certain voices....The beliefs,

utterances, texts, and persons taken to be authoritative are deferrred

to unquestioningly" (1988, 354).

Homeric particularism alone might seem to achieve MacIntyre's

normative aims, without recourse to Aristotle or Aquinas. The now-

Friedman 310

familiar goal of ending emotivist interpersonal manipulation by giving

people a set of ends in common is achieved by subordinating people to

socially sanctioned practices. By adopting as our own the goods

internal to these practices, we--the members of any given community--

gain the ability to deal with each other without manipulation.

Whenever we disagree, we can reason with each other by making reference

to the shared premises inculcated in us by our participation in the

same practices. We are free because we need not coerce each other to

attain our ends; our ends, being shared, are no longer antagonistic.

But we are not yet equal: slaves, metics, and women are means to

others' ends.

MacIntyre allows that Aristotle justifiably affronts us by

"writing off...non-Greeks, barbarians and slaves, as not merely not

possessing political relationships, but as incapable of them"; and by

restricting to "the affluent and those of high status" the important

virtues of "munificence and magnanimity." Crucially, "this blindness

of Aristotle's" accurately reflected the "blindness of his culture," so

in condemning it MacIntyre demonstrates that the socially particular

can be criticized. But criticized in the name of what? MacIntyre

cannot uphold universalistic egalitarian criteria against Aristotle

without subverting the particularism that has been, in one form or

another, the strategic means to his political ends for 30 years. Thus,

according to MacIntyre, Aristotle's error was that he did not take

account of the future possibilities of his tradition. He "did not

understand the transience of the polis because he had little or no

Friedman 311

understanding of historicity in general" (1984a, 159). Aristotle had

set himself "the task of giving an account of the good which is at once

local and particular--located in and partially defined by the

characteristics of the polis--and yet also cosmic and universal"

(ibid., 148). The cosmic and universal dimension of his thought is put

in the particularist form of the historical proviso. Even though it

grows out of what Aristotle adds to pure, unconstrained Homeric

communitarianism, it can be used against Aristotle, too, when he fails

to grasp the future potentialities of the tradition of which he is a

part.

We need not labor the fact that drawing the boundaries of what

count as (worthwhile) "possibilities," or of the tradition itself, will

provide an illicit answer to all normative questions, just as drawing

the boundaries around Sandel's and Walzer's territorial communities,

and around Taylor's philosophical tradition, answers--by begging--those

questions. A theorist may claim to be an Aristotelian or a Thomist,

but if, in some respect, he--like Aristotle himself--does not meet

MacIntyre's normative criteria, then this aspect of his thought can be

jettisoned as incompatible with the tradition's future. The point is

not that MacIntyre is being duplicitous, but that making normative

claims without thereby "universalistically" attributing extra-communal

validity to them is impossible. At any rate, this is the point taken

up in Chapter 7.

The Philosophical Proviso

Friedman 312

Aristotle's dictum that man is "a political animal" can be used to

illustrate both his contribution to the heroic tradition, as MacIntyre

sees it, and the way his contribution can be turned against normatively

undesirable aspects of that tradition, including those promulgated by

Aristotle. On the one hand, our "political" nature signifies

Aristotle's debt to heroic ethics by suggesting that our proper ends

are set for us by our community. Aristotle sought to link "the

concepts of virtue and goodness on the one hand and those of happiness,

success and the fulfilment of desire on the other," as they were linked

in heroic societies (1984a, 140). But rather than following Plato in

achieving this linkage by setting reason against inclination--which is

unrealistic--Aristotle saw, according to MacIntyre, that we are so

constituted that we can be trained, through participation in practices

that presuppose socially given criteria of excellence, to acquire the

inclinations, the virtues, that are internally validated by such

practices. Such virtues reflect our nature as political beings in two

senses. First, the process of acquiring them requires that during a

training period we be subordinated to norms established within the

polis. Second, the end result of this training is to premise our

happiness on success in activities that are, again, socially

established. The reason MacIntyre cannot accept Aristotle's

"metaphysical biology"--by which he seems to mean Aristotle's claim

that the ultimate human end is to contemplate the metaphysically

permanent, i.e., the divine--is that a contemplative view of the human

essence conflicts with "Aristotle's view of man as essentially

Friedman 313

political" (ibid., 158).

There is no trace here of a specific, social desire constraining

Aristotle; rather, Aristotle advocates bending people's desires

according to communal notions of the good, even those that deviate from

the particular norms of Homeric Greece. The historical proviso,

however, legitimates Aristotle's deviation from Homer, in turn giving

birth to another caveat, the philosophical proviso: Aristotle's "cosmic

and universal" assumption that "man is" communal ("political") by

nature. This assumption not only ratifies the historical proviso; it

also elevates the particularism of heroic ethics--when suitably

modified by the two provisos--into the good of man qua man. While in

heroic ethics there is no gap between facts and values because what one

is, according to the norms of one's particular society, directly

determines the excellences one should pursue (so that even to describe

an individual's role in such terms artifically bifurcates it), in

MacIntyre's gloss on Aristotelian ethics, there can be no is-ought gap

because what one essentially is, the universal human telos, directly

determines the virtues one should pursue. These virtues are those that

are internal to communal practices, because practices, being doubly

social, express our political nature.

Yet this non-biological telos also serves to constrain

"conventional and local" practices, as does the historical proviso.

The philosophical proviso is an attempt to derive tradition-

transcending norms from the authority of a tradition itself. It has

two chief results. First, the Aristotelian telos subjects local

Friedman 314

conventions, according to MacIntyre, to "natural and universal...rules

of justice" (1984a, 150). These rules prohibit practices and virtues

that run counter to the "qualities of mind and character which would

contribute to the realization of [the] common good" of those engaged in

"founding a community to achieve a common project" (ibid., 151). "The

absolute prohibitions of natural justice" follow, that is to say, from

Aristotle's recognition "that the individual is indeed intelligible

only as a politikon zoon" (ibid., 150). Examples of offenses against

the common good "would characteristically be the taking of innocent

life, theft and perjury and betrayal" (ibid., 151).

The philosophical proviso also, and just as crucially, limits

pure communitarianism by establishing that the purpose of justice is

allocation according to desert. "To deserve well is to have

contributed in some substantial way to the achievement of those goods,

the sharing of which and the common pursuit of which provide

foundations for human community," and the achievement of which "is a

good for the whole community who participate in the practice" (1984a,

202, 190-91). At first glance this may seem not to limit but to

enshrine particularism; but it rules out communities in which

distribution accords with merits that are external to practices.

External goods (e.g. power, fame, and especially money) "are always

some individual's property and possession," and "the more someone has

of them, the less there is for other people" (ibid., 190). In this

respect they are in conflict with the essentially social human essence.

This explains why Aristotle juxtaposes against the virtue of justice

Friedman 315

the vice of pleonexia, or acquisitiveness. In practice, MacIntyre

writes in a 1995 introduction to Marxism and Christianity, "justice of

desert" means the enforcement of "a just wage and a just price," which

"necessarily have no application to transactions within...capitalist

markets" (1995, x).

In addition to subjecting communal practices and virtues to

natural law and to the standard of desert, the dictates of essential

human nature limit the local and particular in a third way when joined

with an heroic insight that Aristotle suppressed, but that was revived

in the Middle Ages. This insight is the unavoidability of "tragic

conflict"--conflict, that is, "of good with good"--due to "a

multiplicity of goods" (1984a, 201, 163). Once tragic conflict is

recognized, the pursuit of plural individual ends and even the

individual's repudiation of her tradition are licensed. Without an

allowance for tragedy, the freedom created by shared subordination to

the virtues internal to practices would be the freedom of sheep;

MacIntyre seems to want people to be not only free of interpersonal

coercion, but to be able to choose freely from among communally

sanctioned and sometimes contradictory ends.

MacIntyre admits that pervasive tragic conflict would lead to

something like the situation facing modern emotivists--"too many

conflicts and too much arbitrariness"--but for the fact that by

positing a human telos, Aristotle subordinates practices and their

virtues to "the notion of a type of whole human life which can be

called good" (ibid., 201, emphasis original). What it means to lead

Friedman 316

such a life depends on the interaction of the philosophical with the

historical proviso, as can be seen by examining the historical

proviso's own historical origins.

The historical proviso originates in the medieval concept of a

"narrative quest." This concept historicizes the Aristotelian telos,

since for medieval Christians we are in this life engaged on a journey

from a sinful beginning toward the salvific future.

The medieval vision is historical in a way that

Aristotle's could not be. It situates our aiming

at the good...in contexts which themselves have

a history. To move towards the good is to move in

time and that movement may itself involve new

understandings of what it is to move towards the

good. (1984a, 176.)

"An adequate sense of tradition," therefore, "manifests itself in a

grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available

to the present," MacIntyre (1984a, 223) writes--echoing an argument he

made when he was unquestionably a Marxist (in Marxism and

Christianity).7 Anticipating Taylor's, Sandel's, and Walzer's similar

provisos, which allow the participants in a community to dissent from

its precepts, the historical proviso makes individual freedom more than

a matter of being uncoerced by one's fellow community members; it edges

MacIntyre perilously close to restoring to the individual the

Friedman 317

conventional liberal totem, freedom of choice. For while

the story of my life is always embedded in the story

of those communities from which I derive my identity...

rebellion against my identity is always one possible

mode of expressing it....The fact that the self

has to find its moral identity in and through its

membership in communities such as those of the family,

the neighborhood, the city and the tribe does not

entail that the self has to accept the moral

limitations of the particularity of those forms of

community. Without those moral particularities to

begin from there would never be anywhere to begin;

but it is in moving forward from such particularity

that the search for the good, for the universal,

consists. (1984a, 221, emphasis original.)

Once the philosophical proviso that constrains pure

communitarianism is, in turn, modified by the conjunction of tragic

choices and the historical proviso, the result is MacIntyre's abstract

and seemingly empty specification of the human telos, the "type of

whole human life which can be called good," as consisting in "the unity

of a narrative quest," such that "the good life for man is the life

spent in seeking for the good life for man" (1984a, 201, 219). What

makes such a life possible is that it is conducted within the confines

Friedman 318

of a community animated by "a history" that makes each of its members,

willy-nilly, "one of the bearers of a tradition"--by which MacIntyre

means not only a body of just but of socially given practices and

virtues (practices and virtues limited by the requirements of natural

law, desert, and scope for tragic choices), but a body of practices and

virtues that is capable of being transcended through future-directed

"criticism and invention" (ibid., 221, 222).

Thus, while insisting that we should learn from heroic societies

that "all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local

and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to

a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion" (1984a,

126-27, emphasis added), MacIntyre allows that the "authoritative texts

or utterances" of a tradition are "susceptible to...alternative and

incompatible interpretations" (1988, 354-55). Somehow, MacIntyre

supposes, the "unity of a narrative quest" imposed on a human life

spent in seeking the good for man qua man--one, that is, that begins

from a communally determined point of agreement, inasmuch as

"individual human lives" can have "narrative structure" only "because

they are embedded within social traditions" (1984c, 72)--ensures that

such a life will not endure "too much" arbitrariness and hence, we may

be entitled to infer, not too much mutual unintelligibility and

coercion.

Will Kymlicka (1989, 57) has underscored how MacIntyre's notion

of a tradition oscillates between pure communitarianism and

universalism. If we can participate in a tradition by criticizing it--

Friedman 319

if we can express our communally given identity by rejecting it--"then

it's not clear how MacIntyre's view is any different from the liberal

individualist one he claims to reject." Just as Walzer, Sandel, and

Taylor alternate between, on the one hand, descriptions of our

embeddedness in tautologically defined communities in which it seems

that anything that is "socially constituted"--which is to say anything

at all--goes; and proscriptions of certain types of community on the

other, MacIntyre seems to be faced with a contradiction between, on the

one hand, his sustained polemic against "modern individualism" for

claiming that "I can always, if I wish to, put in question what are

taken to be the merely contingent social features of my existence,"

and, on the other, his description of "all reasoning" as taking place

"within the context of some traditional mode of thought" (1984a, 220,

222, emphasis added). If all reasoning is traditional, then modern

individualism has to count as a tradition; how, then, can MacIntyre

criticize it, or its emotivist denouement, as being antithetical to

tradition?

It would seem that one must either accept the tautologization of

particularism achieved by MacIntyre's allowances for normative tragedy,

depriving one of any communitarian basis for criticizing liberalism; or

else that, in order to condemn liberalism, one must defend the pure

authority of the socially particular over the individual. But to take

the latter course would mean not only stifling individual freedom, but

replacing the clash of irrational individual "preferences" to which

MacIntyre objects with an equally irrational clash of communal

Friedman 320

traditions; the arbitrary selection of values by individuals would give

way to the arbitrary selection of values by communities. As we have

seen, though, MacIntyre has never criticized emotivist arbitrariness as

undesirable per se. Emotivism is undesirable only insofar as it

indicates a lack of the social basis of "intelligibility," consensus;

therefore, it is a marker for interpersonal manipulation. While pure

communitarianism may be as arbitrary as emotivist individualism, it has

the advantage of precluding coercion within a given community--which

has been the point all along. Assuring that the community is neither

capitalistic nor otherwise criminal, and that it does not impinge on

individual freedom of choice in other ways, is the task of what I am

calling the philosophical and historical provisos.

The sticking point is that both provisos are patently

universalistic. They ensure that MacIntyre's communitarianism leads

not to a society that has values anything like Homer's (or Aristotle's)

society did, but to a communist society: a society of equal

subordination to some common set of ends, but also one in which the

ends cannot be Nazi or Mafioso or capitalist or even ancient Greek

ends, since they must conform to natural law and the criterion of

desert, and must allow people to dissent from their traditions in

making tragic choices.

As much harm as good accrues to MacIntyre's cause from pure

communitarianism, since he cannot, on pain of reopening the gap between

facts and values, treat communitarianism as a clever way to achieve

communism--say, by openly prescribing as universally good our mutual

Friedman 321

subordination to a set of practices carefully limited so as to preclude

uncommunist values. Having never called the goal of a society of free

community into question, he has always portrayed it as a direct

inference from facts: either from everyday facts of the sort Engels or

Dickens describes; or from a transhistorical fact of human psychology;

or from the "social facts," the tacit agreements, that make human

behavior intelligible. Each of these strategies having proven

problematic, MacIntyre now inserts Marxist liberal normative goals in

the very logic of communal particularity by means of the provisos.

The obvious objection is that MacIntyre is tacitly ruling out

communities with which he disagrees, such as that of Aristotle, by

means of a rococo structure of universalist caveats designed to confer

legitimacy on only one type of community. Why, then, keep up the

pretense of particularism? The charitable explanation is that it

simply doesn't occur to MacIntyre that political philosophy could or

should do anything but construct rationales for predetermined

conclusions--that is, that political philosophy can or should be

anything but "political" in the pejorative sense.

The Politics of After Virtue

Support for this conclusion is to be found in the consistency of After

Virtue's political implications with the political agenda MacIntyre had

pursued for decades before the book's publication. Given the narrowly

strategic concerns that had always animated MacIntyre and the

constricted set of political possibilities--liberalism versus

Friedman 322

communism--that stand behind those concerns, it does not seem

unreasonable to attribute MacIntyre's self-contradictory mature

philosophy to the political complacency that marked his entire career.

Thus, not only does the philosophical proviso specifically target

capitalist societies as unacceptable, but the particularism that it

constrains has the effect of achieving MacIntyre's lifelong goal: doing

away with interpersonal coercion. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes

that "the key to the social content" of modern individualism is that it

"entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between

manipulative and non-manipulative social relations" (1984a, 23). This

claim is the key to the political content of After Virtue.

It explains, for instance, the otherwise puzzling presence in

that book of the chapters on "'Fact,' Explanation and Expertise" and

"The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and Their Lack of

Predictive Power," which separate MacIntyre's history of the rise of

emotivism from his history of the decline of the virtues. These

chapters give political point to MacIntyre's critique of emotivism by

showing that that critique also condemns predictive social science and

the capitalist and totalitarian regimes that, according to MacIntyre,

social science legitimates. MacIntyre summarizes these chapters by

writing that "in our culture we know of no organized movement towards

power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of

no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form"--

including justifications that pay rhetorical obeisance to Marxism

(1984a, 109). Modern individuals, bereft of shared moral standards,

Friedman 323

have no choice but to try to get each other to satisfy their mutually

exclusive individual preferences by means of "nonrational persuasion"

(1988, 86)--i.e., "the manipulation of human beings into compliant

patterns of behavior" through the use of psychological pressure or

bureaucratic power (1984a, 74). This is why the paradigmatic modern

characters are "the rich man committed to the aesthetic pursuit of his

own enjoyment," regardless of the costs to others; the bureaucratic

manager, who "represents in his character the obliteration of the

distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations";

and the therapist, who "represents the same obliteration in the sphere

of personal life" (ibid., 30, emphasis removed). While under modern

conditions "each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an

autonomous moral agent," the reality is that "each of us also becomes

engaged by modes of practice...which involve us in manipulative

relationships with others" (ibid., 68).

Since "it is primarily within the context of practices that good

reasons have to be sharply discriminated from other types of cause of

action," by reestablishing the authority of such reasons over us we

could confer on each other the "respect" shown when one offers another

such reasons rather than "trying to influence him in non-rational ways"

(MacIntyre, 1986b, 67; 1984a, 46.) We could, in other words, stop

treating each other always as "means, never ends"; we could "deal with

other men...as with men"; we could "embody (our) own plans and projects

in the natural and social world" without forcing others to go along

(1984a 24; 1953, 55; 1984a 104). We could be free to make choices

Friedman 324

among tragically incommensurable goods, free "not merely to be the

creations of other people's projects, intentions, and desires," and on

that account, free to be unpredictable--(somehow) within the limits of

our tradition (1984a, 104). This conception of freedom would explain

why MacIntyre endorses Aristotle's view that "the free self is

simultaneously political subject and political sovereign," and that

"freedom is the presupposition of the exercise of the virtues and the

achievement of the good" (ibid., 159).

For what education in the virtues teaches me is that

my good as a man is one and the same as the good of

those others with whom I am bound up in human community.

There is no way of my pursuing my good which is

necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because

the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly

--goods are not private property. (MacIntyre 1984a, 229)

Although nothing in After Virtue or in MacIntyre's other

published works suggests that he entertains any doubt about Marx's

ideal of freedom, one may wonder whether his mature position has not

strayed, however inadvertently, from socialism.

Although it is not my intention to define the essence of Marxism,

I will suggest that MacIntyre views capitalism as the main enemy of

freedom and that his Aristotelian communitarianism is intended to

Friedman 325

abolish it.

Unearthing MacIntyre's mature opposition to capitalism requires

no extensive research; it is spelled out clearly in After Virtue. He

identifies as "the empirical counterpart" of his account of the virtues

Adam Ferguson's sociology, which "saw the institutions of modern

commercial society as endangering at least some traditional virtues"

(1984a, 195), in that "the specialization of different trades and

professions in commercial society eroded the civic virtues by means of

which individuals understood their primary loyalties as being to the

society as a whole (1986a, 27). MacIntyre's extension of Ferguson's

project focuses on explaining the institutional barriers faced by "any

contemporary attempt to envisage each human life as a whole, as a

unity, whose character provides the virtues with an adequate telos"

(1984a, 204). Capitalism, if not the division of labor itself, is the

explanation for these barriers, because it leads each of us to see life

not as a quest for the good that must be conducted in common with

others if it is to be intelligible as a narrative, but instead as a

bundle of pursuits of private goods. For

the kind of work done by the vast majority

of the inhabitants of the modern world cannot

be understood in terms of the nature of a

practice with goods internal to itself,

and for very good reason. One of the key

moments in the creation of modernity occurs

Friedman 326

when production moves outside the household

. . . and is put to the service of impersonal

capital, (such that) the realm of work tends

to become separated from everything but the

service of biological survival and the

reproduction of the labor force, on the

one hand, and that of institutionalized

acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia,

a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now

the driving force of modern productive

work. (Ibid., 227-28.)

Goods internal to practices are thus peripheral to "central

features of the modern economic order and more especially its

individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of

the market to a central social place" (ibid., 254). So

the historical process by and through which the aesthete,

the bureaucratic manager--the essential instrument for

organizing modern work--and their social kindred become

the central characters of modern society...and the

historical process by which the narrative understanding

of the unity of human life and the concept of a practice

were expelled to the margins of modern culture turn out

to be one and the same. It is a history one aspect of

Friedman 327

which is the transformation of forms of social life:

the continuously reestablished dominance of markets,

factories and finally bureaucracies over individuals.

(Ibid., 228, emph. removed.)

Discerning MacIntyre's communist alternative is a bit more

difficult than locating his indictment of capitalism: political options

are not seriously discussed in After Virtue. Still, the book's

equation of justice with desert, desert with distribution according to

one's contribution to the community, and contribution to the community

with excellence in socially established practices seems consistent with

communism. This impression is borne out explicitly by more recent

writings. "The rules of a market economy," according to a 1985 paper,

"detach the rewards of economic activity from any conception of merit

or desert. When prices and wages are determined within a market

framework, such expressions as 'just price' and 'just wage' are

deprived of application"; yet "justice in exchange requires that

conceptions such as those of a fair wage and a just price should have

application" (MacIntyre 1985, 245; idem 1989, 15). To set prices

freely is to treat goods as external to the practices that generate

them; to distribute goods according to desert requires controlling

their prices. Moreover, "for an Aristotelian[,] acquisitiveness as

such, pleonexia, is a vice, indeed the vice which is the principal form

of injustice" (1989, 15). This is what justifies MacIntyre's

repeatedly expressed endorsement of laws against usury, which would

Friedman 328

have the effect of ending any private, yet socially coordinated,

capital accumulation.

Between that measure and price controls, MacIntyre would seem to

have produced something less comprehensive than state socialism via

nationalization--which would, on its face, defeat the goal of a free,

egalitarian community--but more drastic than market socialism. To hold

his position, he rightly affirms, "is to set oneself in radical

opposition to any economy dominated by markets and requiring the

accumulation of capital" (1989, 15.) Is this radical posture

consistent with the closing peroration of After Virtue, in which

MacIntyre calls for "the construction of local forms of community

within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be

sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us" (1984a,

263)?

Yes: the task for those who agree with him, MacIntyre wrote in

1991, is to bring the message of justice to our society in two ways:

first, by participating in "the making and remaking of institutions"

that is ongoing in "schools, clinics, workplaces, and other

institutions"; second, by "show[ing] as well as say[ing] what an

adequate conception of justice amounts to, by constructing the types of

institutionalized social relationship within which it becomes visible"

(1991a, 110, emphasis removed.)

What we should show is that the ends of justice

involve the making and sustaining of what in each

Friedman 329

particular set of social circumstances will be a

highly determinate kind of community in which each

person can play his or her due part. As, and if,

we thus move towards those ends, we shall reverse

the sequence which Marx foresaw in the movement

from socialist to communist justice....We shall

have to move from the justice of "From each according

to his ability, to each according to his or her needs"

to the justice of "From each according to her or his

ability, to each according to his or her contribution."

(Ibid., 107.)

After After Virtue

In After Virtue, MacIntyre treated liberalism as the antithesis of

tradition, but in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three

Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), he treats it as an inferior

tradition. In this way he tries to answer the "relativist challenge"

to his position, which, MacIntyre writes, "rests upon a denial that

rational debate between and rational choice among rival traditions is

possible" (1988, 352). If this challenge stands, then there is no way

his system of thought can succeed in "unmasking and dethroning

arbitrary exercises of power, tyrannical power within communities and

imperialist power between communities" ([1984] 1987, 397).

MacIntyre's task after After Virtue, then, is to demonstrate that

Friedman 330

competing individual interpretations of a tradition, and competing

traditions, do not preclude the possibility of "impersonal standards of

judgment, neutral between competing claims" (ibid.), of just the type

that a given tradition provides for the individuals within it.

MacIntyre's attempt to meet this challenge emphasizez that when

traditions are viewed as ongoing debates, they can sometimes encounter

dead ends in which progress stops, or "crises" in which their

presuppositions are called into question. At such junctures they are

vulnerable to being superseded by other traditions that offer ways

around the obstruction and that explain, in terms acceptable to

adherents of the stymied tradition, why that tradition has reached an

impasse and why only those who adopt the competing tradition's

standpoint can understand the genesis of the first tradition's

difficulties. Thus did Aquinas solve the problems of two traditions,

Augustinian Christianity and Averroist Aristotelianism, by explaining,

from a perspective that fused them, why, on their own terms, they had

both reached certain conundrums that could only be resolved, and

explained, from his new position. In enlisting intellectual history to

his cause, MacIntyre does not want, of course, to be seen as partaking

of the "individualistic" illusion that one can judge traditions "from a

purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached

from all social particularity" (1984a, 32). Like Sandel's immanentist

hermeneutics, however, MacIntyre's attempt to set limits to pure

communitarianism without admitting that this requires an appeal to

community-transcending universals founders on its inherent

Friedman 331

contradictions.

MacIntyre's use of intellectual history as a form of what might

be labelled "immanent transcendence" rests on the agreement, by

participants in a tradition, that progress in the tradition must be

seen as consistent with the essence of the tradition; that stasis in

the tradition iis bad; and that challenges to the tradition must be

seen as crises within it rather than simply as invalid criticisms of

it. Yet it is not at all difficult to imagine a tradition--such as

that of Homeric Greece or modern Islamism--that is imbued with, even

defined by, antithetical assumptions, either because it equates change

in general with evil or because it holds that a particular status quo

embodies the final understanding of the good and, therefore, views the

notion of "progress" away from that status quo as a contradiction in

terms. From the standpoint of such a tradition, MacIntyre's form of

traditional rationality would be seen, correctly, as an alien,

universalist imposition.

But because of its pretenses to particularism, MacIntyre's

version of rationality is not a satisfactory form of universalism,

either. To maintain the fiction of immanence, MacIntyre saddles his

traditionalism with the requirement that what is true must be able to

generate an explanation of what is false. Yet from the perspective of

the universalist or philosophical (or, as MacIntyre calls it in Three

Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, "encyclopedist") tradition, a

tradition's ability to explain a competing tradition's difficulties is

irrelevant, strictly speaking, to the truth of either tradition; all

Friedman 332

that counts is which tradition is right, not which tradition produces

better intellectual history. Just as, in science, the "context of

discovery" does not bear on the truth-value of a discovery--which might

have had its inspiration in a dream or an hullucination--so, in

philosophy, the ability to explain the predicaments of a competing view

is irrelevant to the view's validity.

Take, for example, MacIntyre's own critique of liberalism. He

purports to explain the incoherently relativistic tendencies of the

liberal tradition by blaming them on individualism. In Chapter 8 of

the present essay, working from the antivoluntarist perspective

justified in Chapter 7, I will present an alternative critique of

liberalism that blames the same tendencies on metaethical voluntarism.

How is one to determine which of these explanations is better?

MacIntyre would defend his explanation of liberal relativism as better

than mine because communitarianism bridges the is-ought gap, while

antivoluntarism takes that gap to be inescapable.

If he were able to defend this conviction successfully against

the arguments presented in Chapter 7, then MacIntyre would be right to

prefer his intellectual-historical critique of liberalism to mine. For

if voluntarism is valid, as (ex hypothesi) he would maintain, then the

relativistic tendencies in liberalism, which are (he agrees)

incoherent, cannot be due to its voluntarism. But then MacIntyre's

preference for his is-ought bridge would have to be justified not on

intellectual-history grounds, but on the basis of some nonhistorical,

universalistic, philosophical, encyclopedist argument against my

Friedman 333

nonhistorical, universalistic, philosophical, encyclopedist critique of

voluntarism. Conversely, if he could not make cogent nonhistorical

objections to my critique of voluntarism, then MacIntyre would be

wrong--according to the universalist tradition of philosophy that

begins with Socrates, and in which I participate--to prefer his

intellectual-historical critique of liberalism to mine. So for

MacIntyre to rest his case on his intellectual history of liberalism

alone would both beg the question against universalism, and would

constitute a transcendent insistence on the universal validity of his

own, particularist tradition as against the universalist one. But this

would defeat the anti-universalist pretense that defines MacIntyre's

tradition.

Or consider the status of the intellectual-historical explanation

of communitarian failings presented in Part I of this essay. That what

Part I attempts to explain are communitarian "failings" requires me to

bring forth different evidence--evidence of underargued or unargued or

contradictory assumptions--than the intellectual-historical evidence

required to attribute these alleged failings to the communitarians'

"political" or strategic agenda. That is why Part I is not a critique,

of communitarianism, as Part II is intended to be; it is merely an

explanation of communitarianism’s failings (which are unproven until

Part II). In MacIntyre's view, however, communitarians are free to

ignore an intellectual-historical explanation of their view's failings,

because the notion that their view has failings in the first place

depends on universalistic, nonhistorical arguments that their tradition

Friedman 334

holds to be invalid precisely because of their universalism. MacIntyre

is in the nice position of saying, when I demand some kind of

justification for the authority of the community, "Isn't that just what

one would expect from an exponent of encyclopedist universalism?"

Only if a communitarian already feels that her tradition has run

into an epistemological crisis would she be obligated (according to

MacIntyre's version of communitarianism) to pay attention to

intellectual-historical explanations of those crises. Just as

communitarianism celebrates the prevenient validity of whatever moral

claims "we" already feel inhere in "our" identity, it licenses closing

one's mind to criticisms one does not preveniently find valid. Very

well; but by the same token, MacIntyre's post-After Virtue defense

against the charge of relativism should not be convincing to anyone not

preveniently sympathetic to its strategic purposes, because it provides

no argument against liberal universalism that does not presuppose the

validity of his version of particularism. Without an argument against

the truth-value of universalism, an "encyclopedist" can, according to

MacIntyre's own standards of rationality, simply treat MacIntyre's

intellectual history of liberalism as, at best, interesting but merely

suggestive antiquarianism. This would produce no more of an

epistemological crisis for the universalist than universalist

criticisms would produce for MacIntyre.

MacIntyre claims that pure communitarianism inheres in the very

nature of practical reasoning. He points out that an agent's untutored

desires may interfere with the performance of the action that is the

Friedman 335

conclusion of a practical syllogism, rendering the individual

irrational (MacIntyre 1988, 139). But then he simply assumes, without

justification, that (1) only communal tutoring, as opposed to

individual introspection, can bend desires toward performing well-

reasoned actions; and, more importantly, that (2) the ends toward which

communal tutoring bends individual desires must, by virtue of being

communal, be rational in the strong, non-instrumentalist sense he has

in mind. These two assumptions inhere in MacIntyre's tendentious

illustration of practical reasoning as being exemplified by someone

who, in the hockey rink, takes the actions appropriate to a "person qua

hockey player" (141)--as if all human action is and should be as

convention-bound as playing a game.

From the hockey metaphor, MacIntyre infers at once that

it is thus [sic] only within those systematic forms

within which goods are unambiguously ordered and

within which individuals occupy and move between

well-defined roles that the standards of rational

action directed toward the good and the best can

be embodied. To be a rational individual is to

participate in such a form of social life and to

conform, so far as is possible, to those standards."

(Ibid., 141.)

This account of "the good" is entirely open-ended, leaving it to the

Friedman 336

community (in the absence of the historical and philosophical provisos)

to supply any conceivable premises, and thus conclusions, to practical

syllogisms. Traditions, MacIntyre (1988, 355) reminds us, have their

origins

in and from some condition of pure historical contingency,

from the beliefs, institutions, and practices of some

particular community which constitute a given. Within

such a community authority will have been conferred upon

certain texts and certain voices....Where a person or

text is assigned an authority which derives from what is

taken to be their relationship to the divine, that sacred

authority will be...exempt from repudiation [during]...

the development of [the] tradition.

This pure communitarian moment in MacIntyre's post-After Virtue thought

is not far removed from the justificatory strategy of his canonical

book, either in its perfunctory reasoning (recall, in After Virtue,

MacIntyre's reliance on the socially determined function of a

wristwatch), or in the alacrity with which MacIntyre leaps from

individual subjectivism ([3], in the schema set forth above in Chapter

2) to the alleged remedy of normative collectivism (~3), on the basis

of the non sequitur that if individualist moral epistemology (1)

subjectivizes the good, then communitarianism (~1) necessarily makes it

objective. Like Sandel, Taylor, and Walzer, MacIntyre fails to connect

Friedman 337

the dots by making an argument (as opposed to an assumption) regarding

the inherent superiority of communitarian (~2) to individualistic (2)

epistemology.

Instead, the force of MacIntyre's case against individualism, as

it was in After Virtue, is that individualism leads to manipulative

social relationships, and that his form of communitarianism does not.

When he decries "the modern liberal conception of government as

securing a minimum of order, within which individuals may pursue their

own freely chosen ends" (1988, 201), it is not because MacIntyre

objects to individual freedom per se, but because freedom to choose

ends (except, apparently, from among a menu of tragic choices offered

up by one's community) is incompatible with interpersonal freedom from

coercion. "Justice in the fullest and proper sense governs only the

relationships of free and equal citizens within a polis," MacIntyre

writes of Aristotle with apparent approval (ibid., 146).

If we are to be free from coercion, MacIntyre holds, we must be

free from the pursuit of incompatible interests; and this freedom

requires that our community set our "identities" for us. Only to the

extent that communities are "imperfect," MacIntyre writes in Dependent

Rational Animals (1999, 144), are "competing interests...apt to emerge.

And it is therefore important that, so far as is possible, communities

are structured so as to limit such emergence." Accordingly, MacIntyre

explicates with approval Aquinas's assertion that "the best regime best

conduces to education into the virtues in the interest of the good of

all" (1988, 201).

Friedman 338

Like the "proceduralist" liberalism Sandel criticizes,

MacIntyre's (and Sandel's, and Taylor's, and Walzer's) communitarianism

is but a formal procedure designed to enact whatever ends a community

values--as long as these values are not such as would violate

interpersonal freedom. The virtues inculcated by the community inject

no more content into this proceduralism than the liberal virtues

promoted by such writers as Macedo and Berkowitz designate substantive

ends for the individuals who display them. Liberal virtues make

possible a society in which individuals can pursue any ends, as long as

these ends are communally inculcated and respectful of the other

individuals’ like pursuit. MacIntyre's virtues, too, make possible a

society in which individuals, while not choosing their ends, pursue any

ends that are consistent with the freedom of other individuals.

"Prudence is...concerned with how reason should operate in practice.

Justice...is an application of reason to conduct....Temperateness is

the restraining of passions contrary to reason....Courage is the

holding fast of the passions to what reason requires" (1988, 197).

Inasmuch as MacIntyre makes shared ends a precondition of reason-cum-

"intelligibility," the virtues he lists are all designed to make people

into good communitarians who do not interfere in their neighbors'

pursuit of shared ends, just as liberal virtues make for good liberal

citizens who cooperate in their neighbors' pursuit of divergent ends.

In such a formalistic, content-free account of "the good," what

does the political work turns out, as in After Virtue, to be the

constraints on MacIntyre's communitarianism, not the communitarianism

Friedman 339

itself. On the one hand, Aristotle (presumably like Aquinas)

"represents a tradition of thought, in which he is preceded by Homer

and Sophocles, according to which the human being who is separate from

his social group also deprived of the capacity for justice" (MacIntyre

1988, 96). Yet, on the other hand, Homer and Sophocles and Aristotle

were anything but egalitarians, and would recoil from MacIntyre's most

recent additions to the list of what justice requires: not just the

inclusion of all able-bodied human beings in the polis or its

equivalent, but also inclusion of the severely disabled (MacIntyre

1999); not just the repudiation of class barriers to political

participation, but the demand "that there should be relatively small

inequalities of income or wealth," since "gross inequality of income or

wealth is by itself always liable to generate conflicts of interest and

to obscure the possibility of understanding one's social relationships

in terms of a common good" (ibid., 144); not just the rejection of

occupational barriers to citizenship, but the requirement that

everyone, "so far as is possible, will have to take their turn in

performing the tedious and the dangerous jobs, in order to avoid

another disruptive form of social inequality" (ibid., 145).

MacIntyre's deviations from the "texts and voices" of his own

tradition is apparently justified by not only the philosophical

proviso, which allows MacIntyre to distinguish what is essential in his

tradition (its communitarian dimension) from what can be discarded, but

by the historical proviso: "The exercise of practical relationships in

communities always has a history and it is the direction of that

Friedman 340

history that is important." What counts as a good direction is not

even a question MacIntyre seems able to entertain; thus, he writes

blandly of "communities that have been or are open to alternative

possibilities" that they "sometimes move towards the better and

sometimes towards the worse" (ibid., 143), adding en passant that the

worse are--obviously--those that succumb to "corruption by narrowness,

by complacency [sic], by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole

range of other deformities" (ibid., 142).

"Justice" in pursuing whatever a community counts as the common

good is the requirement--derived from what I have been calling the

philosophical proviso--that ensures that historically "open"

communities turn out the way MacIntyre wants them to. Although

MacIntyre (1988, 121) maintains that "it would be consistent with what

[Aristotle] asserts to hold that natural justice would generally

require the citizens of a constitutional polis to abide by their own

conventions," he must also maintain--without benefit of sanction from

Aristotle, Sophocles, or Homer--that "the standards of rational

justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which

they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects

of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition"

(ibid., 7). This universalistic constraint on MacIntyre's putative

particularism is all that enables MacIntyre to single out the elements

in Aristotle and Aquinas that anticipate Marx as being the essential

aspects of the Thomist tradition. "The requirements of distributive

justice are satisfied," according to MacIntyre's exegesis of St.

Friedman 341

Thomas, "when each person receives in proportion to his or her

contribution...to the good of all" (1988, 199). Communities that

distribute goods according to other criteria are illegitimate. "The

labor theory of value" also receives Thomistic (as well as

Aristotelian) approval (ibid.), and "the standard commercial and

financial practices of capitalism" are condemned by virtue of failing

to distinguish "between the value of a thing and what it is worth to a

particular person, a distinction which lacks application in the modern

economics of free markets" (ibid., 200). However, that distinction

would be nugatory without some standard of "the value of a thing," and

many such standards are conceivable: a thing's beauty, its actual (as

opposed to hoped-for) utility in making people happy, its disclosure of

an aspect of reality....MacIntyre reaches communist conclusions about

the economic theory he locates in Thomism by assuming tacitly that the

only alternative to the arbitrary individualistic assignment of value

under capitalism is a collective--hence nonarbitrary--assignment. But

MacIntyre never supplies anything like an adequate argument showing

that "to reason apart from" one's status "qua member of a particular

type of political society and not just qua individual human being...is

to have no standard available by which to correct the passions"

(MacIntyre 1988, 321).

That MacIntyre wants to make such logical leaps is explained by

his politics. That he feels able to is explained by his metaethics, to

be explored in Part II. For the moment, we need only notice how

misleading it is for MacIntyre to associate "the good" (1988, 212,

Friedman 342

emphasis original) with the particular type of community that is

screened in by his interpretation of Thomism. It is in the nature of

his reduction of the alternatives to either individual or communal

proceduralism that MacIntyre feels entitled to contrast the liberal

"notion of the human individual as such with whatever desires or goods

he or she may have as providing the measure of value" (1988, 108,

emphasis original) against "reasons for action whose authority and

force deriv[e] from some particular account" of the good given by a

community (ibid., 212, emphasis added)--without specifying what

account. The only determinateness in MacIntyre's argument flows from

the philosophical proviso and, thus, from the requirements of natural

law and distributive justice--which produce an account not of the good,

but of communist freedom to pursue "some" good specified by the

community.

Apparently because, since at least 1953, MacIntyre has conflated

his strategic opposition to universalism with a metaphysical embrace of

value-laden facts; and because, since at least 1960, this conflation

has taken the form of dichotomizing individualist and communitarian

moral epistemology, MacIntyre's mature thought has been pushed so far

toward the blanket acceptance of all internally harmonious communities

--even grossly inegalitarian ones--that he has had to impose on them a

tacit structure of caveats that, since the publication of After Virtue,

he has portrayed as outgrowths of the same tradition they constrain.

In this respect his recent position is much like that of his college

friend Taylor's recourse to the Western tradition as the "source" not

Friedman 343

only of pure republican nationalism, but of the "hypergoods" that

filter out illiberal republics. But MacIntyre goes a step farther by

making allegiance to his (Thomistic) tradition not, as with Taylor--

and, in their own ways, Sandel and Walzer--a mere matter of value

commitments that "we," the communitarian authors and their liberal

audience, already find compelling. MacIntyre closes the circle by

contending that his tradition can prove its superiority to others,

making his a uniquely universalistic particularism. But in the end,

the effect of this final step is to shift MacIntyre's claim for the

"authority" of his tradition from ethical precepts that liberal readers

are likely to find congenial toward epistemic precepts they are likely

to find bizarre. That he should do so, however, is consistent with his

self-understanding not as the progenitor of a metaphysically improved

liberalism, but as a radical critic of everything for which liberalism

stands.

It is hard to agree with MacIntyre's self-assessment. Yes, he

puts less emphasis than conventional liberals on providing people the

means to pursue their own ends, but only because for him, individual

freedom means the absence of interpersonal coercion more than the

ability to choose, or attain, ends one has chosen. But while they may

not be ends they have chosen, the ends pursued by members of

MacIntyrean communities are still ends of their own; it is the freedom

to pursue these, unmolested, that requires that they be "chosen" by the

traditions into which individuals are born. It is in the scope of his

ambition more than its content that MacIntyre differs from mainstream

Friedman 344

liberals. As he puts it, "Trying to live by Utopian standards is not

Utopian, although it does involve a rejection of the economic goals of

advanced capitalism" (MacIntyre 1999, 145).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES

1. This is not to say that Hegel's teleology stands up any better, in

the end. But at least it is not so blatantly relativistic as Taylor's

appropriation of it is. With Hegel, the question is whether "history"

(any more than "nature") is a real telos, or whether it collapses into

a hidden voluntarism in which the interpreter of history validates his

substantive moral claims with the imprimatur of progress.

2. In A Short History of Ethics (1966, 265), MacIntyre sets forth a

description of is-ought reasoning similar to the one presented in After

Virtue, but he declines to "pursue this as yet unfinished argument

further." He merely contrasts it against "the individualism which has

had recurrent mention in this history," where the assumption "that

facts can never entail evaluations" leads to the view "that the only

authority which moral views possess is that which we as individual

agents give to them" (ibid., 264).

3. It is striking that in "The Logical Status of Religious Belief"

(1957), 201n1, MacIntyre had favorably analogized our reaction to

religious visions with "the relation between an imperative and

obedience to it." By 1965 MacIntyre will be able to publish a paper,

Friedman 345

"Imperatives, reasons for action, and morals" (in MacIntyre 1967), that

rebuts the notion that morality is imperatival, and suggests that the

notion that it is results from the modern disjunction between morality

and "human well-being."

4. Here MacIntyre is explicating Hegel, but in light of his very

limited criticisms of Hegel MacIntyre gives us no reason to think this

is not his own view as well.

5. Cf. MacIntyre's article, "Ought" (1971): In particularist cultures

"there is no citing of some human good which will be procured by

whatever action is in question. Indeed, the fact that obedience to the

rules will produce disaster for a man is sometimes noted in the

sagas...and this contributes not at all to showing that the agent

therefore ought not to do what the rules prescribe." In MacIntyre

1978, 145.

6. Cf. "The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology" (1971)

in MacIntyre 1978, 10: "Nobody can know what an agent wants better than

the man himself."

7. Cf., inter alia, 1984a, 221: "Insofar as the virtues sustain the

relationships required for practices, they have to sustain

relationships to the past--and to the future"; and ibid., 146: "The

past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, yet

Friedman 346

corrected and transcended in a way that leaves the present open to

being in turn corrected and transcended by some yet more adequate

future point of view."