Getting Alasdair MacIntyre Very, Very Wrong

A title for nonfiction creates clear expectations. Fail to live up to it, and the reader will find fault where none may be. When I first picked up Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography, I was excited to see how Emile Perreau-Saussine would analyze MacIntyre’s philosophical odyssey. Within a few pages of its foreword, I started to worry. Worry turned to dread, and dread gave way to frustration and anger. Most of that frustration was justified, but some of it was not.

As one of MacIntyre’s many undergraduate students from Notre Dame, I have a tremendous respect for the man and his work. This book by Perreau-Saussine does not deserve to bear MacIntyre’s name because it certainly does not provide what its front cover claims. Although Perreau-Saussine possesses a great mind for history and philosophy, this book lacks sufficient depth and understanding of MacIntyre and his thought. In failing to express MacIntyre fully, the book demonstrates one of MacIntyre’s central theses: that the modern world struggles to know coherently and cogently. As such, Perreau-Saussine’s book fails to meet a standard that MacIntyre mentioned occasionally in class: it’s not even as good as an encyclopedia entry.

Perreau-Saussine organizes his work into three main parts: politics, philosophy, and God. At first glance, this division seems fitting and just, a reflection of MacIntyre’s nomenclature for many of his works – but in constituting his work that way, however, Perreau-Saussine falls into quicksand that he never manages to escape from, failing to account for MacIntyre’s intellectual shifts. Instead of being able to explain fully, succinctly, and chronologically how MacIntyre moved from one position to another, Perreau-Saussine is forced to continually backtrack in order to give proper context – something that proves fatal as he ends up spending as much time philosophizing as explaining MacIntyre. Moreover, instead of helping neophytes, Perreau-Saussine makes so many intellectual detours that only a well-read expert will know what he is talking about at any given point.

In his entry on MacIntyre’s politics, Perreau-Saussine meanders around the latter half of the twentieth century spending most of his time bewailing how confused the Left had become. In this chronicle, MacIntyre is barely a supporting character. Five whole pages are devoted to the disillusionment of many British intellectuals with their respective parties before MacIntyre is even brought up. After a brief treatment of MacIntyre’s view of instrumentality and property, it gets back to the history of the Communist Party in England. Perreau-Saussine does a good job of explaining how the Left broke into competing sects and isolated intellectual islands, but a clear view of MacIntyre’s thinking remains absent. Instead, we get fragments and a few quotes.

Somehow ending up in the 1950s, Perreau-Saussine then describes how MacIntyre became interested in “communities.” What makes for a community? How does a community form its members? Can a man be more than a member of a particular community? To borrow a term MacIntyre does not use (for good reason), can anyone be an authentic member of a nation-state as a community? These would all be great questions to hear MacIntyre answer in this section. Instead, Perreau-Saussine laments that MacIntyre does not spend enough time on politics while broadly describing MacIntyre’s criticisms of the nation-state as it relates to the Enlightenment. This line of thought then gives way to a long and cumbersome comparison of MacIntyre and Charles Taylor over communitarianism.

Here, Perreau-Saussine makes an intellectual error of the first order: he fails to explain in MacIntyre’s terms why MacIntyre rejects modernity’s politics. He notes the break and even provides a great quote from MacIntyre: “For I not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition … but I believe this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.” Perreau-Saussine seems to think that MacIntyre abandoned political theory because it stopped answering questions. But that is wrong: MacIntyre is rather making the claim that there is no political theory that justifies our current political structures and enables political participation. In other words, what we call “politics” are just shadows dancing on a wall meant to distract and/or entertain us.  

Just a few pages later, Perreau-Saussine either fails to apprehend MacIntyre or just distorts his words. Consider this quote from MacIntyre in detail:

My ancestors lived in small communities in Northern Ireland and in the West of Scotland – my father was one of the first generation of his family not to learn English as a second language. In other words, I came from the fringes of modern Western culture and have tried to give a clear voice to some of those people who do not belong to the dominant mainstream and cannot identify with it. But paradoxically, I was only able to do this, and I only became aware of the need to do so, because I myself spent most of my adult life in universities that belong to this mainstream.[1]

A fair reading of the above passage is that MacIntyre has become aware of the tensions between his own life and the life of his family. Their very language and customs have shifted tremendously over a couple of generations, and he clearly understands that he is not part of those “small communities” that bred him but rather of the universities of the mainstream. Yet, a few lines above, Perreau-Saussine remarks that “MacIntyre likes to think of himself as Irish.” This complete lack of insight into MacIntyre’s nuances will repeat throughout the book.

A sort of longing for the goodness of the past seems to align MacIntyre with the conservatives of our day, and Perreau-Saussine does a decent enough job of explaining how MacIntyre differs from mainstream conservatives on either side of the Atlantic. This section on politics, however, keeps bringing up the Enlightenment and the grounding principles of the Left in opposition to the Right. Perreau-Saussine cannot help but see MacIntyre’s turn to Aquinas in light of someone rejecting Locke and company, not in MacIntyre’s terms of discovering a better way of articulating human nature. Yet, Perreau-Saussine does understand that After Virtue marks an important departure for MacIntyre into a less pessimistic mindset. 

A long analysis of Liberalism’s epistemology follows, much of it good, but little related to MacIntyre’s politics. Writing at length about the “Enlightenment Project,” Perreau-Saussine accurately describes MacIntyre’s core criticisms of how Modernity grounds and develops its reasonings. What Perreau-Saussine cannot countenance is that Modernity is fundamentally broken and MacIntyre seeks to correct it. When MacIntyre points out that Liberalism is a parasite, he is obviously stating that it does not benefit its host but saps him of strength. Parasites destroy for their own benefit, not that of the host – similarly, an intellectual parasite cannot provide answers, only condemnations of its host. Perreau-Saussine conflates liberalism with the world in order to absolve MacIntyre of the sin of disbelief, arguing that “MacIntyre does not so much criticize the liberal regime as such, as he criticizes certain tendencies of liberalism.” No: MacIntyre thinks that modernity is a wasteland of truth, goodness, and beauty. 

The second section of the book purports to frame MacIntyre’s philosophy by examining collective reasoning in three subsections: The Moral Critique of Stalinism, Moral Life and Socially Established Practices, and Philosophy of Tradition. The issue is that, again, Perreau-Saussine struggles to differentiate philosophy from politics while commenting ad nauseam about tangential affairs.

The section begins by commenting at length about how the world became disillusioned with Communism. Perhaps the events of Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary are simply too far removed from this author for them to have the same impact as they must have had on MacIntyre and even Perreau-Saussine. Discovering that Communism has problems is certainly not a novel experience, but Perreau-Saussine manages to make even this confusing as he falls into a stream-of-consciousness type of narrative that leaves any reader scratching his head and frowning … a lot. Eventually, he arrives at Kant and self-interest and has a discussion about how the universal and particular are related to the community. It may not be revolutionary in terms of philosophical history, but at least he becomes comprehensible as he describes the background of Marx and by extension the USSR.

Nevertheless, it is torturous to read fourteen pages describing such history that fail to explain how MacIntyre condemns Stalin! Eventually, Perreau-Saussine will explain that MacIntyre realized that the right and the good had to be joined together again after Machiavelli and Hobbes (and all who followed them) separated them.[2] This realization leads MacIntyre to posit that far from an individual experience, morality is a communal work that requires a socially established practice.

And then comes Perreau-Saussine’s most bizarre analysis. Whilst explaining how MacIntyre attacks positivism, emotivism, and moral relativism[3], Perreau-Saussine simply summarizes MacIntyre with eloquence – for example, the is-ought distinction is shown to be a great deal of hot air and a poor explanation of how humans behave – but as Wittgenstein is brought up, the book becomes truly confused. Perreau-Saussine makes the bold claim that MacIntyre grounds his rejection of modern political philosophy in Wittgenstein. Sure, MacIntyre and Wittgenstein have a lot in common from a historical perspective, but vanishingly little in terms of their approach to philosophy, let alone their conclusions. When one reads Wittgenstein, one encounters the mind and the most fundamental questions of knowing, especially in light of how language allows human beings to interact with the world. At the end of the day, Wittgenstein is trying to ground thinking in the mind as Descartes and Kant would. That project may be adjacent to some of MacIntyre’s works, but it is not his main field of inquiry.

In the last section on Philosophy, Perreau-Saussine attempts to present MacIntyre’s views on tradition. The obvious and easy-to-understand analogy that MacIntyre used in After Virtue to explain tradition is that of teaching a child to play chess. Accordingly, no such easy reference is made. Instead, Perreau-Saussine launches into a lengthy discussion of Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, and other modern philosophers who looked at large groups of people and how MacIntyre was supposedly influenced by them. Despite his many footnotes and assertions, this explanation comes across as confused, ill-focused, and unenlightening.

Then Perreau-Saussine begins the worst section of his work. Since I have a strong bias toward the Catholic Faith as a Catholic priest, my views on this section might be unduly harsh. However, up until this point, when Perreau-Saussine had criticized MacIntyre, he had done so without cruelty. This changes when he frames his discussion with a provocative and unfair question, “Are Wars of Religion as Dangerous as Secularization?”

Dear reader, let us remember that in the world of letters, we must always strive to speak to our opponents on their terms as well as our own. Posing the above question has no relevance in regard to MacIntyre since as far as this author knows, MacIntyre never wrote about the Thirty Years War or Europe’s tumults during the Evangelical Revolution. This question prejudices the reader to see Perreau-Saussine being the more reasonable philosopher who is rescuing MacIntyre from his mad dash against the local windmill. What is worse than this intellectual barb is that it is not returned to or even really referenced. Instead, Perreau-Saussine brings up Hobbes, the rights of minorities, MacIntyre’s interpretation of Plato, and a small host of non-religious issues. Anyone who claims that Perreau-Saussine was fair to MacIntyre in this work either did not read this section or has similar levels of contempt for the man that Perreau-Saussine so obviously does.

In the second supposedly about theology, entitled “The Absence of Liberal Spirituality,” our misguided author instead spends most of his time comparing MacIntyre to Charles Taylor…for reasons. After bringing up the concept of taboo and its historical context from Hawaii, Perreau-Saussine rightly explains that MacIntyre views contemporary cultures as last men in the Nietzschean sense. In other words, morality has been emptied of meaning, and most simply people go on about their lives attempting to satisfy their basic desires. Then comes the compare and contrast between MacIntyre and Taylor, which I cannot comment extensively on because I lack extensive knowledge of Taylor’s views. I am simply unable to justify this digression or understand its point except that it allows Perreau-Saussine to comment more generally and broadly about the state of spirituality in the world.

Coming to the last section, on his analysis of MacIntyre’s theology, Perreau-Saussine once again brings up Tradition…at least in the title. To his credit, our author does give us a great quote from MacIntyre, “If I were God, I do not think that I would want to be studied by most contemporary theologians…It is also because the peculiarity deep secularization of our pluralist culture offers traps to the theologian into which they continually fall.” He then chronicles MacIntyre’s journey, from Barth to Thomas Aquinas, while complaining about its deficiencies. With the regularity of routine, Perreau-Saussine asserts that MacIntyre arrived at the Angelic Doctor through a detour from Wittgenstein and Kuhn. Except this detour is pure invention, especially as it relates to Kuhn. Kuhn is a relativist who proposes that paradigms are self-justifying but never complete. In conceiving tradition as fundamentally constitutive, MacIntyre could not be further from Kuhn’s perspective.

Eventually, our wandering guide returns us to MacIntyre’s thought by proposing that MacIntyre is stuck in the dilemma between authentic choice and God’s Will. Anyone familiar with Aristotle or Aquinas will know the answer to this critique: the human soul. God created man with an intellect and will that exists in time but is oriented to eternity. Man has a capacity for choice not as an act of self-actualization but as a power given by God.

What is too much to stomach for me as a priest, however, is the snide remark on MacIntyre’s conversion, “In 1983, he converted to Catholicism, following the example of other British philosophers, in particular Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Michael Dummett.” I have never met anyone who changed faith because it was the trendy thing to do.  Perreau-Saussine may think that faith is merely a social construct that can attract or repel, but I have never encountered a conversion story that would justify such a belief as is implied in this retelling. In other words, when someone claims to have experienced the Divine, I tend to believe their sincerity at the very least.

Returning to the haze of Perreau-Saussine’s thoughts about religion, our Captain Ahab searches the seven seas of MacIntyre, Aquinas, and Augustine for his elusive prey: freedom. Like Melville’s obsessed seaman, Perreau-Saussine will not let go of his search for a liberal conception of MacIntyre. Eventually, Perreau-Saussine will claim that MacIntyre finds Catholicism appealing because it allows him to claim that moral practices allow for true freedom. MacIntyre – it is claimed by Perreau-Saussine – then wishes to revive the tug of war between Thomas and Augustine to create theology worth reading.

Finally, we come to the Epilogue and the end of our journey. Perreau-Saussine summarizes why he thinks MacIntyre is worth reading for liberals: he asks superb questions that correct many of liberalism’s bad tendencies. Perreau-Saussine states clearly that MacIntyre does not have much to offer as an alternative to liberal democracy and thus can be integrated into liberalism’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It should be clear to the reader by now, that such a presentation of MacIntyre is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst.

I had not read Perreau-Saussine before reading Alasdair MacIntyre and I will likely not read more of his writings. Becoming lost in a web of philosophers and movements, Perreau-Saussine fails to tell an engaging story about MacIntyre which is what his book intended to do but failed at completing. Like the sailors aboard the ill-fated ship of Jonah, Perreau-Saussine’s readers are tossed about in a storm of references that threaten to capsize the endeavor at any point. Most deadly of all, however, is Perreau-Saussine commitment to his own philosophy. Instead of allowing MacIntyre to be himself, Perreau-Saussine must place the man in a straightjacket of Left versus Right that benefits no one. For an author so enamored by freedom, such imprisonment reveals how cruel and tyrannical the liberal mind is. Luckily, MacIntyre offers us moderns a way out of such constraints into the freedom that God intends: virtue.

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography
By Émile Perreau-Saussine, trans. Nathan J. Pinkoski
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. 216 pp.

NOTES:

[1] (Alasdiar MacIntyre and Dmitri Nikulin, “Interview: Wahre Selbsterkenntnis durch Verstechen unserer selbst aus der Perspektive andere,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44, no. 4 (1996), p.671).

[2] I reject this reading of Machiavelli. It combines a surface reading of The Prince with near complete ignorance of the Discourses on Livy.

[3] MacIntyre does differentiate these ideologies very well, but we will group them together in so far as most commentators do so.

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