The Life and Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre

“[S]tories and theses about rule-following and rule-breaking, about achieving and failing to achieve goods, have to be understood together or not at all.” If Alasdair MacIntyre is right, philosophical reflection on the nature of practical reason, and on what makes for a meaningful and fulfilled life, forms part of an ongoing dialogue about the theoretical presuppositions concerning the human good which explain the directedness of exemplary life narratives. MacIntyre’s own life is no exception. Indeed, his thought invites a retelling of his life story. This is a formidable task, and one that Émile Perreau-Saussine seems to set himself in Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography. First published in French in 2005, this book is now available in English. The author’s stated purpose is “to reconstitute [MacIntyre’s] intellectual journey, as a way to outline the biography of a problem.” Rather than a sustained intellectual biography, the emphasis is on reconstituting MacIntyre’s journey, towards what Perreau-Saussine sees as its fulfillment—a “new conservatism” addressing the cultural malaise of secular liberalism, and rejuvenating political liberalism with ethical and spiritual sources from the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition.

This reconstitution of MacIntyre’s story is undertaken by sympathetic, dialectical engagement along three thematic lines: his politics, practical philosophy, and theology. Within each part, the narrative of MacIntyre’s development as a thinker is disjointed. The author mixes snapshots of intellectual biography with insightful, broad-brush comparisons to other philosophers, such as Charles Taylor, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Elizabeth Anscombe. The thread of discussion jumps at times between different ‘MacIntyres’ at various stages of his thought. However, the cumulative trajectory in each part is not so much towards charting his intellectual journey, although it does this in fits and starts; but towards outlining the contours of that “new conservatism,” which at times explains and at other times corrects MacIntyre’s anti-liberalism.

Perreau-Saussine frames the introduction of MacIntyre, as a key contemporary discontent of political liberalism, with a tension embodied in the liberal tradition itself. On the one hand, classical political liberalism offers some admirable practical insights:

Neither moral edification nor laws are enough to render citizens good and virtuous. It is useless to look to transform tyrants into generous kings, oligarchs into aristocrats, and corrupt men into wise men. It is more efficient for ambition to counteract ambition so that one cancels out the other … In relying on the vices, in transforming passions into interests, we can ensure that each one pursues his interest in a way that profits everyone.

On the other hand, by constituting political order “out of the crooked timber of humanity,” political liberalism makes human will and freedom central to political and moral life. Privatizing questions of the human good, liberalism feeds an individualism and moral relativism in practice that undermines the ethical commitments necessary for its own coherence and survival. This tension between the practical good sense of political liberalism and the individualist excesses of liberal culture is one that Perreau-Saussine seeks to resolve with MacIntyre’s help.

Chapter One examines MacIntyre’s politics through his early association with the British New Left, and its development towards Perreau-Saussine’s “new conservatism”. MacIntyre’s abiding political concerns are traced from the identity crisis confronting Socialist movements in response to the 1950s rapprochement between the British Labour Party and the welfare state. A nagging question for the New Left was the extent to which the quest for human realization through politics could be satisfied with the comforts and material prosperity for the growing middle classes. For MacIntyre, something more radical lies at the root of the socialist critique of liberalism: “The relationship between human beings must take precedence over the relationship of human beings to things.” Throughout his career, he maintained the conviction that market relations of liberal democracies have compartmentalized and instrumentalized the bonds of human sociability, and rendered politics into a form of oligarchy for the benefit of political and economic elites. He also rejects any state-driven political solution, since more collectivist planning only consolidates the power of such elites and entrenches utilitarianism within a creeping bureaucracy. Instead, due to the lack of alternatives, Perreau-Saussine argues that “MacIntyre rallied indirectly to liberal democracy … through a kind of grudging resignation.” MacIntyre remains committed to rejuvenating political discourse at the level of local community, in a way that resonates with Guild socialism or Catholic distributivism. However, at the same, large-scale political institutions remain necessary, and he offers little detail on what might replace the modern liberal state, apart from the potential for a new Saint Benedict, or a new form of localized politics, to reshape our political order.

These “communitarian sensibilities”—longing for authentic human community—lead MacIntyre to neglect the political domain, in Perreau-Saussine’s view. This is the author’s most critical point. MacIntyre seeks to retrieve Aristotle in order to resist the cultural relativism of communitarianism. However, his intellectual journey from Marxism shapes an over-emphasis on the social dimension of the human being, at the expense of politics. By consequence, MacIntyre’s Aristotelian retrieval rightly affirms the “natural character of social life” from the Nicomachean Ethics, while neglecting questions about reasons for political rule and the best political regime in Aristotle’s Politics. Thus, as Perreau-Saussine describes it, MacIntyre’s retrieval project is set on the path of a “new conservatism” seeking to recover “rootedness in community,” but without adequate consideration of the political character of this rootedness, within a political regime. His diagnosis of political liberalism becomes distorted without a more thorough-going and realistic treatment of how different, viable political systems can participate in achieving the overall common good for a given society, even though they may be defective or incomplete to some extent, especially given the challenges of human evil.  

The apparent reduction of politics to ethics in MacIntyre’s thought connects to the second thematic exploration of his practical philosophy in Chapter Two. Perreau-Saussine explains how MacIntyre’s search for moral resources to critique Stalinism leads him to re-embed his moral theory within “practices,” “traditions,” and “life narratives”. The philosophy of action developed by Anscombe and Wittgenstein are a determinative influence in this account, and partly explain the undue focus on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The intelligibility of human action is a function of interpretation with respect to the role that action plays within relevant socially-established practices to realize certain common goods, and within traditions of enquiry that express social understandings of human activities, and within an agent’s purposive life narrative in pursuit of some overall human good. Inside these rich normative contexts, the functional character of natural duties and virtues is re-established when grounded by a background biological-cum-metaphysical account of the human telos, which MacIntyre offers in Dependent Rational Animals.

While MacIntyre has much to say on these “forms of life” requiring the human virtues, Perreau-Saussine chastises him for having “very little to say about the virtues themselves: temperance, courage, and moderation.” This is unfair. A perusal of MacIntyre’s discussion on the virtues of independent practical reasoning and acknowledged dependence in Dependent Rational Animals is enough to cast doubt on Perreau-Saussine’s harsh comparison to the treatment of virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, MacIntyre devotes significant attention to specific virtues, as well as rival accounts of virtues, across a number of writings, from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to his 1994 Tanner Lectures on Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers. Perreau-Saussine did not have the benefit of MacIntyre’s most recent works, like Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity and God, Philosophy, Universities, but this rather flat-footed appraisal suggests a selective or blinkered reading. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that MacIntyre is chiefly concerned with retrieving an awareness of those forms of life in which our need for the virtues makes sense. Without that retrieval, claims of virtue ring hollow within the emotivist culture of late modernity.  

As Perreau-Saussine describes it, the collective force of MacIntyre’s arguments on the embeddedness of practical rationality within practices, traditions, and narratives, is to reveal how “individual reasoning is participation in collective reasoning, upon which it depends.” At the same time, he avoids moral relativism. Although different traditions can exhibit forms of incommensurability in their conceptual and linguistic schema, there is always the human capacity to critically reflect on and revise our most basic presuppositions, and to develop understandings that are more adequate to human experience within these practices and traditions. Using MacIntyre’s debates with Peter Winch to elucidate his account of “traditions of inquiry,” Perreau-Saussine claims that “MacIntyre escapes from the theory of universal commensurability because he emphasizes the importance of belonging to a society”; and yet he also “escapes from the theory of incommensurability because he emphasizes that social life is not foreign to human nature.” This notion of tradition provides epistemological foundations for “a natural law that is understood and interpreted within the framework of different social forms.”

If, however, the proper end of a human being’s action, according to reason, is attunement to a “logos that at once constitutes him as a rational animal and a political animal,” then philosophical inquiry into that end remains radically incomplete without contemplation of the source of that logos. This point raises the third theme that Perreau-Saussine explores in Chapter Three, concerning the relationship between MacIntyre’s philosophy and theology, and his response to secularization in liberal democracies. The founders of the liberal tradition sought to resolve the problem of uncompromising religious belief, manifested in religious wars, by separating the essential identity of politics from religion, and of the individual from religious tradition and practice:

Following Hobbes, who was himself hardly a liberal, the theorists of liberalism call for the sovereignty of the individual and of the state. Thanks to the nation-state, these same citizens conceive an identity that is no longer essentially confessional. Thanks to individualism, these same citizens come to conceive of themselves as relatively independent from their church, whatever it may be.

In contrast to this classical liberal fixation on the disruption caused for action and theory in the City of Man by all-encompassing forms of religious conviction, MacIntyre responds to what Perreau-Saussine calls the “theologico-political problem” downstream from liberal separations. His focus is instead on “the threat society poses to faith,” rather than “the threat faith poses to civic peace.” Quoting at length from MacIntyre’s first book, Marxism: An Interpretation, Perreau-Saussine claims that his response to the theologico-political problem explains his neglect of politics:

[I]f our religion is fundamentally irrelevant to our politics, then we are recognizing the political as a realm outside the reign of God. To divide the sacred from the secular is to recognize God’s action only within the narrowest limits. A religion which recognizes such a division, as does our own, is on the point of dying.

Especially in his later writings, when he turns to Aristotle and Aquinas for inspiration, MacIntyre becomes set on overcoming these liberal divisions and reinvigorating human contemplation of the demands of the City of God through religious tradition, and especially the Tradition of the Catholic Church.

This theological reading of MacIntyre may seem somewhat stretched. With a few exceptions, the last things are hardly in the foreground of his main writings since After Virtue. Indeed, to some Christian believers, MacIntyre might even seem prone to liberal divisions, between a secular object for philosophy and a sacred object for theology, or between personal faith and professional work. This is, I believe, unfair. MacIntyre confines himself to the strictures of philosophy according to Aquinas, in proceeding from sources for natural reason. His later writings broach but end off where his philosophical inquiry reaches the natural desire for God, the divine will and reason undergirding the natural law, or the need for the theological virtues (e.g., Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity). To reach beyond any authority, the inquiry should draw on divine revelation and MacIntyre professes no special theological qualifications to warrant the expression of his intellectual labors in this direction. Instead, his own life story, and particularly his complicated conversion to the Catholic faith, complete the “intellectual journey” that cries out for an ending in his writings. This is what Perreau-Saussine intends by seeking to “reconstitute his intellectual journey, as a way to outline the biography of a problem.” The narrative direction of MacIntyre’s life starkly raises the theologico-political problem. Embracing the City of God leads him to retreat unduly from the City of Man and find repose in a politics of the local community ordered to divine things. On this reading, the elusive reference to Saint Benedict in After Virtue becomes the model for localized social relations, sheltered from the temporal problems of large-scale political community, and joined in the practice of friendship in divine contemplation.

Behind Perreau-Saussine’s core criticisms of MacIntyre is the work of his doctoral supervisor, Pierre Manent, who authored the Preface. In Perreau-Saussine’s work, MacIntyre is singled out as one instance of the retreat from politics in the nation-state that Manent laments in A World beyond Politics?: A Defense of the Nation-State. Essentially, the more radical form of MacIntyre’s anti-liberalism, which refuses to engage with the practical questions of the liberal nation-state, is a symptom of an anti-politics—refusing to dirty one’s hands in political matters. In a more scathing indictment, Manent argues that proponents of this type of “Aristotelianism of the opposition” remain “condemned to a certain abstraction because they refuse to consider the real concretizations of action, which always have a political mark or coefficient.” That political mark, as Perreau-Saussine describes it, includes the practical resilience of liberal democracy in the absence of effective alternatives. Rather than a rejection of political liberalism, MacIntyre’s thought actually ends up reinforcing a de facto political liberalism because it provides critical resources to correct the excesses of liberal culture in the ethical domain, which would otherwise undermine the liberal tradition.

One wonders, however, whether this attempted rapprochement with political liberalism is now well-dated. Perreau-Saussine was writing in 2005. Much has happened since in terms of the rapid advancement of identity politics and rising intolerance of religious traditions. Given our circumstances, even more can be said in support of the “revolutionary” and radically anti-liberal aspects of MacIntyre’s thought. It is unfortunate then that MacIntyre’s Replies to his French interlocutors were not published in this English translation of Perreau-Saussine’s book. It would have given the reader a better sense of the ongoing debate and inquiry. In his Replies, MacIntyre stoutly rejects the suggestion his “critique of moral and political modernity should have been taken to be conservative in its implications.” Resisting any “new conservative” mold, he reasserts the “revolutionary” character of his Aristotelianism, which draws resources from Marxism. As he outlines in his essay, Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995, he remains convinced of the institutionalized injustice of the capitalist system due to its reliance on an initial misappropriation of the means of production, a perpetuation of class conflict over partial interests, the systemic injustices of exchange relations due to imbalances and abuses of power, and the miseducation of citizens in the pursuit of wants, rather than goods. Inherently, the liberal inversion of the vice of pleonexia into a virtue—grasping after more than one’s just desert—corrupts those who seek power and wealth in the modern liberal state, and it is those elites that predetermine the restricted political choices to be made by citizens through democratic procedures.

In response to the charge that he offers an apolitical Aristotelianism, MacIntyre warns against taking for granted “the categories of the present day dominant cultural and social order,” like the concept of the “state.” Instead, for MacIntyre, the “political dimension of human life” is expressed through “institutionalized forms of deliberation” about the common good of a political community, for the sake of their human flourishing. The “right place to begin” is to ask: “what it is for human beings to act as reflective, practically rational agents and what kind of social order is necessary if they are to engage in shared deliberation about their common goods”. In seeing political practice in this way, MacIntyre’s claim is that, far from separating Aristotle’s ethics from his politics, he is identifying that “[o]ur political relationships are our social relationships understood in a particular way,” through shared deliberation about common action. Reading between the lines, MacIntyre seeks to turn the tables—it is Manent and Perreau-Saussine who unduly compartmentalize “the political domain” from the social dimensions of human life, and misidentify it with the modern state. Following MacIntyre’s line of argument, the deliberative character of an Aristotelian form of political practice puts it in stark opposition to the politics of mutual advantage embodied through the institutional structures of the modern liberal state, and globalized capitalism. The right response for local communities that remain able to sustain allegiance to authentic goods within their communal practices and traditions is to develop a “politics of self-defense.” As Nathan Pinkoski argues, it is towards nascent and local practices that MacIntyre directs our hope and attention for any prospects of realizing an authentic politics of the common good in the future, which must be a politics of resistance against our emotivist culture and the bureaucratic overreach of the state.

Whether or not MacIntyre has accurately diagnosed the condition of politics in late modernity, there is more to be said for the line of criticism in Perreau-Saussine’s “biography of a problem.” What MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelian politics hides from view is the importance of political institutions and authority to realize common action in conditions of political disagreement, especially within large-scale and complex political societies. MacIntyre tends to overstate the normative character of joint deliberation about the common good and to sideline an inquiry into reasons for authoritative decision-making based on political institutions and the rule of law. This is an area in which MacIntyre should be challenged, and Perreau-Saussine’s book is a helpful start in that conversation. Whether or not MacIntyre’s diagnosis of the liberal nation-state is right, and a politics of self-defense for local communities is sorely needed, he runs the risk that his political theory undermines justifications for the central case of governance by law in human history, through political authority established by custom and exercised through institutions and decision-makers for the common good of a people. The central case becomes defective because it can never live up to MacIntyre’s deliberative ideal, which makes most sense within the face-to-face relationships of local communal practices. And yet, the central case is absolutely necessary to realize a political common good because, as MacIntyre recognizes, the politics of local communities can never be “complete” in providing for the self-sufficiency of its members. One can agree with MacIntyre that nation-states should not be confused with the ideal of a complete community, but this does not mean that they do not participate in, contribute to, or aim at a common good in ways that give presumptive weight to their institutional authority. That moral weight is reinforced by considering the precious character of institutions and legal order, the realizable alternatives for governance, and the morally permissible means to realize such alternatives. A ‘politics of self-defence’ may be necessary to combat the defects in modern state governance, but one must also appreciate the good of that governance to express the rightful limits of any defensive action. Either MacIntyre’s politics is radically incomplete, or there are serious questions about whether he is really seeking the communion of saints with an excessive temporal ardor more to do with his debt to Marxism.

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

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