MacIntyre_The Indispensibility of Political Theory

8/4/2019 MacIntyre_The Indispensibility of Political Theory

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The Indispensability of Political Theory"Alasdair MacIntyre

Vanderb il t Un ive r si t y

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I'Man, being rational and capable. of self-knowledge, puts tohimself two sorts of questions, and science answers only one ofthem. The sort of question which science answers he puts both ofhimself and of what is external to him; but the sort which sciencedoes not answer he puts only of himself or of creatures whom hebelieves to be in his own condition.' (M an a nd So ciety (London,Longman, 1963), vol. 1, p. xxi). Questions of the latter kind, onJohn Plamenatz's view, include the questions of polit ical theory.And not only can science not answer them, neither can analyticalphilosophy. None the less they are not questions that can be waivedor put permanently on one side. 'A hostile or perverse critic' maytry toreduce the exercise of framing such theories to 'a statement ofpreferences or a laying down ofrules or a defining of goals ... and awhole lot of verbiage besides ' , but it may be pointed out to such acritic that 'it is perhaps a kind of verbiage in which he himselfindulges when, momentarily, he forgets his opinions about it.' Thisinescapable character ofpolitical theorizing arises from the fact thatit is .one of the key activities by which man satisfies 'a need to" place" himself in the world . . . to take his own and the world'smeasure. This need is not met by science.' And it is not met bymorality either, for human beings need a conception of the worldand their place in it which will connect their morality with thenature of things. The thinker who understood this best, onPlamenatz's view, was Pascal, not at all because, as he alwayshastened toadd both inhiswritings and inconversation, Pascal wasa Christian. A modern secular thinker could, however, do nobetterthan model himself upon Pascal ( Ma n a nd S oc ie ty , vol. 1, p. xxi andvol. 2, p. 457: my confidence that this isthe view being expressedderives from more than one conversation with John Plamenatz) .

17 Alasdair M aclntyre 1983.


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18 A la sda i r Mac lnt y re The Ind ispensab il it y o j Po li ti ca l T h e or yPolitical theorizing isthus, on Plamenatz's view, an exemplifica-tion of the project of metaphysical self-knowledge: His defence ofthisprojectin the passages fromwhich I have quoted was directed towhat he took tobe the hostile criticisms of' analytic philosophy' , anunsurprising stance to anyone who recalls the intellectual climate inOxford in the nineteen fifties and sixties. But had he considered

instead or as well the dominant atti tudes of historians to polit icaltheory, the need for a defence of the project would have been quiteas evident. Professional academic historians are notoriouslysuspicious ofphilosophies ofhistory; and many political theories areor include just such philosophies. For where the philosopher ofhistory looks for-and sometimes claims to find-patterns,generalizations, regular and determined development, thehistorian continually insists upon discovering the contingent, theirregular, the breakdown ofpattern. Some academic historians doof course profess political theories or philosophies of history;Buckle, Bury, Beard, and Butterfield have their contemporarycounterparts. But it is important to remark that the standing ofhistorians qu a historians inthe academic community oftheir peers isbased on considerations which disregard this fact; even the best ofMarxist historians are usually evaluated by their colleagues ashistorians in a way designed to exclude consideration of them as...Marxists. Moreover the compartmentalization ofthe conventionalacademic curriculum tends to assign Machiavelli and Hobbes andRousseau and Hegel to one set of historical narratives and theMedici and Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell andRobespierre to another, in such a way that the history of ideas ispresented with a minimum of political context and the history ofpolitics as largely devoid of theoretical content. Both thesecharacteristics of the professionalization of academic history arereinforced by the successful polemics conducted by Pieter Geyl andJ. H. Hexter against the use made of particular philosophies ofhistory. The dominant forms of contemporary historicalunderstanding and those of theoretical or philosophical under-standing coexist with at best lack of sympathy, at worse activemutual antagonism.The professional historian can afford to regard this situation withsome complacency; the polit ical theorist and the philosopher ofhistory cannot. For the latter are professionally bound to yield to thehistorian's findings in a way that apparently need not be recipro-

cated. Since the claims of the political theorist and of thephilosopher of history do have empirical content and empiricalconsequences-for they are characteristically claims to the effectthat the motives for striving after and the effects ofobtaining powerare ofsome specific kind (Machiavelli and Hobbes) or that projectsof a certain kind are bound to fail (Burke) or to succeed (Marx) orthat rationality in history emerges in certain specific forms (Hegel)-they are always open to at least prima-facie refutation by theempirical findings of the historian, even if the falsification of suchtheories isalways in the end acomplex matter. Consequently theserious political theorist always has to be concerned not only withthe internal coherence of the theories which are his or her specificsubject-matter, but also with the truth or falsity of a variety ofhistorical claims about motives, institutions, and forms ofdevelopment. Thus the serious political theorist must also b e togreater or lesser degree a historian and the tension between thegeneralizing tasks of theory and respect for the particular contin-gencies which emerge from the study of history has to becomeinternal to the study ofpolitical theory.What I am going to argue in this paper is that ifwe are to allowthis tension its due place in the studies which constitute polit icaltheory, then we shall have to recognize that history ismore than asource ofnegative and falsifying constraints upon the theorist. Weshall have to insist that the practice of history itself requires muchmore in the way of a relationship to theory than professionalacademic historians are apt or anxious to recognize. For in thepractice ofeven the most implacably anti-theoretical historians, soIshall argue, there has to remain an implicit, even if unacknow-ledged, reference to philosophical theory. One fundamental reasonwhy this is so isthat historians, l ike those whom they write about,are human beings; and human beings, as John Plamenatz neverallowed us to forget, are incurably theoretical and philosophical intheir reflection upon themselves. It istherefore worth enquiring atthe outset, even if in a manner that is necessarily too brief andcompressed, in what way this isso.IIEvery society isconstituted bymembers whose behaviour embodiesa set of beliefs about the workings of that particular society: howindividuals are tobe classified and ranked, who owes what towhom


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20 A l a sd a ir Mac ln t yr e T h e I nd is pe ns ab il it y o j P o li ti ca l T h eo ry 21under what circumstances, what the consequences are likelyto beofbreaking rather than keeping different types of rule. Those beliefsmay be more or less systematic, and the more systematic that theybecome the more closely they approach the condition ofa theory. Itis of course rare for the ordinary members of a society to think ofthemselves as holding a theory about the social lifewhich they enactin their everyday behaviour. But on the rare occasions when someofthose about whom an anthropologist has written read the anthro-pologist's account and compare itwith their own beliefs about howand why they do what they do, and on the somewhat morenumerous occasions on which those who inhabit particular types ofinstitution in advanced societies-industrial firms, -universities,trade unions, hospitals-read theoretical accounts by sociologists oreconomists of how and why they do what they do, the ordinarymembers of a society become aware, sometimes uncomfortablyaware, of the extent to which their own theory as to how and whythey behave and the social scientist's theory of why and how theybehave are rival and incompatible theories about one and the samesubject-matter.That there should be discrepancies between the theory ofa givensocial order embodied in the behaviour ofone particular individualand the theory of that same social order advanced in explicit andtheoretically articulated terms by an observer isunsurprising for atleast three different kinds ofreason. The first isthat although whatconsti tutes the social order as an order, rather than a chaos, isthedegree towhich the theories embodied in the behaviour ofdifferentindividuals overlap with each other and are compatible in such away as to integrate the activit ies of each into the activities of all (ifyour understanding of what I am doing and ofwhat you are doingdoes not to some degree match my understanding of what you aredoing and what I am doing, then Wewillnot be able tointeract inanintelligible way), none the less there will always be discrepancies,discrepancies arising from the different vantage points from whichthe social order isviewed as well asfrom the social conflicts. Theviews of social class taken by a duke, his butler, and the man whocollects his rubbish willdiffer in significant ways; the view ofurban-rural differences taken in the countryside isapt to differ from thattaken in the town. The social scientific observer by contrast seeks toproduce not a partial and one-sided theory of the social order,but one designed to overcome partiality and one-sidedness bypresenting a view ofthe social order as a whole.

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A second difference arises from the fact that the theories of thesocial scientific observer are apt to be constrained by the conven-tions of the curriculum to a degree not always recognized by thesocial scientist himself or herself. What the economist picks out assignificant willnot be the same aswhat thepolitical scientist fastenson; anthropologists bring a professionally informed vision of sociall ifeto their field-work which isnot the same as that which informsthe observations and experiments of social psychologists. Thissecond type of difference contrasts interestingly with the first, forhere the partiality and one-sidedness are apt to belong to the socialscientific observer rather than tothose whom he or she studies. Andthis isso not only because of the different perspectives of the varioussocial scientific professions, but also because the theory of societyembodied in the behaviour of the inhabitants of a social ordercharacteristically has dimensions excluded to greater or lesserdegree by every kind ofsocial scientific professionalism. For a socialorder isgenerally understood by those who inhabit it as standing incertain relationships to nature and to the divine. Nature isunderstood as providing some particular kind of environment, asource of fears, threats, and hopes, of material for enjoyment ordomination or awe; the divine is either an important part of thenatural and social orders, altogether distinct from either or both, orabsent or non-existent. Ordinary members of almost all societiesare metaphysicians in their implicit and explicit theorizing, a luxurywhich the Western academic tradition denies to social scientists.Thirdl y the theoretical constructions ofthe social.scientist are ofcourse just that: theoretical constructions explicitly spelled out inwhatever idiom may be intellectually and professionally appro-priate. But the theories which inform the behaviour ofthe ordinarymember of a social order are often tacit and at best partiallyarticulated schemes of thought and action, providing a set ofmaxims which are simultaneously instructions for interpreting thebehaviour ofothers and prescriptions as to how to behave oneself ifone's actions are tobe susceptible ofsome particular interpretation.I have already suggested one reason why we should none the lessthink of such schemes as theories-their more or less systematiccharacter. And to this I now want to add two other perhaps moreimportant reasons. The first is that the ascriptions of actions andpassions to others which are warranted by such everyday schemesof thought and action always in an important way go beyond theevidence provided by the bare observation ofbehaviour. And they


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2 2 A l a sd a ir Mac ln ty r emust so outrun the evidence if they are to provide the kind ofcharacterization of the actions of others which will enable us torespond to those actions in what we ourselves do and say.Consider three different possible characterizations ofone and thesame segment ofbehaviour: 'His finger pressed against the trigger,the revolver went offandJohn felldown dead'; 'He shotJohn with

the revolver'; 'He murderedJohn.' The first l ists three successiveevents, but ascribes no causality. The second ascribes causality, butimputes no intention; its truth iscompatible with the truth either of'He killedJohn accidentally' or of 'He killedJohn in self-defence'and sowith the falsity of the third characterization. It isonly at thisthird level of characterization that we find a type of actiondescription on the basis of which others can judge what type ofresponse on their part towhat happened isappropriate. And that istosay, itisonly by characterizing the sociallife around us in terms ofthe intentions embodied in it and their effectiveness or ineffective-ness inproducing either intended or unintended changes in that life-including changes in the intentions of others and in the effective-ness of those intentions-that we are able to find in that social lifematter for our own intentional responses.Such characterization requires that we go beyond the evidence

afforded by the observations of the externals of behaviour in at, least two ways. The thoughts and feelings which are partiallyconsti tutive of many of our intentions are often not manifest in thebehaviour which is the expression of those intentions, andsometimes at least this is the result of an additional intention todisguise or withhold some of our intentions. And moreover thequestion ofwhether a particular intention was orwas not effective inmaking it the case that someone did what he or she did can oftenonly be answered by making a claim about the truth of somecounterfactual conditional. For toassert ofsomeone that they did orare doing such-and-such because it is their intention to do so-and-soalways implies that they would not have done or be doing such-and-such if it were not their intention to do so-and-so. (This istoosimple, for we need to add some clause to the effect that they mightstill have done such and such if some other causal agency hadoperated to that effect. Happily for my present purposes all that Ineed to note is that, however that type of clause is worded, thecommitment to the truth ofsome set of counterfactual conditionalsremains.)It is these two features of Our characterizations of the actions of

The Ind i sp ensabi l it y o f Po li ti ca l T h e or y 2 3others which give point to the assertion that at the level ofcharacter-ization which enables us torespond to the actions ofothers-that is,at the level of characterization which makes all social transactionspossible-we are inevitably engaged in a task of theoretical inter-pretation. But where there has to be interpretation, there alwaysarises the possibility of rival, incompatible interpretations. Andindeed a good deal ofsociallife isconstituted by the coexistence andsometimes the conflict of such interpretations.It isimportant to notice that our systematic interpretations oftheactions of others and of the transactions in which we ourselves areinvolved are not and cannot be neutral with respect to the solutionsof certain well-established philosophical problems. The relation-ship of intentionality to causality, the role of intention in theconstitution of action, the types of reasoning appropriate forsupporting counterfactual claims, and the nature ofour knowledgeofother minds are all recurrent topics in thejoumals ofprofessionalacademic philosophy. Thus the everyday activity and experience ofplain men and WOmenpresupposes the truth of certain philoso-phical theses in,tli~se particular problem areas and the falsity ofothers, even al:though this often goes unrecognized; and when sucheveryday activity and experience is partially consti tuted by rivaland contested interpretations, one source of such conflicts is thecoexistence of r ival philosophical presuppositions. .I am going to suggest that political theories are, by and large,articulate, systematic, and explicit versions of the unarticulated,more or less systematic and implicit interpretations, through whichplain men and women understand this experience of the actions ofothers in a way that enables them to respond to it in their own

actions. If this is so, then the force ofJohn Plamenatz's remarkswhich I quoted at the outset becomes immediately clear. For ifthereis any substance to my suggestion, then polit ical theory is indeedjust the central kind ofhuman activity that Plamenatz took itto be.Moreover the grounds for disagreement with the kind of analyticphilosophy which Plamenatz identified as one ofthe antagonists ofclassical political theory also becomes clear. One of the centraltheses of that particular kind of analytic philosphy was that thephilosopher isa second-order commentator on 'ordinary language'and the sciences. The ordinary language user isthus portrayed asessentially a pre-philosophical being whose common-sense beliefsare innocent of the sophistications of theory.This was never plausible. The remark that common sense is


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24 A l a sd a ir Mac In t yr ealways the graveyard of past philosophical theories encapsulatespart of the case against i t; and my present argument supplementsthat remark, by suggesting that the ordinary agent isable to act inrelation to others only because he has theoretical and philosophicalcommitments of the same kind as those expressed in classicalpolitical theory. This is most evident on the occasions when thepolitical theorist articulates his systematic views in the course of hispolitical activity and when therefore the theorist's interpretationsand consequent actions are matched against the interpretations andconsequent actions of those ordinary non-theoretically-mindedagents who are caught up in the same set ofpolit ical transactions.To turn therefore to an example of the theorist as political agentmay help to lend force to an argument which, it may be rightlycomplained, has been too brief, schematic, compressed, and inconsequence oversimplified. Before I offer such an example,however, it isnecessary to make one further point.When rival interpretations ofone and the same set ofactions andtransactions become available, they characteristically becomeavailable after the event as rival narratives of those happenings.Before and during the event they function as dramatic scripts interms of which each person understands both his or her own roleand that ofothers; and as the drama ismore and more fully enacted,those who persist in their allegiance to rival and conflicting inter-\.pretations necessarily tell different and incompatible tales ofwhathas occurred. The disagreements embodied in such conflicts ofinterpretation are ofcourse compatible with a wide range ofagree-ment in the characterization of events at the level of what I havecalled the observation of the externals of behaviour. Who ma~iedwhom on what day, the sentences uttered in someone's oration andthe numbers of the units engaged in a battle , the size of the crowdand whether itrained or not: every party may well be able to agreeon all ofthese points without mitigating the conflict of their inter-pretations to any degree at all .To illustrate my thesis I need therefore to show how rival politicaltheories have on some particular occasion functioned as articulateand systematic versions of the rival interpretative standpoints ofordinary men and women, in such a way as to function either asrival dramatic scripts before and during the event or as rivaljustificatory narratives after it. To this task I therefore turn.

The Ind is p ensab i li t y o f Po l it ic a l T h e or yIIIThe great events of history are rarely staged with an eye to theconvenience of political theorists. What happened in France, an.dmore especially in Paris, from February 1348to December 19511sexceptional in the number of theorists who were at or near thecentre of events. Marx, who had been expelled from France byGuizots government in 1845, returned to Paris at the invitation ofFerdinand Flocon, a member of the revolutionary government, inMarch 1843. He left for Cologne inJune, but returned to Paris inJune 1849, where he stayed until his departure for London in lateAugust. He published T h e E ig ht ee nt h B ru m ai re o f L o ui s B o na pa rt e inGerman inthe second number ofJoseph Weydemeyer' s review D ieRevolu tion, published in New York in 1852. Proudhon helped buildbarricades in Paris in February 1843, was elected to the ConstituentAssembly inJ une, and supported the workers after the] une days inhis newspaper, L a R ep re se nt an t d u P e up le . The newspaper was clos~ddown and later Proudhon was imprisoned, but he managed towntenot only his Con fe ss io n s o j a R e vo l ut io n a ry , but also T h e G e ne ra l I de a o ft he R ev ol ut io n i n t he N in et ee nt h C e nt ur y, which was published in 1851.Seven months after Louis Bonaparte's coup d ' eta t he published Th eS o ci al R e vo lu ti on D em on st ra te d b y t he C o up d 'E ta t.Alexis de Tocqueville was a member in turn of the ConstituentAssembly and of the Legislative Assembly. From ] une toNovember 1849 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs in OdilonBarret's Republican government. He remained a member of theAssembly and was imprisoned for two days after the coup d ' e ta t , butnot before he had sent a letter ofprotest on behalf of his colleaguesand himself to T he T im es in London. This letter was published on 11December 1851. Walter Bagehot had been in Paris for severalmonths before the c oup d ' i ta / ; his reports ofand reflections on it-thefirst is dated 8January 1352-appeared in an English Unitarianjournal, Th e E nq ui re r .Collect together four political theorists and the chances are thatyou willbe presented with at least fiverival interpretations of oneand the same set ofevents. The events of 1848to 1851inFrance areno exception: for Marx, Tocqueville, and Bagehot each present uswith a clear and distinctive view ofevents, while Proudhon presentsus with two such views, in one of which Louis Napoleon is thesubverter of the revolution, while in the other he is its potential


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26 A l a sd a ir Mac ln t yr eleader. Of these five I shall concentrate attention on two only, thatof Tocqueville and that of Marx. I shall do so in a way welldesigned, I hope, to bring out how each of these theories is anarticulate version ofjust that kind ofinterpretation which everyonehas to rely upon in his or her everyday social transactions. I shalltry, that is, not only to show that each of them embodies somesystematic method for interpreting the evidence of behaviour byascribing intentions ofa certain kind and by ascribing a certain kindofeffectiveness or ineffectiveness to those intentions, but also that inso doing they are providing in their theories an explicit version ofwhat ordinary non-theorizing participants in and observers of thevery same events are providing in their actions , reactions, andtransactions. It isvery much to the point, ofcourse, both that Marxand Tocqueville were themselves tovarying degrees participants aswell as theorists an d that each aspired to represent in articulate formthe point ofview ofsome large body ofparticipants. It iseven moretothe point that, at the level ofwhat isavailable tothe observation ofwhat I have called the externals ofbehaviour, there isno significantor extensive disagreement between Marx and Tocqueville orbetween either of them and Proudhon or Bagehot as to whathappened in France between 1848and 1851. Disagreement arisesat quite another level of characterization.A central question (0 which Marx and Tocqueville addressthemselves is: why did an outcome which none 'of the originalparties to the revolution of 1848 intended emerge in 1851? Andsince the answer to that question necessarily depends in part onwhat the intentions of the participants in the revolution of 1848were, it is not surprising that the different answers to that questiongiven by Marx and TocqueviUe turn out to depend upon their

different answers to the question of how the intentions of theparticipants are to be identified. It will clarify those differences if Ifirs t turn to consider two problems that characteristically arisewhenever questions about the knowledge ofintentions are raised;The first is connected with the counterfactual claims associatedwith ascriptions of causal effectiveness to intentions. In manysituations there are a number of equally truthful and appropriateanswers to the question: 'What are you doing?' 'Digging thegarden', 'Taking healthful exercise', 'Pleasing my wife', 'Makingsure that we shall have vegetables inthe summer' , An action at onelevel may be informed by a number of intentions. But these

The Ind is p ensab i li t y if Po l it ic a l T h e or y 2 7intentions may not all be equally powerful in the agent's life. It isonly when we know the answers to such questions as 'Would youstillbe digging the garden if it did not please your wife, although youstill believed itto be healthful exercise?' 'Would you still be diggingthe garden ifi t was cheaper to buy vegetables at. the supermarket,although you stillbelieved itpleased your wife?', and soon, that weare able to rank order the intentions that we ascribe in terms ofcausal effectiveness. And effective understanding of the behaviourof others always involves not only the ascription of intentions butalso the role of these intentions in bringing it about that the agentacts in one way rather than in others.Secondly short-term intentions are often nested within longer-term intentions. 'What are you doing?' 'Writing a sentence','Finishing a chapter', 'Completing my book', 'Trying to gettenure' . All these intentions clearly may be embodied in one andthe same action. And effective understanding of the behaviourofothers always involves understanding how and how far the short-term intentions of an agent are dependent for their existence andcharacter upon his or her longer-term intentions,When, therefore, someone sets out to decipher the intentions ofthose around him or her, he or she always has three types ofquestion to answer: (i) What are they doing now? How manydifferent intentions are embodied in their present behaviour?; (ii) Ifthey had to choose to implement one rather than another of theseintentions in a situation inwhich the implementation ofboth was orappeared to be impossible, which would be the dominantintention?; (iii) How do their present intentions relate to theirlonger-term intentions? What kind ofbridge between a believed-inpast and a projected future istheir present intention? It was in thesystematically different ways inwhich they answered these types ofquestion, framed as specific questions about the major participantsin the events of 1848 to 1851, that the systematically differentpolitical theories of Marx and Tocqueville-and indeed ofProudhon also-functioned as action-guiding interpretations ofpolitical transactions. Notice that n o o ne could have participated inthese e'vents in an effective way without making practicaljudgements which would presuppose highly specific answers to allthree types ofquestion. Plamenatz was quite right in asserting thatpolitical theory is not an optional discipline for human beings.Consider one particular episode, In May 1850 the party of


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2 8 A la sd a i r Ma c i n ty r eOrder, the party of the monarchists, succeeded in having a lawpassed which, by requiring a particular kind of evidence ofresidence for voters, deprived a large minority of the electorate ofthe vote, while technically not violating the constitutionalprotection ofuniversal adult male suffrage. When Louis Bonaparteas President agreed to this law, he did so in such a way as to make itappear that he had not foreseen or intended this outcome: 'allFrance', wrote F. A. Simpson, 'believed that the Royalists hadtricked the President' (L ouis N ap oleon and th e R ecovery o f France ,1848~1856(London, Longman, 1923), p. 95). Later, however, theRoyalists came to believe that the President had in fact trickedthem: that he had intended both the disfranchisement of threemillion voters, mostly peasants, an d that that disfranchisementshould appear to have been the work of the Royalists who hadexploited his unsuspecting and innocent good will. 'They thoughthe would be a tool and a tool that they could break.,' wroteTocqueville of a similar earlier misjudgement; 'The folly ofclevermen I S wonderful. ' (Co rrespondenc e and Conve rsa ti on s (London, HenryS.King, 1872), vol. i, p. 195.) In November 1851when Bonaparterestored universal suffrage he therefore appeared to have been itsconsis tent friend. From the standpoint of the Royalists-as fromthat of almost all Republicans and Socialists-the story ofBonaparte isthat of an unprincipled opportunist, whose overridingintention is to take power; from the standpoint of Bonaparte'sapologists-Bagehot is an early example, but De Maupas in hisMemoires gives the semi-official Bonapartist view-Bonaparteappears as a principled lover ofhis country who isalmost forced intotaking power by c o up d 'e ta t as a desparate remedy for the disorderproduced by every other party. The partisans of the [ivai inter-pretation disagreed about the character of Bonaparte 's actionsprecisely because they disagreed both about the character of hiscausally effective intentions at earlier and later stages and about therelationship of his short-term to his longer-term intentions.I choose to begin with this episode because at first sight theseparticular rival ascriptions ofintention may not seem to embody orpresuppose any systematic theoretical standpoint. But we have onlyto notice the way in which both modes of ascription are incom-patible with that practised and defended by Marx to understandthat there must be some tolerably systematic theoretical presupposi-t ions at work. Both Royalists and Bonapartists agreed after all in

The Ind ispen sab i li ty o f Po li ti ca l T h e or y 29believing that it was Bonaparte's intentions which were causallyeffective, that it was his agency which dictated events; theirdisagreements arose within the context of this agreement. It wasMarx's fundamental thesis that Louis Bonaparte was an effectrather than a cause and that his success was an unintendedconsequence ofthe actions of others, actions which he interpretedvery differently from either Royalists or Bonapartists, let alonefrom Tocqueville and Proudhon. In his introduction to thereprinted edition of the Eigh fI Je nth Bruma ire in 1869 Marx wrote 'Formy part, I prove that the class wars in France created circumstancesand relationships that enabled a grotesque mediocrity to strut aboutin a hero's garb.'The core of Marx's interpretation is his contention that inperiods ofbourgeois revolution, although men and women concealfrom themselves their class roles and the way that their actionsembody intentions intell igible only in the light of those roles, i t is

these latter intentions which are causally effective. The individualqu a representative ofthe bourgeoisie characterizes what he does interms ofan ideological misrepresentation ofhimself: 'Thus Lutherdonned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and theRoman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing betterthan to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793to 1795 ... '. Hence there is a crucial difference between whatindividuals say about the meaning oftheir actions, to themselves aswellas to others, and the real substance and effectof what they do.What such individuals treat as their own primary and effectiveintentions Marx takes to be secondary ideological disguise; whatsuch individuals treat at first at least as merely incidental aspects oftheir actions Marx treats as the intentional substance oftheir basic,that is their class, roles. I say' at first at least' because it is alsoMarx's contention that in the end individuals losethe need for suchillusions. Bourgeois society comes to recognize itself for what it is:'Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in peacefulcompetitive struggle, it no longer comprehended that ghosts fromthe days of Rome had watched over its cradle. 'The Revolution of 1848 in France had, however, created a quitenew type ofsituation, one inwhich the bourgeoisie confront for thefirst t ime a rising and threatening proletariat in the face of whomthey are prepared to hand over the powers of government to


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30 A l a sd a ir Mac I nt y rewhomsoever will protect order and property, even to someonewhose power involves the overthrow of their own elected politicalrepresentatives. It isin fact Marx's thesis that the political role filledby Bonaparte after the c ou p d 'e ta t is one in which he mustsimultaneously represent and oppose the middle classes, and alsoone inwhich he must be the representative of 'the peasants and thepeople in general' agains t the middle classes. 'Bonaparte would liketo appear as the patriarchal benefactor ofall classes. But he cannotgive to one class without taking from another. ' Bonaparte thus hasto become a political trickster, an opportunistic performer ofconjuring tricks designed to conceal political realities. This is howcircumstances and relationships' enabled a gross mediocrity to strutabout in a hero's garb' .Louis Napoleon as a successful power-seeking individual isthen intelligible only in the light of his relationships, especiallythose with the bourgeoisie who, in the course of seeking to protecttheir material economic power, sacrificed their polit ical power toBonaparte who 'looks on himself as the adversary of the polit icaland literary power of the middle class. But by protecting itsmaterial power he generates its political power anew.' ThusBonaparte's detailed intentions are intelligible and effective onlyas a response to the schism within the bourgeois character. Andthis schism derives from the contingently incompatible projectsand intentions embodied in the class role ofthe bourgeoisie. Thusthe bourgeoisie are essentially self-defeated and, given thecontingent incompatibili ty of their polit ical and their economicprojects and the circumstances of 1848-51, things could scarcelyhave gone otherwise.Whether they could indeed perhaps have gone otherwise was one

ofTocqueville's central questions. ByJanuary 1851 he had alreadybecome highly pessimistic. But his pessimism was not rooted inanybelief that the economic role of republicans would subvert theirpolitical intentions. It was rather that Tocqueville saw only anarrow prospect for what he called 'regulated liberty', a libertywhose enemies included both the revolutionary egalitarians of theLeft and the autocratic ambitions of Louis Bonaparte. The partiesin the Assembly 'failed to come to an understanding; this gave tothe whole body an uncertain and sometimes contradictory. policy'(Letter to. T he T im es , 11 December, 1851). This contradictorycharacter was.rooted in.the basic contradictions of the republican

The Ind i sp ensab il i ty o f Po l it ic a l T h e o ry 31ideal, an unstable amalgam, as Tocqueville envisaged it, of theincompatible requirements of liberty and equality. Thus whereMarx interprets. the political intentions of the republicans as anideological disguise, Tocqueville reads them as internally unstable.ForMarx the explanation ofthe political isin the end tobe found inthe economic; for Tocqueville the explanation ofthe political isto befound in the political itself. Both see a schism within republicanism;but they locate it at very different points.Thus according to Tocqueville-although he does not of courseput it in any way remotely like this-a quite different set ofcounterfactuals is true of the republicans from that which Marxascribes in deciphering their behaviour. According to Marx theireconomic role set l imits to what the republicans could have doneunder a r r y political circumstances; the only limits that Tocquevilleidentifies arise from a lack of clear polit ical perceptions which amore adequate understanding and a firmer loyalty to regulatedliberty might have provided. Thus Tocqueville's diagnosiswarrants in retrospect a very different response to one and the samesituation warranted by Marx's diagnosis; and this quite apart from-indeed it is logically prior to-e-the differences in their politicalideals.It is thus not too difficult to see that rival accounts and inter-pretations ofpolitical action at the day-to-day level are rooted in therivalry of more comprehensive theories of human nature andaction. There can then be no account ofthe events in France in 1848to 1851 which isnot theoretically committed at this more compre-hensive leve1. For even if an empirically minded historian isdismissive of Marx an d Tocqueville an d Proudhon, he is at leastcommitted, implicitly if not explicit ly, to a set of negative thesesabout the nature and interpretation of human action at a morecomprehensive level of theorizing. There is no way of character-izing the historical facts which is both theoretically neutral andcapable of rendering the events thus characterized intelligible., At once it may be remarked that the problem set us by theempirically minded historians has not been solved but onlyrendered more difficult ofsolution. For the negative theses towhichthe empirically minded his torian finds himself committed maysurely leave him without any systematic theoretical view ofhis own.His theoretical commitments may be and remain only negative.To this, two very different kinds of response may be made. The

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Alasda i r Mac In ty r e The Ind is p ensab il i ty oj Po li ti ca l T h eo r yfirst would be in a narrow way philosophical. Beginning perhaps ..from Spinoza's dictum that "Omnis negatio est determinatio' an'argument could be constructed to show that there are no purely and..:.only negative theses in this area, All negations are the logical.shadows cast by positive commitments. But, although I would be'prepared to defend such a conclusion, I want here to consideranother type ofresponse, one that is a little closer to the historian~.sown immediate concerns. .

Consider the example of historians dealing with the Englishseventeenth century. There are two large-scale bodies of theorydealing with that time and place: the Whig account and the Marxistaccount. What most professional academic history concerned withthis period in the last hundred years and more consists in is theaccumulation of factual detail in a way which allows theprofessional historian to dissent from either or both views. But atonce this very remark raises an interesting question: could thesignificance ofthe detail have emerged in the way that ithas done, ifithad been detached from its theory-falsifying context? More thanone historian has remarked of Christopher Hill's Marxisttreatment ofthe seventeenth century that itprovides a 'model' forunderstanding the period, but a very inadequate guide inany depth.What this clearly implies is that the Marxist theory embodied inHill's account is both false and illuminating. And it is, I think, asignificant feature of polit ical theories, as I have characterized.them, that they may possess both these characteristicasimulta-neously.It may well be, that is, that in a particular period the politicallandscape issuch and the predicament ofpolitical agents within itissuch that the honest, rational, and well-informed agent can onlylocate himself within the political landscape by means ofa series ofdenials. But these denials have the significance for him that theyhave only because ofthe context provided by the theory or theories,ofwhich they are denials. Itfollows that such theories, false even inlarge part as they may be, are an indispensable means in enabling

political agents to locate themselves within their contemporarypolitical landscape.

Ifthis is so, we have some grounds for entertaining the thoughtthat the ostensibly a-theoretical historian who proclaims hisfreedom from all theory may simply be failing to recognize certainfeatures of his own activity. The historian can certainly do his ownproper work without himself explicitly and articulately theorizing orengaging in philosophy; what he cannot, however, contend withany cogency is that philosophical theory has therefore been shownto be dispensable, even in understanding what the empiricalhistorian is doing. Theorizing, and more especially politicaltheorizing, as John Plamenatz saw so clearly, are among thoseindispensable activities which give to human nature and to humansociety their distinctive qualities.

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Ifthe argument sofar iscorrect, then ordinary agents are able to attpolitically and socially only in virtue of abilities to characterize theirown actions and those of others in ways that presuppose, usuallyimplicitly but sometimes explicitly, bodies of theory. The politicaltheories which are expounded in the classical texts of academicpolit ical philosophy are, on the view that I have taken, articulateversions of the same type of theory, presented in a form whichmakes them available for rational criticism. But ifthis isso then thepolit ical philosophies of the classical texts must share the crucialcharacteristic of the theories which are presupposed by theintentions ofordinary agents: they are maps which make itpossibleto move about in the political landscape with some hope ofimplementing one's intentions.The metaphor of' a map' may be instructive at this point. Mapscan guide, indeed they can be the only rational resource available,even when they are and are known to be grossly inaccurate. Theadventurous seamen ofthe late Middle Ages and the early modernage must often have survived on the basis of a map (sometimes inthe form of a diagram and sometimes in the form ofa description)itselfgrossly inaccurate, but continuously emended or added tobyad ho c corrections in this or that port. What isimportant to observehere isthat the emendations and additions were only able toaffordthe guidance that they did in fact afford by being ancillary to theoriginal map. Lacking that map, there would have been no focus,no way of organizing, often indeed no way of characterizing theitems in the list ofemendations and additions . And that is to say afalse map may under certain conditions provide th~ rational ag~ntwith what isa great deal superior to no map at all. In this respect, Iwant to suggest, the metaphor ofa map isilluminating with respectto political theories.

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MacIntyre_The Indispensibility of Political Theory

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