Alasdair MacIntyre’s Political Liberalism MacIntyre’s Political Liberalism 271 dichotomy, since...

266 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

Alasdair MacIntyre’ s PoliticalLiberalism

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1984).

Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Vir-tues by Alasdair MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).

Alasdair MacIntyre is known as one of the foremost critics ofliberalism, both liberal theory and liberal practice. As an

alternative to the utilitarianism and relativism of liberal moraltheory, MacIntyre has proposed virtue-ethics and “tradition-constituted rationality.” As an alternative to the individualism andbureaucratization of liberal moral practice, MacIntyre has pro-posed the practices and politics of local community. MacIntyrehas presented his anti-liberal moral and political vision in histrilogy, After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , andThree Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry , in later works such asDependent Rational Animals , and in numerous articles, lectures,and interviews; and he has done so with a brilliance, erudition, andsophistication unmatched by his liberal opponents. Yet, as I shallattempt to show in this article, MacIntyre’s moral theory containsinternal contradictions that render its practical application ofsmall-scale, tradition-constituted communities defective.MacIntyre’s political prescription is built upon an incoherentnotion of the state, is insufficiently political, and fosters thepolitical liberalism he so vehemently opposes. Since MacIntyre’smagnificent trilogy, though rich in moral theory, does not containmuch in the way of sustained political theory, to substantiate my

Alasdair MacIntyre’s Political Liberalism 267

critique of MacIntyre’s political philosophy, I shall examine hislesser-known Dependent Rational Animals , as well as some of hislectures on politics.

Acknowledging Dependence: A Prologue to PoliticsIn Dependent Rational Animals , MacIntyre brings his thinkingdown, as it were, from the meta-ethical and meta-theoretical levelof Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , with its dialectical-historical presentation of tradition-constituted rationality in gen-eral and Thomistic-constituted rationality in particular, to a muchmore concrete ethical and theoretical level. Essentially, he offersus a revised account of the virtues, one quite different from whatwe find in After Virtue, for it is now biologically, as well asAristotelianly and Thomistically, informed. Most importantly,MacIntyre provides, for the first time, a description of theparticular social and political forms that best sustain and promotethese virtues. In the context of answering the question “Whyhuman beings need the virtues?” MacIntyre provides us with hisfirst extended treatment of a politics adequate to virtue-needinghuman beings, or “dependent rational animals.” What is particu-larly noteworthy about Dependent Rational Animals is its absenceof any treatment of tradition, and when one notes that thisabsence coincides with the concrete discussion of particularmoral norms and ideal political structures, one wonders if thereason for the absence is a substantive change in MacIntyre’sthinking, or simply the effect of a change in philosophical focus.In any event, we note the absence of theological matters inDependent Rational Animals like in other works, but it is aparticularly notable absence here, since the work involves, not aformal, abstract, meta-ethical discussion of the generic structureof the good, or a historical comparison of moral traditions, but acontent-rich, concrete, normative account of the specific virtuesof human flourishing.

MacIntyre asks the question: “What difference to moralphilosophy would it make, if we were to treat the facts ofvulnerability and affliction and the related facts of dependence as


central to the human condition?”1 This is a variation on MacIntyre’sconsistent condemnation of the Enlightenment’s conception ofman the autonomous and independent “individual,” with itsplacing of the highest moral imperative precisely on the emanci-pation of man from vulnerability and affliction. For the Enlight-enment, these latter are eminently remedial defects, not, asMacIntyre claims, ineradicable aspects of the human condition.The difference an affirmative answer to the question makes is therecognition of an essential defect in the Aristotelian conceptionof virtue, that rational agency requires the “virtues of acknowl-edged dependence” in addition to the virtues of the independentrational agent.

MacIntyre asks a second question: “What type of socialrelationship and what type of the common good are required, ifa social group is to be one in and through which both the virtuesof rational independence and the virtues of acknowledged depen-dence are sustained and transmitted?” 2 To understand his answerto this question, we must first examine what MacIntyre means bythe virtues of acknowledged dependence. In order for humanbeings to flourish, they need to understand themselves as practi-cal reasoners about goods, and they come to learn this identity asreasoners, as well as the particular goods about which theyreason, from arguing about them with others; this is an exampleof our intrinsic dependence. To learn “how to stand back in somemeasure from our present desires, so as to be able to evaluatethem,” and to “imagine realistically alternative possible futures,”is required to become an independent practical reasoner, but thislearning itself requires the presence and occasional interventionof others. In fact, our very identities depend upon our beingrecognized by others: “I can be said truly to know who and whatI am, only because there are others who can be said truly to knowwho and what I am.” Recognizing this is a prerequisite for gainingthe virtues of acknowledged dependence: “Acknowledgment ofdependence is the key to independence.” Accurate knowledge ofone’s good first requires accurate knowledge of one’s self, and thiscan only occur “in consequence of those social relationships


which on occasion provide badly needed correction for our ownjudgments.”3

MacIntyre’s discussion of the “social relationships of givingand receiving” is similar to his discussion of “practices” in AfterVirtue. The social relationships of giving and receiving that allowfor self-knowledge and knowledge of one’s good are also indis-pensable to achieve this good. Once these relationships areinstitutionalized, however, they become bound up with “unequaldistributions” and “established hierarchies” of power, and sothere is always a possibility of corruption in social relationshipsthat can “frustrate us in our movement towards our goods.” 4 AsMacIntyre notes in his discussion of practices in After Virtue ,institutions, though prone to corruption, must exist to keeppractices in existence. In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues thatpractices can remain immune from institutional corruption aslong as the goods of effectiveness required to sustain institutionsare subordinated to the goods of excellence that are internal topractices and required for human flourishing. In DependentRational Animals , MacIntyre gives the same argument but indifferent language: “The worst outcome is when the rules thatenjoin giving and receiving have been substantially subordinatedto or otherwise made to serve the purposes of power, the bestwhen a distribution of power has been achieved which allowspower to serve the ends to which the rules of giving and receivingare directed.” 5

This contrast of the two kinds of subordination is important,for it is one of two fundamental ideas in MacIntyre’s analysis andevaluation of the “social relationships” of the modern state. Thesecond fundamental idea is the common good. Practical reason-ing is “reasoning together with others,” and in order to reasontogether effectively about the means to certain goods, there needsto be agreement on these goods themselves. Our reasoning is onlyas good as the others with whom we reason, since reasoning is anessentially social activity: “The good of each cannot be pursuedwithout also pursuing the good of all those who participate inthose relationships.” MacIntyre defends this eminently non-


liberal view of the human good by emphasizing our radicaldependence upon others at certain stages of our lives. If othersdid not “make our good their good” at certain vulnerable times inour lives, such as infancy, childhood, illness, and old age, then wewould have either never survived, or survived only with a severelyattenuated capacity for the virtues and activities of independentpractical reasoning. If I am to have a reasonable expectation ofreceiving this care when I need it, which I must if I am to trust inthe possibility of my becoming an independent practical reasoner,then I must be prepared to give this care to others, and in anunconditional manner. 6 Thus, in a flourishing community, one inwhich there are vibrant networks of giving and receiving, andwhere the virtues of acknowledged dependence are in abundance,one can make the goods of the community one’s own. Thesenetworks and virtues, although not reducible to rules, requirethem, else there be a lack of mutual trust in others’ fulfillment ofresponsibilities and deficiency in fulfilling these responsibilitiesand deliberating about them. The set of precepts that include boththe necessary rules and enjoinments of the acts of the virtues thatthe common good requires is what MacIntyre identifies as thenatural law. 7

Macintyre suggests how diametrically opposed his concep-tions of the common good, social relationships, and practicalreasoning are to those which underlie modern liberal culture,conceptions that suggest that “good” is no more morally signifi-cant than the satisfaction of desire. In the modern “market-based”culture, the only unchosen constraints we can accept on ourbehavior and commitments are those dictated by a rationalityguided by the self-interested motive of preference maximization.Other commitments and responsibilities may exist, but since theyare chosen with regard to our “affections” and “sympathies” only,they are not fully rational. Whether we care for the radicallydependent unborn baby, for example, is not a rational or moralissue—it cannot be, since there is only one person capable ofcalculated self-interest in the relationship—it is a matter of mereemotional attachment. MacIntyre argues that this is a false


dichotomy, since “[a]ffective and sympathetic ties are alwaysmore then a matter of affection and sympathy.” Affection andsympathy are things that we owe to others, to children andparents, for example, and therefore are inexorably bound up with“norms of giving and receiving.” Thus for MacIntyre, marketrelationships of rational, calculative self-interest are not evil inthemselves; they only need to be attached to relationships ofgiving and receiving if they are not to corrupt human flourishingand the common good. Social practice must provide the contextfor both aspects of human behavior or they become prone tovice.8 The virtue that is the bridge between affectivity andintelligence with regard to social relationships is “just generosity.”This virtue directs one to give to others, even those outside one’srecognized community, with a willingness to give an amountdisproportionate to what one hopes to receive. This virtue enablesmisericordia, in which one feels others’ suffering as if it were one’sown.9

The Politics of TraditionPolitics for MacIntyre is essentially the securing of the commongood, which is “found in the activity of communal learningthrough which we together become able to order goods, both inour individual lives and in the political society.” 10 As this quoteexemplifies, a primary feature of MacIntyre’s political thought isits focus on the necessary conditions for, as distinct from theparticular content or values inherent in, the practice of politics. InAfter Virtue, MacIntyre articulated a “contentless” definition ofthe good life for man: “We have then arrived at a provisionalconclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is thelife spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtuesnecessary for the seeking are those which will enable us tounderstand what more and what else the good life for man is.” 11

Continuing this formalistic, “meta-political” mode of description,MacIntyre portrays political structures in a similar manner tohow he portrays traditions of inquiry, as institutions of communallearning; thus, he evaluates the former as he does the latter, in


terms of their capacity to sustain rational argument about, andenable the securing of, internal goods and virtues.

In Dependent Rational Animals and “Politics, Philosophy, andthe Common Good,” MacIntyre lays out six conditions thatpolitical structures must satisfy to enable men to learn about andachieve their individual and common goods. Three of the condi-tions have to do with achieving the good , and three with learningthe good. The first of the three conditions relating to achieving thegood is the requirement that politics “afford expression to thepolitical decision-making of independent reasoners on all thosematters on which it is important that the members of a politicalcommunity be able to come through shared rational deliberationto a common mind.” The second is that the norms of justiceinvolve the virtue of just generosity, aiming at securing the desertand needs of independent and dependent citizens respectively.The third is the provision that all citizens engage in communaldeliberation about the norms of justice, including the establish-ment of “proxies” to speak for those who cannot speak forthemselves.12 We note here the great emphasis MacIntyre placeson the participation by all citizens in political activity, for anessential aspect of the common good is that it be a good acknowl-edged by all via a “common mind”; it is vital that this acknowledg-ment come as a result of community-wide rational deliberation.

The first of the three conditions for a justifiable political orderin which men can learn about the good, both their own and thatof the community as a whole, is the communal recognition of andobedience to the natural law, and a “shared understanding ofgoods, virtues, and rules.” In another essay, MacIntyre definesthe natural law as “the exceptionless precepts . . . which, insofaras we are rational, we recognize as indispensable in every societyand in every situation for the achievement of our goods and of ourfinal good, because they direct us toward and partially define ourcommon good.”13 It is important to note here that MacIntyre seesuniversal agreement on a particular and authoritative conceptionof the good as an indispensable condition for both knowing andachieving personal and common goods. The second condition for


an acceptable political order is its size: “a relatively small-scalesociety whose relationships are not deformed by compartmental-ization.”14 Compartmentalization is not simply the differentiationof social roles and institutions, for this dynamic attends anyhealthy political order, even small-scale ones, but the differentia-tion of virtues, norms, and goods according to each social role andinstitution. The result is the disintegration of the individual, whomust aim at conflicting goods, follow contradictory norms, andadopt irreconcilable virtues; it also leads to the disintegration ofsociety, since after compartmentalization, no purview is availablefor ordering the various goods of the differing institutions to thegood of society as a whole, which is the very purpose of politics.MacIntyre writes,

Within each sphere such individuals conform to the require-ments imposed on their role within that sphere and there is nomilieu available to them in which they are able, together withothers, to step back from those roles and those requirements andto scrutinize themselves and the structure of their society fromsome external standpoint with any practical effect. 15

For MacIntyre, compartmentalization is the inevitable con-comitant of large-scale political structures, whose complexity andscope preclude the “face-to-face encounters and conversations oflocal community.” 16 The communal ordering of all internal goodsand practices to the common good is, for MacIntyre, the essenceof politics, and this is itself a “practice”: “Such a form ofcommunity is by its nature political, that is to say, constituted bya type of practice through which other types of practice areordered, so that individuals may direct themselves towards whatis best for them and for the community.” 17 Indeed, politics is thehighest of practices, since it “affords the best opportunity for theexercise of our rational powers.” 18 A justifiable political ordermust not only permit but also actively facilitate the engagementby all its citizens in terminable rational inquiry and debate aboutthe justification of those political structures. The activity of


inquiry and debate about how to organize and integrate personaland institutional goods and practices with the common good isessentially constitutive of politics itself: “Suppose however thatthere were a culture with the following conception of politicalcommunity: political community exists for the sake of the creationand sustaining of that form of communal life into which the goodsof each particular practice may be integrated so that both eachindividual and the community as a whole may lead a life informedby these goods.” 19

Modern political structures preclude deliberative forums forthe attainment of a common mind that could rationally integrateprivate and lesser common goods to a comprehensive commongood all could share. Moreover, and this is the third and finalcondition for a rationally justified politics, the “large-scale so-called free market economies” 20 that are inherent in modernpolitical structures prevent citizens from freely pursuing andsecuring their common good. Because of the unjust inequality inwealth and power they inevitably produce, and the individualisticethos that they presuppose, endless conflict “between rival con-ceptions of the common good” is the citizens’ inescapable lot.

To MacIntyre’s mind, not even one of these six conditions foran acceptable political order is met by the modern nation-state.His radical critique of the modern political order separatesMacIntyre’s political thought from that of John Rawls and JacquesMaritain, who both accept the nation-state as not only a possiblelocus but as the primary locus for a genuinely moral and rationalpolitical activity. Rawls and Maritain, notwithstanding their radi-cally disparate conceptions of the nature and purpose of politicalactivity and their differing assessments of this activity as it ispresently practiced in modern secular democracies, are in com-plete agreement about one point: the essential legitimacy of thefundamental structures undergirding modern political activity,including its most fundamental institution, the nation-state.MacIntyre, on the other hand, does not simply reject, as doesRawls, certain explanative theories and justifications of modernpolitics, nor does he reject modern political practice insofar as it


fails to live up to its basic Christian principles, as in Maritain.Rather, he rejects modern politics altogether, in both theory andpractice: “Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conserva-tive, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from astandpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of thevirtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutionalforms a systematic rejection of that tradition.” 21 For MacIntyre,liberalism’s claim to provide, in virtue of its ostensibly neutralstance toward particular conceptions of the human good, themost free, and hence best possible milieu for individuals todetermine, pursue, and secure their own particular conceptionsof the human good is false. Liberal social orders do indeedpromote and even impose a particular conception of the good,and it is one that enslaves rather than liberates. Since, forMacIntyre, the nation-state is the fundamental institutionundergirding all modern Western social orders, the judgment hemakes about the latter applies to the former.

We can examine the reasons for MacIntyre’s assessment ofliberalism in general in terms of his six-fold criteria for legitimatepolitics in particular, evaluating the nation-state’s capacity toenable the learning, on the one hand, and the achievement, on theother, of both personal and common goods. We begin with theformer. MacIntyre writes, “What is always oppressive is any formof social relationship that denies to those who participate in it thepossibility of the kind of learning from each other about thenature of their common good that can issue in socially transfor-mative action.” 22 This is the heart of MacIntyre’s critique of thenation-state, for it exemplifies his understanding of moral learn-ing as a social practice and his understanding of social practice asessentially an activity of learning. The politics of the nation-stateis not a social practice, not a craft, for it is missing what all well-ordered practices possess, the means of learning about andattaining one’s good. Yet, not every non-practice is oppressive, foras MacIntyre points out, all practices rely upon institutions,which are defined as non-practices, for their existence andsustenance. What is oppressive about the institution of the nation


state is that it pretends to be a practice . Since it is not actually apractice it cannot afford its participants the knowledge andpossession of internal goods of excellence constitutive of humanflourishing. However, since it must pretend to be a practice, orelse lose both its status as a political structure and the allegianceof its citizens, most of whom, more or less, seek to live a politicallife aspiring to goods higher and more common than the instru-mental and self-interested goods of effectiveness, it must excludefrom public discussion any philosophical arguments that couldexpose its true nature. And insofar as it succeeds at this cover-up,as it were, it prevents the practice of communal deliberation andargument about the justification of its own political activity, oneof the constituent goods of human flourishing and an essentialfeature of any authentic politics: 23

What is lacking in modern political societies is any type ofinstitutional arena in which plain persons—neither engaged inacademic pursuits nor professionals of the political life—are ableto engage together in systematic reasoned debate, designed toarrive at a rationally well-founded common mind on how toanswer questions about the relationship of politics to the claimsof rival and alternative ways of life, each with its own conceptionof the virtues and of the common good. . . . What we have insteadis a politics from whose agendas enquiry concerning the natureof that politics has been excluded, a politics thereby protectedfrom perceptions of its own exclusions and limitations. 24

As we discussed earlier, practices must be governed by a“shared understanding of goods, virtues, and rules,” and anypolitical practice must be governed by the precepts of the naturallaw, which “direct us toward and partially define our commongood.”25 However, the nation-state, because of its great size,complexity, and “ramshackle” nature, precludes any shared un-derstanding among citizens other than a mutual commitment toindividual self-interest and pragmatic tolerance. Moreover, itjustifies its political authority not by arguments showing that its


norms conform to the precepts of the natural law, for this wouldbe oppressive and unjust to anyone who denies the existence, letalone political authority, of the natural law, but by argumentsshowing that it enables individuals to attain individualistic, self-chosen goods. The problem with this mode of justification is thatthe absence on the nation-state level of any semblance of a sharedunderstanding of moral reality prevents the possibility of the kindof public discussion in which citizens could evaluate whether theactivity of the modern state is indeed justified in its activity an itsrationale for this activity: “What the modes of justificationemployed in and on behalf of the activities of state and marketcannot give expression to are the values that inform just thoseongoing argumentative conversations through which members oflocal communities try to achieve the goods and their good.” 26

Further, the absence of natural-law norms governing its activi-ties guarantees that the state’s activity will not be conducive tohuman flourishing. But if neither the precepts of the natural law norany shared substantive values can be authoritative upon the nation-state, by what authority does it govern its citizens, and itself? “It iscentral to the life of the modern state that from its point of viewthere can be no appeal to anything beyond its sovereign authority.When positive law and the natural law conflict, there is no appealbeyond positive law.” 27 Of course, this is a highly questionablejustification for political authority, for it is self-referential. Yet,MacIntyre does not counsel revolt against the nation state, eventhough he considers it indubitably unjust and an unjustifiableoppressor. His purpose is to unmask, not to eliminate; not “toreform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communi-ties to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against thedistinguishing forces of the nation-state and the market.” 28

In fact, for MacIntyre the state should not be eliminated, forit supplies indispensable goods and services for both individualsand communities, such as the rule of law, public justice, relief ofsuffering, and protection of liberty. 29 However, it has potentialfor great evil, especially when its representatives speak and act asif it were something it is not, a genuine political entity embodying


the common good and operating with a rational and moralpurpose determined by a deliberative common mind. MacIntyrearticulates here the morally ambiguous nature of the nation-state:

The importance of the good of public security, without whichnone of our local communities could achieve our common goods,must not be allowed to obscure the fact that our shared publicgoods of the modern nation-state, are not the common goods of agenuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-statemasquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcomeis bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both. In a modern,large-scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and thepretense that it is, is always an ideological disguise for sinisterrealities. I conclude that insofar as the nation-state providesnecessary and important public goods, these must not be confusedwith the type of common good for which communal recognition isrequired by the virtues of acknowledged dependence, and thatinsofar as the rhetoric of the nation-state presents it as the providerof something that is indeed, in this stronger sense a common good,that rhetoric is a purveyor of dangerous fictions. 30

In a lecture entitled, “Natural Law Against the Nation-State:Or the Possibility of the Common Good against the Actuality ofthe Public Interest,” MacIntyre portrays the nation-state asessentially a “common-interest,” as opposed to a “common-good”organization, meaning that, although it can have a shared aim, itis one necessarily constituted by a summing of individual aims.The common-good organization, however, “can only be pursuedby those individuals who are acting as parts of some communalwhole,” and who “understand their individual good as partlyconstituted by a good . . . characterizable independently and ofand antecedently to the characterization of their particular indi-vidual good.” 31 The nation-state is structured in terms of acommon-interest organization and cannot be otherwise, for itssize, complexity, and impersonality preclude shared deliberationabout goods, and the intimate knowledge of and trust in other


persons that allows each citizen to see another’s good as one’sown. Therefore, attempting to embody a common good in acommon-interest structure is bound to fail.

Trying to turn the public-interest organization of the nationstate into the common-good organization of a political commu-nity is the misguided project of the communitarian. The problemwith the communitarian proposal is twofold. It rightly advocatesa robustly moral political community based upon a shared cultureand particular conception of the good, but it wrongly deems thiscommunity an unconditional good in itself; it is only good whenit fosters the virtues. Secondly, it exaggerates the possible scopefor such a community. The communitarian is blind to the fact thata political community exercising shared deliberation can onlyexist on a level more local and modest scale than the nation-state,and that the attempt to embody moral community on the nation-state level only leads to greater tyranny, as liberals recognize. Thecommunitarian would empower the nation-state with not just amoral justification but also a moral imperative to implement itsinherently amoral and apolitical, self-aggrandizing power. Thestate, though not an immoral agent in itself, would thus becomeimmoral by being charged with a moral responsibility it cannotexecute, since it translates, by it very nature, any matter of moralimport into its own non-moral vocabulary: “The contentionunderlying it is that whatever the grounds concerning goods maybe upon which certain policies are supported or principleschosen, the political expression of that support and those choiceswill in the context of the modern state have to be understood interms of preferences and interests. 32

Thus the communitarian project mistakenly perceives a moral,rational agent where there is only an amoral, irrational animal.This animal can be tamed and trained, perhaps, but never human-ized; it can be tolerated, but only insofar as it serves those trulyhuman moral communities that depend upon its bureaucraticlargess. In a famous passage, MacIntyre provides a sardonic yetsober account of the state:


The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous andunmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand asa bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is alwaysabout to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money,and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from timeto time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. As I haveremarked elsewhere, it is like being asked to die for thetelephone company. 33

The communitarian’s non-individualistic conception of thecommon good is more in line with MacIntyre’s thinking than theliberal’s, yet its conception of political community is still inad-equate, for it is not a “community of political learning and enquiryparticipation in which it is necessary for individuals to discoverwhat their individual and common goods are.” 34 The communi-tarian’s approach to the state, on the other hand, has less incommon with MacIntyre’s than the liberal approach. A liberalwould agree with MacIntyre’s statement that the modern state is“grotesquely unfitted to be the protagonist of any substantiveconception of the human good” 35—however, for an entirelydifferent reason. The liberal advocates a morally and ideologicallyneutral state because he values, above all, the moral and rationalautonomy of the individual, which he judges to be severelycompromised by any political structure, not just the state em-bodying a “substantive practical agreement upon some strongconception of the human good.” 36 MacIntyre, on the contrary,sees rational and moral autonomy as requiring a political commu-nity united on a particular and strong conception of the good.Since the nation-state can never embody such a community,political community must be sought elsewhere.

MacIntyre’s view of the nation-state can be distinguishedfrom the liberal’s in another important respect. According to theliberal historical narrative, the nation-state was originally createdto stabilize and prevent any possible reoccurrence of the “wars ofreligion.” Thus, its raison d’etre , then and now, is to prevent thedevelopment of any political community united in particularist


doctrines, for the sake of preserving the rational and moralautonomy of the individual and securing the political peace andstability of society. MacIntyre would agree that the nation-stateposes a great threat to particularist political communities, but farfrom celebrating this feature as a positive good, he regrets it as amost tragic flaw. Although he would prefer the nation-state to staywithin its role of promoting the public interest, of providing theinstitutional and instrumental goods without which local politicalcommunities cannot exist and thrive, he is convinced that itcannot help itself, as it were. In a kind of third-way alternative tocommunitarianism and liberalism, MacIntyre prescribes neithera morally particularistic nor a morally neutral state: “The contem-porary state is not and cannot be evaluatively neutral, andsecondarily . . . it is just because of the ways in which the state isnot evaluatively neutral that it cannot generally be trusted topromote any worthwhile set of values, including those of au-tonomy and liberty.” 37 The liberal demands state neutrality to-wards particular goods as a requirement for its securing andprotecting the universal goods of autonomy and liberty; however,according to MacIntyre, such state neutrality is impossible: “Theactivities of government are such that they are not in their effectsneutral between ways of life, but undermine some and promoteothers.”38 Therefore, since the state is an “ineliminable feature ofthe contemporary landscape,” 39 since it cannot be evaluativelyneutral, and since its evaluations are bound to cause harm, theprudent course of action is to make it as evaluatively neutral aspossible. Here, MacIntyre endorses a version of the political“noble lie”: “Even although the neutrality is never real, it is animportant fiction, and those of us who recognize its importanceas well as its fictional character will agree with liberals in uphold-ing a certain range of civil liberties.” 40

We have explained why MacIntyre advocates the morallyneutral state in theory, but what still needs explaining is why hejudges the morally neutral state impossible in practice. MacIntyrenever answers this question directly, but he does provide anindirect answer in his understanding of the nature of societal


reality in general. He writes, “Every political and social orderembodies and gives expression to an ordering of different humangoods and therefore also embodies and gives expression to someparticular conception of the human good.” 41 MacIntyre appliesthis principle in his unmasking of liberalism’s duplicitous estab-lishment of the “particular good” of “no particular good” as thenon-negotiable basis of political order, excluding, or at leastmarginalizing, any other possible political ordering for the stateand for sub-state social and political institutions centered uponother possible particular goods. Since, as MacIntyre avers, allsocial and political orders inevitably propose a particular order-ing of social and political goods, even an ordering based upon themaximization of the freedom of individuals to order social andpolitical goods themselves without political interference presup-poses and embodies a particular conception of the good; stateneutrality in this regard is impossible. In sum, if state neutralityis both impossible and disastrous, then the best we can do isneutralize the state by limiting its size and scope, charging it withpolitically minimal tasks such as providing the material, non-moral institutional goods that enable the craft communities ofvirtuous acknowledged dependence to do the real political work.

MacIntyre’s Politics: Practically LiberalVirtually all contemporary political philosophers, despite theirsignificant disagreements, are unified in one fundamental way:they all support the political order of the liberal democratic state.As we have seen, however, Alasdair MacIntyre rejects it toutcourt. For MacIntyre, the nation-state is not a possible locus forgenuine political activity. MacIntyre’s basic argument is thatsince a morally based political order requires a tradition-homog-enous citizenry, and since the nation-state is necessarily com-prised of a tradition-heterogeneous citizenry, the nation-statecannot embody a morally based politics. Insofar as it attempts todo so, the result can only be tyranny, force, and fraud, and theattenuation of morally based political activity on the sub-statelevel. Insofar as sub-state political communities attempt to em-


body their authentic politics on the state-level, the result can onlybe the perversion of that politics, as MacIntyre’s pithy remarksuggests: “Those who make the conquest of state power their aimare always in the end conquered by it.” 42

Yet when we examine MacIntyre’s rationale for rejectingstate-based politics, questions arise to which MacIntyre providesno clear or coherent answers: why precisely is the nation-stateincompatible with genuine political activity? In certain places,MacIntyre explains it in quantitative terms, its great size preclud-ing it from embodying a consensus on a particular tradition ofrationality and conception of the good; but in other places, hespeaks in qualitative terms, suggesting that it is the state’s com-plex, bureaucratic structure that prevents it from performinggenuine political activity. If size is not the essential problem, thencould the state embody genuine political activity in the event of anation-wide consensus on a particular conception of the good? Ifa nation-wide consensus is too much to ask, could a state embodygood politics if its size and scope were small enough to procure aconsensus, but still larger than the local communities MacIntyreprescribes? If the problem is not only quantity but also quality,could the state’s essential structure be reformed to enable genu-ine political activity? Or is there something essentially andirredeemably anti-political about the state, regardless of acciden-tal differences like size, scope, and complexity? Is the modernnation state intrinsically anti-political, or is the state qua statesuch? Is the political model of the nation-state necessarily boundup with the errors and defects of modern, post-Enlightenmentthought and culture? And if the state is irredeemable, why exactlyis that the case?

In my assessment, MacIntyre does not provide a philosophi-cally adequate and coherent answer to any of these questions. Forexample, his judgment that the state cannot embody a genuinepolitics is based upon his notion of the state’s incapacity toembody conceptions of the good. But upon examination, thisnotion is confusing. On the one hand, MacIntyre insists that thestate should not embody a conception of the good, but on the


other, he admits that the state cannot help but embody someparticular conception of the good:

Even though that neutrality is never real, it is an importantfiction, and those of us who recognize its importance as well asits fictional character will agree with liberals in upholding acertain range of civil liberties. . . . For the contemporary statecould not adopt a point of view on the human good as its ownwithout to a significant degree distorting, degrading and dis-crediting that point of view. It would put those values to theservice of its own political and economic power and so degradeand discredit them. 43

If the state is as amoral a structure as MacIntyre claims it tobe, it is not clear why its “neutrality is never real”; for why couldthe desired neutrality not be produced in an essentially moral-neutral structure? If state neutrality cannot be produced, doesthat not indicate that the state is not an essentially amoral entity?If the state’s complexity and bureaucracy render it impervious tobeing infused with moral substance, then how could it evermanage to behave in the morally non-neutral manner MacIntyreclaims it inevitably does? Why not at least try to shape the state’snon-neutrality in accordance with a true conception of the good,perhaps by working to lessen its size and complexity to make itmore amenable to moral influence and embodiment; one couldbegin with the state’s more modest embodiments, such as localand municipal governments. It does not seem reasonable simplyto leave a potentially harmful source of immense power to its ownanarchic whims without any attempt to direct it to moral good. Ifthe explanation for the morally-biased character of the state isthat it is a necessarily immoral bias, then one must conclude thatthe state is irredeemably evil. This severe judgment requires bothan adequate philosophical explanation and historical demonstra-tion, which MacIntyre does not provide.

Keith Breen, Ronald Beiner, and Thomas Hibbs have madestrong arguments that MacIntyre’s notion of the state is problem-


atic. The state, as MacIntyre admits, is necessary for the existenceand sustaining of MacIntyrean communities of the commongood, but these authors argue that unless the state also embodiesa politics of the common good, MacIntyrean communities cannotsurvive. There needs to be some political entity with ultimatecustodianship of the common good , without which there can be nopolitics of the virtues of acknowledged dependence, and only someform of state that can fulfill this role. As Breen points out,MacIntyre confusedly characterizes the state as both irredeemablyevil and non-political, and yet capable of some good politicalactivity: “The state supposedly subverts all values and yet he praisesthe ‘Americans with Disabilities Act’ for removing obstacles to‘humane goals.’”44 What this reveals is that, for MacIntyre, the statecan be a bearer of ethical value, at least sometimes. However, if itis sometimes capable of genuine As moral activity, then it is notirredeemably evil, as MacIntyre suggests in other places. Breennotes, “Whether states corrupt values is a matter of contingentfact, not theoretical generalization.” 45 In other words, it is notclear why, if the state’s moral corruption is only a contingentphenomenon, it could not be reformed.

Another problematic aspect of MacIntyre’s view of the statecan be seen in the counsel he offers to members of traditionalcommunities regarding the proper way to deal with the state andstate functionaries. Because the state is a non-moral and self-serving entity disguising itself as a moral and selfless one,MacIntyre advises to have as little dealings with it as possible. Wecannot shun the state completely, however, because it providesgoods of effectiveness necessary for the existence and sustenanceof traditionalist communities, such as economic resources andsecurity from domestic and foreign violence. Thus, traditionalistcommunities must “Take from the modern state and moderncorporations no more than what one really needs.” 46 The upshotof MacIntyre’s counsel is, ironically, that traditionalists shouldadopt the self-serving, calculative attitude of state functionaries.Breen notes: “Far from attaining unified lives, virtuous practitio-ners must maintain a stark duality of mind, oriented to local


excellence but the canniest of tacticians in their tussles with statefunctionaries.”47 The result of such moral schizophrenia can onlybe a less robust and integral practice of the virtues of acknowl-edged dependence.

These two examples are symptomatic of a fundamentalincoherency in MacIntyre’s notion of the state: “At heart here isa basic contradiction, the wish for a minimalist state that will,through some miracle, fulfill the goals of social democraticwelfarism. Collaboration is decried whilst being recommended.” 48

If the state can act as a moral agent for the political good, even ifmost of the time it does not, then it cannot be characterized assimply evil, even if it is a necessary evil. Instead of counselingcalculative cunning and withdrawal, which would be the properattitude to adopt only when dealing with something irredeemable,why not encourage the attempt to transform the state into alocation for a politics of the common good? Limiting the scopeof his political vision to non- and sub-state social entities wouldonly make sense if it were a priori impossible to extend it anyfurther, but MacIntyre has given us no adequate reason to thinkit is impossible. Breen sees a kind of hypocrisy in MacIntyre’sthinking, a result, he surmises, of his extreme hostility to themodern state in virtue of its historical dominance by liberalism.But the liberal dominance of the state, pernicious as the effectsof this dominance might be, is at least consistent with liberalism’ssocially transformative goals. MacIntyre’s error it to conflatesstate politics with liberal politics, but he provides no adequatereason to think that the connection is a necessary one, eventhough it has been an historical one. In short, for Breen there isnothing incompatible about a state politics of the virtues ofacknowledged dependence. Breen’s critique is powerful, and aswe shall soon see, it is incompatible with MacIntyre’s politicalideal not to involve the state in a politics of virtue.

An Unpolitical PoliticsOne might argue that while MacIntyre’s rejection of the possibil-ity of a state politics of the common good is unnecessary, it is, at


least understandable. Though a more extended area for genuinemoral political activity would be better than a less extended one,the rejection of a state politics is an acceptable price to pay toprevent the immoral—but perhaps not inevitably so—nation-states of contemporary Europe and America from corruptingnascent communities of virtue too weak to defend themselves.However, the price might be higher than just the loss of thepossibility of a greater scope for political activity. As I will argue,the price is the loss of any political good whatsoever. MacIntyre isso careful not to implicate his communities of virtue in the politicalmachinations of the state that he renders them non-political andhence vulnerable to those very machinations he seeks to avoid. Ifthe state is as politically powerful as MacIntyre suggests, and if thispolitical power will inevitably be used for evil, then why not equipsub-state communities with some measure of political power todefend themselves, and to ensure they receive the political goodsthey need, such as freedom from external and internal oppressionand violence? Yet, if we examine carefully the constitution of theMacIntyrean political community, it is incapable of providingthese goods—for it is not really a political constitution at all.

If Breen is correct in his claim that the modern state iscapable of becoming a genuinely political entity, then MacIntyre’ssmall-scale political communities should share some of its politi-cal features, such as the authority of law. Yet, because MacIntyrerejects the political nature of the state, he rejects any state-likepolitical features in his ideal political communities, and one is leftwondering how genuinely political these communities really are:

The unavoidable question is: What’s political about MacIntyre’s“politics of local community”? . . . he writes that a community is“political” insofar as “it is constituted by a type of practice throughwhich other types of practice are ordered.” He calls this a polis.But the Greek polis embodied concepts of law, authority, andcitizenship—notions seemingly absent from the local communi-ties that MacIntyre is calling political. 49


Even though it would seem that communities require law,authority, and citizenship to be genuine political bodes, nowheredoes MacIntyre describe his ideal political communities as af-fording the privileges of citizenship, possessing representativeauthority, or having any framework of coercive law. The latter isthe most significant, since, at least for Aristotle and Aquinas, lawis an essential component of any political entity. The state inMacIntyre’s view, however, is the only institution empowered tomake and execute law; but, as Hibbs points out, even if localcommunities were permitted the power to make laws, how couldthey compete with the enormous law-making power of the state?

Within the confines of the nation-state with its invasive andseemingly omnipresent legal apparatus, what sort of legislativeself-determination can a local community have? Even if it decideshow to allocate resources and enact local laws, its police force isstill fundamentally committed to enforcing the law of the nationand its economy is largely dependent on the national and increas-ingly the international economy. 50

MacIntyre expects his local communities of virtue to order andrank goods and practices for individual community members, buttheir freedom to do so is at the behest of a dangerous and practicallyomnipotent state. MacIntyre makes no provision to equip thesecommunities with the political sovereignty to enact such orderingswith any level of self-sufficiency and autonomy from the state. 51

In short, because MacIntyre’s political communities areinsufficiently political, they cannot guarantee the accomplish-ment of the moral goods MacIntyre desires of them. Withoutpossessing the power of law and sovereign self-rule, they canneither effectively order the practices and goods within theirdominions, nor order the “practice of practices” that is politicsitself. Rather, it is the law-making and law-enforcing state, theonly institution invested with actual political power, that ulti-mately orders these by default, and, according to MacIntyre, itsoverarching “ordering” of the goods, practices, and communitiesunder its dominion is inevitably disordered. Beiner pointedlyremarks: “The problem here, of course, is that MacIntyre is left


with no possible site for overarching political community compat-ible with the basic condition of modernity—he offersAristotelianism without a polis.” 52

Paradoxically, the political impotence of the MacIntyreancommunity can be traced to the political impotence MacIntyreimputes to the modern state. If the state is, in reality, notpolitically impotent, for it does indeed embody a conception ofthe good, however mistaken, and because this conception of thegood inevitably wields an architectonic political influence over allthe institutions under its purview, due to the power of law and itsmonopoly of coercive power, for MacIntyre to counsel moralcommunities to simply reject the state, or at most, to adopt a self-serving, utilitarian relationship with it, is to ensure only that thestate will have its political way, as it were, with these communities.Since the state’s conception of the good is a false one, then nocommunity, regardless of the vehemence with which it rejects thisfalse conception of the good, can hope to remain immune from itsinfluence. The only recourse against a state gone bad, as it were,would be either to attempt to reform it, or to protect one’scommunity through the counter-use of effective political power;however, neither of these does MacIntyre’s political vision en-dorse or make possible. As Breen points out, MacIntyre’s refusalto grant to the nation-state the capacity of moral activity threatensthe moral capacity of those institutions to which he does:

The state, like any other institution, cannot but embody values.Living in a network of networks means the character of thenation-state (liberal, socialist, or fascist) determines to a realextent what can go on in its constituent towns and villages.Consequently, liberty and the ability to act persist only whensecured on every level of political and social organization. Andthis suggests, too, that MacIntyre and his liberal opponents aresimilarly wrong to exclude ethos from national and supranationalpolitical structures, it being an ethos of a highly specific sort thatsustains freedom and sets boundaries to what can and cannot bedone in the name of the common good. 53


We have argued that while MacIntyre may desire the socialconditions for the thriving of Thomistic-constituted communi-ties, he does not effectively prescribe these conditions. In reject-ing the consolidation of any conception of the good within thesocial structure of the state, MacIntyre sustains an otherwisereformable tyrannical liberal state, he secures the political impo-tence of just those moral communities that could transform thistyranny into a moral force for good, and he prevents the tradition-homogenous communities of virtue from preserving their moralintegrity, self-sufficiency, and political autonomy. JonathanChaplin summarizes the problem with MacIntyre’s rejection of anormative state: “It [The MacIntyrean ideal community] is para-sitic upon the existence of a ‘regime,’ a democratic politicalcommunity. It lacks an account of the nature and normativepurpose of the state as the institutional context which alone makespolitical advocacy, whether agonistic or consensual, possible inthe first place.” 54

MacIntyre’s Political LiberalismBreen claims that “no theoretical obstacles prevent him[MacIntyre] from recognizing that a prime way to render the stateless harmful is to transform it from within.” 55 As I will argue,however, there is a theoretical obstacle to MacIntyre’s prescrib-ing the inner transformation of the state. MacIntyre’s maincritique of liberalism is its inherent dishonesty. Claiming intheory to be neutral of any particular tradition in order that it mayfacilitate the freedom of all, in practice it is a particular traditionthat severely limits the freedom of others. Claiming in theory tosecure a culture, public square, and political order open to alltraditions because embodying, recognizing, and confessing none,in practice it permits nothing but its own particular conception ofthe good to be embodied, recognized, and confessed as authori-tative in culture, public debate, and law. MacIntyre’s primarystrategy against liberalism is to expose its dishonesty. By success-fully narrating the tradition liberalism denies itself to be, byunmasking the existence and revealing the incoherence of the


liberal conception of the good, and by showing that its traditionand conception of the good has been embodied socially, cultur-ally, economically, and politically in the modern nation-states ofthe west to the detriment of the freedom and moral integrity oftheir inhabitants, MacIntyre demonstrates the need to search fora non-liberal alternative, both in theory and in practice.

MacIntyre presents his model of the tradition-homogenouscommunity as the best possible practical alternative to liberalism,but is it truly the best? As we shall see, there is even doubt as towhether it is even a genuine alternative to liberalism at all. On thesurface, there is a superficial similarity between liberalism andMacIntyreanism in that they both restrict the extent of theconsolidation of their beliefs within social structures. However,the differing extent of their social restrictions, and especially theradically different rationales they employ for such restrictions,reveals the similarity to be only superficial. MacIntyre rejects theconsolidation of his beliefs within the political structure of thestate and the large-scale social structure of the nation not becausehe rejects the social embodiment of conceptions of the good, butbecause he judges that the level of tradition-homogenous consen-sus required for such social embodiment, and hence genuinemoral and political activity, cannot exist within the institution ofthe modern state and within the large-scale social structure of thenation as a whole. The liberal, however, rejects the consolidationof beliefs within all social structures, being unwilling even toconsolidate them within small-scale social structures, because heconsiders social consensus on any particular conception of thegood to be both undesirable and impossible. For the liberal, anysocial embodiment of a particular conception of the good is moreof a threat than a help to the individual’s exercise of the freedomto choose and live out a conception of the good on the overwhelm-ingly more important individual level. MacIntyre, on the con-trary, endorses without hesitation the social embodiment ofconceptions of the good because he judges that the ability tochoose and live out a conception of the good requires the good’ssocial embodiment, and the individual’s active participation in


that social embodiment.However, notwithstanding their considerable differences in

scope and rationale, both liberalism and MacIntyreanism areidentical in their rejection of large-scale social embodiment ofconceptions of the good, either within the institution of the stateor in the culture at large. It is, of course, quite clear why liberalismrejects social embodiment of conceptions of the good; it com-ports with its overall procedural and non-metaphysical logic.However, it is not clear why MacIntyreanism rejects is, for it doesnot seem to comport with the overall logic of its moral theory.Regardless of the fact that liberal conceptions of the good happento be, against the explicit logic of liberalism, socially embodied ona large-scale level in virtually all of the contemporary westernnation-states, and embodied to such an extent as to exclude othersocial embodiments, these de facto social embodiments do notsquare with its theoretically individualist and epistemologicallyskeptical theory. Its unwillingness to admit this discrepancy isproblematic, but at least its explicit prescription of the socialdisembodiment of all particular conceptions of the good is consis-tent with its overall theory. One would not expect someonedenying an interpretation of the good as inherently social, asencountered, learned, and embraced only through social relation-ships, naturally to desire that conceptions of the good actually besocially embodied. The pertinent question, then, is not whyliberalism endorses the social restriction of conceptions of thegood, but why MacIntyre does. Is it logical for MacIntyre to limithis aspirations for the social embodiment of conceptions of thegood to small-scale communities with virtually no political power?Is it consistent with his overall theory to reject large-scale socialembodiment within the culture-at-large and the state?

If one believes a particular, socially embodied conception ofthe good to be true, and the practices in accord with this good tobe alone capable of perfecting human beings, then would it not beconsistent with this belief to desire this conception of the good tohave the widest extent of social embodiment possible? The liberal,who at best would plead ignorance of any knowledge of the “true”


conception of the good, at second best, would deny that anyoneknows which conception of the good is true, and at worst, that thegood even exists at all, should logically desire that any particularconception of the good attain as little social embodiment aspossible. To be consistent, he should desire either no socialembodiment at all, or at least an equality of social embodimentsof the good in a social structure in which no conception of thegood could ever gain societal advantage over another. MacIntyre,however, recognizes not only the existence of one, true concep-tion of the good, but also the necessity of socially embodiedtraditions of rationality for the discovery and attainment of thishuman good. Moreover, he identifies the Thomistic tradition ofrationality as the embodiment of this one, true good, and affirmsthe necessity of participating in the socially embodied practices ofthis tradition for the effective discovery and fullest attainment ofthe human good. The logic of MacIntyre’s truth commitmentswould seem to dictate a desire for at least the necessary socialconditions for the thriving and multiplying of Thomistic-constituted small-scale communities.

However, to remain consistent with his commitment toThomistic-constituted rationality, one could argue that MacIntyreshould desire more than merely the thriving and multiplying ofThomistic communities; he should desire that these communitiesthrive and multiply more than other traditions and attain moresocial embodiment than communities embodying other tradi-tions. For MacIntyre, all traditions except the Thomistic traditionare rationally deficient to some extent, and hence incapable ofcompletely fulfilling the moral desires of their adherents. Does itnot follow that for the sake of the individual and common goods,these defective traditions should, in an ideal world, have as littlesocial embodiment as possible? Similarly, should the MacIntyreanThomist not desire a large-scale social embodiment of the Thomistictradition as the ideal? Moreover, in the light of Breen’s solidargument that there is no good reason not to grant the state acapacity for some genuine ethical activity, especially since small-scale ethical communities suffer in the absence of a morally good


state, one must ask why a large-scale social embodiment of atradition should not include embodiment in the state. In short, itis not clear how MacIntyre’s rejection of both large-scale socialand political embodiment of the Thomistic tradition is consistentwith either his general theory of tradition-constituted rationalityor his particular judgment of the superiority of the Thomistictradition, and it would seem that MacIntyre fails to prescribe thenecessary social conditions for the thriving of the tradition hejudges to be true.

The ultimate irony is that MacIntyre’s theory succeeds tosome extent in prescribing the social conditions for liberalism tothrive, and not only to thrive, but also to attain social and politicaldominance. Catherine Pickstock, in a remarkably insightful pas-sage, illuminates how MacIntyre’s political ideal, as well as anypolitical program aiming at merely local social embodiment, canserve only to sustain a liberal social order:

There are unresolved problems about the pure communitariancelebration of the resistance exercised by the local organiccommunity. First, how does one distinguish it from a kind ofliberalism to a higher power in which the freely choosingsubjects are not individuals but organic collectivities? Secondly,while these organic localities may be characterized by practicesoriented towards substantive value-laded goals, it is difficult tosee how this will be true for a confederation of such groups. Willnot their collectively agreed-upon goals be extremely minimaland, indeed, given the degree of divergence, will not the onlybinding glue be pragmatist and contractualist in character? Onemay say that that if one is applying the principle of subsidiarity,that this does not matter, but if the only common language is afterall liberal, then the universalism intrinsic to liberalism will tendto reassert itself, and press once more towards centralization,even if this remains concealed. The spaces of communitarianassociation in the local societies will tend, therefore, to becomemore carnivalesque spaces, where people can “play” at havingsubstantive creative and pre-modern freedoms. 56


Liberalism in its desire to secure and preserve the autono-mous exercise of individual rationality, eschews the social em-bodiment of conceptions of the good and the communal partici-pation in traditions of rationality that alone enables and sustainshuman rationality. The resulting political program is, as Pickstockdescribes, a pragmatist and contractualist state charged with thetask of neutrally managing the essentially irrational desires andactions of individuals. Since the social accumulation of similarthoughts, desires, and actions can lead to the unjust exclusion oroppression of dissimilar ones, the state must be ever vigilant inrooting out such social accumulations. But one can ask howdifferent, in practice, MacIntyre’s political program is from theliberal one just described.

One could argue that MacIntyre, in his desire to secure andpreserve the autonomous exercise of communal rationality, es-chews the kind of large-scale social embodiment of conceptionsof the good and large-scale communal participation in traditionsof rationality that alone enable and sustain traditions of rational-ity. The resulting political program is, as Pickstock puts it,“liberalism to a higher order,” for the same pragmatist andcontractualist state ends up getting endorsed in the MacIntyreansocial order to prevent the social accumulation of similar desiresand actions , except now on the part of local communities. Thestate in the MacIntyrean social order is as bereft of a substantiveconception of the good as in the liberal one, and must manage theessentially irrational, “extra-traditional” activity of traditions, asopposed to individuals. I say “irrational” because the activity ofthe traditional community as a whole, which may be more or lessrational in itself in virtue of the rationality of its internal telos, is,in this view, irrational in its actions in relation to other traditionalcommunities and to the greater social arena as a whole ; for, inMacIntyre’s ideal politics, there can be no overarching rationaltelos to order the traditions to each other and to the good of thesocial whole.

The key insight of Pickstock is that the “universalism intrinsicto liberalism will tend to reassert itself.” MacIntyre’s political


program deprives “extra-communal” social space of tradition-constituted rationality, a particular conception of the good, anexclusive belief, a specific telos. However, it is this tradition-bereftsocial-space, and it alone, that must contain the tradition-constituted social space of the various communities, for, not beinga community itself committed to any particular conception of thegood, it is thus in the unique political position to manage them all;and it will do so the only way it knows how, pragmatically andcontractually, based upon its universal purview, “neutral,” and“above the fray.” But this universalism and neutrality is, asMacIntyre insists, a fiction. The neutral management of theostensibly, substantively empty social space—the modern state’sdishonest description of itself—has only ever served to mask thedomination by itself, a substantively based community with aparticular conception of the good, over all other communities.Why should this sort of liberalism, inherent in the tradition-bereftsocial order of atomized individuals, be essentially different fromthe liberalism inherent in the tradition-constituted social order ofthe now “socially atomized” traditions? Chaplin makes the pointthat neutrality in politics is just another word for liberalism:

Specifically, I shall argue that just as liberals necessarily andlegitimately seek to realize an authentically liberal pluralism, soChristians necessarily and legitimately seek an authenticallyChristian pluralism. “Christian pluralism” is not only not acontradiction in terms but is an essential aspiration for anauthentically Christian political perspective. If Christians merelyseek a neutral pluralism, they risk lapsing into the language—forthem inauthentic—of secular liberalism. 57

Breen criticizes MacIntyre for condemning liberalism in onecontext but endorsing it, at least implicitly, in another: “Ready todamn liberals for having consolidated their beliefs within socialstructures, he seems curiously unaware that this is the honest goalof most serious political standpoints, his own included.” 58

MacIntyre charges liberals with denying their substantive moral


and political commitments, and the practical ramifications ofthese commitments, but it seems that MacIntyre himself deniesthe political ramifications of his own commitments. In the light ofMacIntyre’s understanding of rationality as tradition-constituted, should the ultimate telos of MacIntyre’s politicaltheory not be the transformation of all social space into atradition-constituted, communal forum for ethical deliberationabout the human good? Yet MacIntyre relegates any social spacemore extensive than a small-scale community to the barren landof individualistic, “traditionless” irrationality, ruled over by theanarchic whims of an essentially irrational state whose “universal”conception of the good—individualistic autonomy—poses a for-midable threat to the particular conceptions of the good embod-ied in the communities it rules: “The paradox, then, is that whileMacIntyre rightly believes the whole of human life to the propersubject of ethical deliberation and rejects all claims to administra-tive neutrality, his partisanship for communal politics relin-quishes these gains.” 59

Tradition-Constituted PluralismA political project that relegates a great part of the social space tothe custodianship of an irrational, amoral ruler is antithetical toa moral project that seeks to order society to a common good, andto embody rational moral activity to the fullest social extentpossible. However, as I will argue, the contradiction betweenMacIntyre’s political and moral theory is only an apparent one. Itis, in fact, quite compatible with MacIntyre’s overall theory oftradition-constituted rationality. Surprisingly enough, there seemsto be an implicit acceptance in MacIntyre’s moral theory of the“interminable moral disagreement” that he explicitly condemns.Both John Rawls 60 and Jacques Maritain 61 hold a similar interpre-tation of the “fact of pluralism,” one in which the lack of moral,philosophical, and theological unity in Western liberal democra-cies is an unchangeable sociological reality; this interpretation isthen incorporated into their political theories and political pre-scriptions. We have seen that MacIntyre accepts the fact of


pluralism as well, but rejects any attempt to build a morallygrounded political order upon it, insisting instead that onlytradition-homogenous communities within the larger pluralisticenvironment can embody genuine moral and political activity.However, far from indicating an attitude of resentment or tragicnecessity towards the fact of pluralism, MacIntyre’s politicalprogram indicates the very opposite. A possible conclusion onecould draw from MacIntyre’s suggestion of the undesirability andeven impossibility of large-scale, tradition-homogenous politicalactivity is that large-scale political disunity is somehow necessaryfor the thriving of traditions of rationality. If political disunity, inthe MacIntyrean view, implies moral disunity, then moral dis-unity would appear to be indispensable for the thriving of tradi-tions of rationality and the rationality of individuals. If thisconclusion is true, then MacIntyre, in both his moral theory andideal political prescription, would implicitly endorse the “intermi-nable moral disagreement” he explicitly condemns.

There does seem to be a paradox at the heart of MacIntyre’smoral theory. Although unified agreement is the ultimatedesideratum of a tradition, in its narrative, history, practices,institutions, authorities, conception of the good, internal goods,philosophical concepts, rational criteria, core beliefs, moralhabits, etc., a certain amount of disagreement, both within andwithout the tradition, is necessary to obtain and preserve thisunity. We have seen that the development of tradition requires theevent of an epistemological crisis, which necessarily involvesconfrontation with an opposing tradition in the careful compari-son with which the present inadequacy or adequacy of one’s owntradition is discovered. Moreover, a tradition cannot progressunless it confronts itself as well as other traditions, that is, unlessit contrasts its present formulation and embodiment with pastformulations and embodiments to show both continuity anddevelopment, and thus to present a coherent narrative of itshistory. A tradition is inherently conflictive, since it is, essentially,an embodied argument: “When a tradition is in good order it isalways partially constituted by an argument about the goods the


pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point andpurpose.”62 Because a well-ordered tradition must always beopen to further development, revision, and even defeat, andbecause such openness to change requires the existence ofconflicting traditions, then disunity or conflict between tradi-tions cannot be an inherent evil; indeed, it is an indispensablegood, for the integrity of traditions requires it. As Levy pointsout, for MacIntyre, “[c]onflict, both internal to traditions andbetween them, is a necessary element in rationality and in rationalprogress, not, a contingent and regrettable feature of certainsocieties.”63

Nevertheless, the primary characteristic of a well-orderedtradition, for MacIntyre, is unity and agreement, not conflict. Ifa plurality of traditions is good, it is only an instrumental good,a good of effectiveness, always in subordination to any tradition’sprimary internal good of excellence, the truth. MacIntyre isinsistent that his theory of tradition-constituted rationality, al-though fully cognizant of the contingent, historical, and social-situatedness of all human knowledge, is ultimately non-relativis-tic, for it affirms that the attainment of unchangeable, objectivetruth about reality is possible. Yet, there is still a tension: to obtainthe knowledge that one has attained truth, that one’s mind hasbecome adequate to some aspect of reality, it would seem thatthere must exist rival claimants to truth with which the one whoclaims to know the truth must contend. MacIntyre writes,

It may seem to be, but it is not paradoxical, to conclude that thediscovery that it is possible for our own particular moral stand-point to be rationally defeated by some rival standpoint is anecessary condition for arriving at a rational vindication of ourown point of view. For the strongest indication that any point ofview can receive is that is has so far survived encounters with aswide as possible a variety of other and rival standpoints withoutsuffering such defeat . . . . 64

It is obvious that because human fallibility, passion, bias,


rivalry, etc., are inextricable aspects of humanity, a pluralism ofrival accounts of moral reality will always exist in the world. BothMacIntyre and the Enlightenment are in full agreement on thispoint. What MacIntyre criticizes the Enlightenment for is not itsacceptance of human fallibility and moral disagreement, but itsexploitation of these truths about human nature by creating asocial order that insures only its worst possible moral conse-quence: the inability of individuals to discover and obtain theirtrue good. It does this by depriving individuals of unified, sociallyembodied, authoritative traditions of rationality the participationin the practices of which alone enable tradition-dependent ratio-nal animals to know the truth and possess the good. Yet MacIntyre’salternative to Enlightenment politics also serves to depriveindividuals of traditions of rationality to some extent, because itdisables these traditions from the capacity to stand up, as it were,to a tradition-destroying state, so as to infuse all of social reality,not just local communities, with tradition-constituted rationality.However, it appears that MacIntyre’s alternative to Enlighten-ment morality would have a similar effect as well.

Neil Levy expresses how MacIntyre’s endorsement of inter-traditional pluralism is really an endorsement of intra-traditionalpluralism:

In order to refute relativism, MacIntyre finds himself importingmore and more of the pluralism of modern culture into hisaccount of the rational tradition, until it is no longer clear whichis the more riven by conflict. The very pluralism which, MacIntyrebelieves, threatens to undermine the rationality of our moraljudgments turns out to be a necessary ingredient of the suppos-edly unified traditions MacIntyre wished to vindicate. 65

If a state of conflictive pluralism between traditions is neces-sary for the occurrence of the epistemological crises that enabletraditions to discover whether or not they can justify theiradherents’ claims to truth, then perhaps a state of conflictivepluralist within a tradition is also necessary for individuals to


discover whether or not the goods, practices, and authorities theypresently desire, participate in, and obey are adequate. But howis this conception of tradition essentially different from the moralconsciousness of the liberal, tradition-independent “individual,”perpetually skeptical of the truth of his own beliefs, the claims ofothers to moral authority, and the existence of an unambiguous,universal, and objective “good”? Obviously, this is not the moralconsciousness that MacIntyre desires. However, if a certain levelof questioning and self-doubt is necessary for the justification ofa tradition in relation to other traditions, then it would seem to bealso necessary for the justification of the individual’s initial andcontinuing allegiance to a tradition.

J. B. Schneewind argues that MacIntyre’s requirement thatindividuals constantly question their given social identities evenwithin their own tradition is, for all intents and purposes, indistin-guishable from the liberal, socially skeptical attitude thatMacIntyrean communities are supposed to counteract:

MacIntyre envisages communities whose key feature is that theirmembers will not have any deep doubts about their socially givenidentities and therefore will not have to make decisions aboutthem. . . . By rejecting fixed inherited social identities and thebad faith involved in treating the cultural as the natural, MacIntyrehas incorporated into his ethic two closely related principles ofthat liberal modern morality he so detests. I do not think hiscommunities, if they were to exist in a world as crowded andcommunicative as ours, could resist the dialectical consequencesof having MacIntyre’s theory as their own self-understanding. 66

Even though MacIntyre rejects the liberal, tradition-inde-pendent view of rationality, endorsing the necessity of obedienceto and dependence upon authoritative texts, practices, person-ages, and institutions, these particular authorities, as well as thetradition as a whole, nevertheless, must remain open to constantrational evaluation and criticism by members of other traditions,as well as by those already accepting these authorities. Of course,


MacIntyre would remind us that the “reason” doing the evaluatingand criticizing is by no means tradition-independent, as its verycapacity to evaluate and criticize is dependent upon continualobedience to the authorities under its investigation; nevertheless,there is a similarity here between the Enlightenment and MacIntyrein the overall attitude towards authority. For both, authority is inthe end subject to reason . Terry Pinkard writes, “The ‘authority oftradition’ is itself subject to assessment by reason, even if thecapacities for good reason are not capacities that can be exercisedoutside of some appeal to such authority.” 67

In sum, there seems to be an irresolvable tension in MacIntyre’soverall theory of tradition-constituted rationality. While tradi-tions are required for rationality, they must be under constantrational surveillance for any signs of irrationality. While a tradi-tion may claim to be exclusively true, it requires the assistance ofother traditions, even “false” ones, to do so, and it must be readyto renounce its truth claims if it is judged to be unable to survivedialectical argument. While unified agreement is ostensibly thegreatest internal good of a tradition, conflictive pluralism seemsto be just as important, and possibly even an internal good in itself.Levy expresses well the tensions in MacIntyre’s theory:

In order for a tradition to be able justifiably to hold sway over theentire field, it is necessary that it does not hold sway over theentire field. In order for a tradition to establish its superiority overits rivals, it is necessary for it to enter into dialogue with them, andbe transformed by them. In order for a tradition to progress, itneeds the arguments thrown at it by, and the alien perspectivesof, rivals. . . . In order for us to be able to conclude that a unifiedculture with a widely agreed upon social and cosmological orderis necessary for rational enquiry, it is necessary for the social fieldto be riven by deep and fundamental divisions. 68

The last point of Levy’s is especially significant for our presentdiscussion because it connects the tension in MacIntyre’s moraltheory to the tension in his political prescription. The primary


target of MacIntyre’s critique of Enlightenment liberalism andthe contemporary social and political order is its “interminablemoral disagreement,” the “pluralism which threatens to submergeus all.” However, when one carefully examines the alternativemoral theory and practical model MacIntyre gives us, it is notevident that pluralism and moral disagreement themselves are theenemy; it is only a certain kind of pluralism and moral disagree-ment that MacIntyre condemns. The conflictive and pluralisticcharacter of the post-Enlightenment social order is not theproblem, for if we could move the locus of the conflict and thesource of the pluralism from individuals qua individuals toindividuals qua members of traditions, and from individuals orga-nized irrationally and non-teleologically by state-bureaucraticand market forces to individuals organized rationally and teleo-logically by the practices of genuine moral communities, thensuch conflict and pluralism would be good. Far from requiring a“unified culture with a widely agreed upon social and cosmologi-cal order” in order to thrive, it would seem that the political idealthat follows logically from the normative pluralism inherent inMacIntyre’s theory of tradition-constituted rationality couldeven exist in a non-pluralistic and tradition-homogenous cultureand order. For, not only would a large-scale, tradition-homog-enous community preclude the level of conflictive pluralismnecessary for the small-scale, tradition-homogenous communi-ties within it to develop rationally, but a similar moral stuntingwould be caused by the small-scale tradition-homogenous com-munities themselves. Levy writes, “The unified practice, rooted ina small, relatively homogenous community—the practices that itremains, officially, MacIntyre’s task to defend and promote—turn out on his own arguments to be inhospitable environmentsfor the development of those resources that would allow practicesto flourish, to develop, to justify themselves rationally, and so tobe worthy of their hegemony.” 69

If we take the specific example of MacIntyre’s own traditionof Thomism, we can see this paradox in its most extreme andironical form. The rational development of the tradition of


Augustinian Thomism reached a high-point in the thirteenthcentury, the century, of course, of St. Thomas Aquinas. This wasthe century that also witnessed the high point of the developmentof the unified religious civilization known as Christendom. Notonly did there exist at this time in Europe a multitude of small-scale tradition-homogenous Thomistic communities, but also alarge-scale homogenously Catholic community unifying the smallerones. Notwithstanding the considerable strife within and betweenthese communities, MacIntyre would be the first to admit thatthere was none of the “interminable moral disagreement” and“pluralism which threatens to submerge us all” now found in post-medieval society. Moreover, the political theology of the Thomisttradition certainly does not endorse moral or political pluralismby any means. On the contrary, the traditional Catholic politicalideal, which has remain unchanged even unto modern times, is alarge-scale morally and religiously unified state under the moraland spiritual authority of the Catholic Church, that is,Christendom.70 In short, traditional Catholicism and Thomismappear to recommend a social order conducive for the flourishingof human rationality quite different from the one MacIntyrerecommends. Pinkard writes,

Given MacIntyre’s own social-practice account of reason, for hisargument against modernity to work and for Thomism to defeatmodernity the social wholes that are necessary for Thomistreasoning to be successful would themselves have to be recon-structed—and there is simply no reason to think that is possible.For it to be possible, the kind of pluralism that gives rise to theproblems of incommensurability would itself have to be over-come, and everything MacIntyre says seems to constitute anargument to the effect that it cannot, that pluralism is a necessary,even rationally required component of the modern world. 71

In conclusion, MacIntyre’s project does not appear as anti-liberal and anti-modern as it claims to be. Like liberalism, itspolitical prescription endorses, and his moral theory requires, a


social order wherein no particular conception of the good prevailson a large-scale level. Both MacIntyreanism and liberalism limitthe state’s activity to tradition-neutral, pragmatic management ofinter-traditional and inter-individual moral conflict respectively.Both consider a morally conflictive social order a good thingbecause necessary for human flourishing and the fullest exerciseof human rationality. Alasdair MacIntyre is arguably the mostsophisticated and trenchant philosophical critic of liberalismalive today; yet if my analysis is correct, even he cannot manageto portray a coherent alternative to the liberal political order.

There are several explanations and conclusions one couldoffer and draw from this fact, but allow me to suggest just one.Since it is quite doubtful that the reason for MacIntyre’s difficultyin overcoming liberalism is a deficiency of philosophical sophis-tication and rigor, then perhaps the problem isn’t philosophical atall. If the Thomist tradition is the true tradition, and if the idealpolitical order can only be described coherently and persuasivelywith all the resources of this tradition, including its theologicalresources, what MacIntyre might be able to provide, if he wereonly to put some theology into his philosophical arsenal, is aneffective refutation of any non-Thomistic attempt to prescribe amodel of the ideal political order. What a theologically informed,MacIntyrean-Thomist ideal political prescription would actuallylook like, and how it could be effectively implemented in thepresent day, is a task yet to be accomplished, but I think that anyphilosopher attempting to execute it must first admit his inad-equacy to go it alone, and then call on the help of the theologians:“Without bad will, political philosophy cannot refuse to considerrevelation’s insight into political things when politics does notsolve its own problems in its own terms about its own subjectmatter.”72

Thaddeus J. KozinskiOur Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy


NOTES1. Alasdair MacIntyre , Dependent Rational Animals: Why

Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 4.2. Ibid., 9.3. Ibid., 68-95.4. Ibid., 102-03.5. Ibid., 103.6. Ibid., 107-09.7. Ibid., 110-11.8. Ibid., 116-18.9. Ibid., 122-25.10. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Com-

mon Good,” in The MacIntyre Reader (Notre Dame, IN: Univer-sity of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 243.

11. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 219.

12. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why HumanBeings Need the Virtues , 129-30. MacIntyre’s outline of the idealpolitical order, although a secular, naturalistic, and philosophicalpresentation, is similar in essentials to the Catholic conception ofthe “preferential option for the poor,” defined in Pope Paul VI’spastoral letter Octogesima Adveniens 23 (1971) as “the preferen-tial respect due to the poor and the special situation they have insociety.” MacIntyre’s position differs from Catholic teaching inthat the latter does not exclude the state as a locus for and an agentof the implementation of its principles, while the former does. ForMacIntyre, the state is, at best, a necessarily evil, not to bedeputed with any moral responsibilities.

13. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive: TheCase of Aquinas,” The Journal of Medieval and Early ModernStudies 26, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 68.

14. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,”249.

15. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Structures and Their Threatsto Moral Agency,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Vol. 2(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 197.


16. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals , 142.17. Ibid., 241.18. Ibid., 243.19. MacIntyre, “Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social

Structure,” 123.20. Ibid., 249.21. MacIntyre, After Virtue , 255.22. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,”

250.23. Ibid., 236-37.24. Ibid., 239.25. MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of

Aquinas,” 68.26. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Con-

flict,” in The Politics of Toleration in Modern Life , ed. SusanMendus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 142.

27. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Natural Law against the Nation-State: Or the Possibility of the Common Good against theActuality of the Public Interest,” (unpublished lectures) fromLaws, Goods, and Virtues: Medieval Resources for Modern Con-flicts, the 1994 Agnes Cuming Lectures in Philosophy, deliveredat University College, Dublin, March 1-3, 1994, 43.

28. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Spectre of Communitarianism,”Radical Philosophy 70 (1995), 35; quoted in Kelvin Knight,“Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” in I. Hampsher-Monk and J.Stanyer, eds, Contemporary Political Studies , vol 2 (PoliticalStudies Association of the United Kingdom, 1996), 894.

29. MacIntyre, After Virtue , 237.30. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals , 132-33.31. MacIntyre, “Natural Law against the Nation State,” 27.32. Ibid.,” 29.33. Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,”

in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of AlasdairMacIntyre, John Horton and Susan Mendus, ed. (Notre Dame,IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 303.

34. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,”


246.35. MacIntyre, “Natural Law against the Nation State,” 29.36. MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” 303.37. MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” 143.38. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,”

238.39. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals , 133.40. MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” 144.41. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,”

247.42. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London:

Duckworth, 1995), xv.43. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Con-

flict,” 143.44. Keith Breen, “The State, Compartmentalization and the

Turn to Local Community: A Critique of the Political Thought ofAlasdair MacIntyre,” The European Legacy 10, no. 5 (2005): 494.

45. Keith Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for aPolitics of Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence,” ContemporaryPolitical Theory 1 (2002): 196.

46. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Virtues of Practice Against theEfficiency of Institutions” in Laws, Goods, and Virtues: MedievalResources for Modern Conflicts , 77.

47. Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics ofVirtuous Acknowledged Dependence,” 198.

48. Ibid., 197.49. Ronald Beiner, “Community versus Citizenship:

MacIntyre’s Revolt against the Modern State ,” Critical Review14, no. 4 (2000): 477, footnote 22.

50. Thomas Hibbs, “MacIntyre, Aquinas, and Politics,” TheReview of Politics 66, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 366.

51. Ibid., 369.52. Beiner, “Community versus Citizenship,” 474.53. Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics of

Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence,” 197.54. Jonathan Chaplin, “Rejecting Neutrality, Respecting Di-


versity: From ‘Liberal Pluralism’ to ‘Christian Pluralism’,” Chris-tian Scholar’s Review 35, no. 2 (Winter 2006), 163.


56. Catherine Pickstock, “Liturgy, Art, and Politics,” ModernTheology 16, no. 2 (April 2000), 171.

57. Chaplin, “Rejecting Neutrality, Respecting Diversity,”145.


59. Breen, “The State, Compartmentalization, and the Turn toLocal Community,” 497.

60. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1993).

61. See Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (The CatholicUniversity of America Press, 1998 [1951]).

62. MacIntyre, After Virtue , 222.63. Neil Levy, “Stepping into the Present: MacIntyre’s Mo-

dernity,” Social Theory and Practice 25, no. 3 (Fall 1999), 479.64. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Moral Pluralism without Moral

Relativism,” Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress ofPhilosophy, Vol. 1, Ethics (1999), 3.

65. Levy, “Stepping into the Present,” 472.66. J. B. Schneewind, “Virtue, Narrative, and Community,”

The Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 11 (November 1982): 663.67. Terry Pinkard, “MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity,” in

Alasdair MacIntyre , ed. Mark Murphy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003), 194.

68. Levy, “Stepping into the Present,” 482.69. Ibid., 484.70. Articulating the Catholic Church’s political ideal of the

Catholic confessional state, Peter Kwasniewski writes, “The Catho-lic state is the natural, organic outcome of the Faith itself when itis fully lived by a people. As Hittinger reminds us, Gaudium et Spes§43 invites the laity to make it a matter of conscience that “thedivine law is impressed on the affairs of the earthly city,” ut lex


divina in civitatis terrenae vita inscribatur . When this is doneconsistently on a broad scale, the normal, proper result is aCatholic society, culture, and state. The Church and her faith willbe, for the majority of citizens, the point of reference forunderstanding themselves and the world, the framework of theirdaily lives, customs, arts, letters, festivities, rituals. She will be thedominant presence in the life of the individual as in the life of thecommunity. This has never ceased to be the ideal towards whichthe Church strives. In an address to the Tenth InternationalCongress of Historical Sciences in Rome in 1955, Pius XII stated:“[W]hile the Church and State have known hours and years ofconflict, there were also from the time of Constantine the Greatuntil the contemporary era and even recently, tranquil periods,often quite long ones, during which they collaborated with fullunderstanding in the education of the same people. The Churchdoes not hide the fact that she considers such collaborationnormal, and that she regards the unity of the people in the truereligion and the unanimity of action between herself and the Stateas ideal” (Peter Kwasniewski, “Basic Notes on the Catholic State,”unpublished lecture notes, April 2006).

71. Pinkard, “MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity,” 195.72. James V. Schall, Roman Catholic Political Philosophy

(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 157.

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