This essay is an expanded version of a piece I composed as respondent to Alasdair MacIntyre's lecture, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” delivered as part of the Bradley Lecture Series in Politics and Religion at Boston College on February 25, 2000 I am grateful to Professor MacIntyre for his responses to the questions posed to him on that occasion. I am also grateful to John O'Callaghan, Jay Bruce, Walter Nicgorski, and two anonymous reviewers at The Review for helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay.

1. Virtue Ethics, ed. Crisp, and Slote, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

2. The problem is not a dearth of available material on politics and virtue. See, for example, Galston, William, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);CrossRefGoogle ScholarSkinner, Quentin, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Bock, G, Skinner, Q., and Viroli, M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Sinopli, Richard, The Foundation of American Citizenship: Liberalism, the Constitution, and Civic Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Dagger, Richard, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

3. See “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” Studi Perugini 3 (1997)Google Scholar, reprinted in The MacIntyre's Reader, ed. Knight, Kelvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), pp. 235–52Google Scholar; “The Theses on Fuerbach: A Road Not Taken,” in Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky (Hingham, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar, reprinted in The MacIntyre Reader, pp. 223–34Google Scholar; “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (1996)Google Scholar; Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).Google Scholar To these, we might add, “The Privatization of ‘Good’: An Inaugural Lecture,” Review of Politics 52 (1990)Google Scholar and the preface to the 2nd edition of Marxism and Christianity (New York: Duckworth, 1995).Google Scholar

4. “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 248.Google Scholar

5. But perhaps not as much scorn as his embrace of Catholicism and Thomism. See the vitriolic reactions of Nussbaum, Martha, “Recoiling from Reason,” New York Review of Books 36 (1989): 36–42Google Scholar and Baier, Annete, “What Women Want in a Moral Theory,” in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 17.Google Scholar

6. For criticisms of MacIntyre's accounts of tradition and of liberalism, see Gutting, Gary, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 69–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Jean, “Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Murphy, Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 38–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stout, Jeffrey, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 118–39.Google Scholar The best criticisms can be found in Stout who argues that, in his hasty and sweeping dismissal of modernity, MacIntyre falls short of his own standards for debate with rival positions. Stout writes, “The result is utterly unsympathetic caricature at the very point where the narrative most urgently requires detailed and fair-minded exposition if it means to test its author's preconceptions with any rigor at all” (p. 127). For a lucid discussion of MacIntyre on tradition and modernity, see Pinkard, Terry, “MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Murphy, , pp. 176–200.Google Scholar

7. See, for example, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 349–69.Google Scholar For a response to the charge that MacIntyre is a political conservative, see Knight's, Kelvin “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” in Contemporary Political Studies, ed. Hampsher-Monk, I. and Stanyer, J., 1996, vol. 2.Google Scholar

8. In this, modernity, according to MacIntyre, fails on its own terms. “Instead of the ever-widening educated public of the democratic intellect,” which Enlightenment theorists had predicted would be the result of liberalism, “we have the mass semiliteracy of the television audience” (“An Interview for Cogito,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 272).Google Scholar

9. Even more powerfully, the argument of Dependent Rational Animals is that philosophical biases, rooted in a distinctively Western celebration of rational autonomy and a Lockean conception of the person, have led certain strains of contemporary liberalism to defend policies of unjust exclusion. In this book, MacIntyre retracts his earlier rejection of natural teleology and depicts the virtues as constituting the “form of life” appropriate “for beings biologically constituted as we are.” The book seeks to recover a greater sense of the “animal conditions” of human agency and of the “nature and extent of human vulnerability and disability” (p. x). If the turn to natural teleology seems a novelty to readers accustomed to MacIntyre's defense of an historicist, social teleology, it is nonetheless something of a return. In “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” first published in The New Reasoner in 1958Google Scholar, MacIntyre argued that the bridge between morality and desire, severed in a variety of ways on modern thought and life, is the Marxist conception of human nature. He writes, “Capitalism provides a form of life in which men rediscover desire in a number of ways. … One meets the anarchic individualist desires which a competitive society breeds in us with a rediscovery of the deeper desire to share what is common in humanity, to be divided neither from them nor from oneself, to be a man” (“Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” reprinted in The MacIntyre Reader, pp. 46–47).Google Scholar

10. Dependent Rational Animals, p. 142.Google Scholar

11. Contemporary liberal political theory may itself be at odds with important features of the African-American struggle. In “Rawls and Liberty of Conscience,” (Review of Politics 60 [1988])Google Scholar, Andrew Murphy cogently argues that underlying Rawls's liberalism “is, at best, a belief-action split that has historically worked against liberty of conscience; at worst, a scheme of repression and self-censorship which renders comprehensive doctrines meaningless” (p. 250). I am currently working on an essay on “MacIntyre and African-American Thought” the thesis of which is that something very much akin to MacIntyre's account of rationality and cooperative inquiry is operative in the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois.

12. As MacIntyre sees it, “communitarianism … is a diagnosis of certain weaknesses in liberalism, not a rejection of it” (“Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” p. 244).Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 249.

14. Ibid., p. 239.

15. Ibid., p. 241.

16. Ibid., p. 242.

17. MacIntyre is quite clearly aligning himself with those Thomists such as Charles DeKonninck who advocated a strong sense of the priority of the common good. For a discussion of a variety of Thomistic conceptions of the common good and for helpful clarification of the meanings of “common good” in Aquinas's own thought, see Froelich, Greg, “The Equivocal Status of the Bonum Commune,” New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 38–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Thomist debates over the common good, see Keys, Mary, “Personal Dignity and the Common Good: A Twentieth-Century Thomistic Dialogue,” in Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism, ed. Grasso, Kenneth, Bradley, Gerald, and Hunt, R. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 173–96.Google Scholar

18. “An Interview with Giovanna,” in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 258.Google Scholar

19. “An Interview for Cogito,” pp. 273–74.Google Scholar

20. In “The Theses on Fuerbach,” MacIntyre traces Marx's failures to his precipitate abandoning of philosophy, but this is a failure in Marx's attempt to articulate a viable alternative to capitalism, not in his analysis of capitalism itself. For MacIntyre's account of the inadequacies of Marx as an economist, especially in his prophetic predictions about the imminent and inevitable collapse of capitalism, see Marxism and Christianity. A recent attempt to apply MacIntyre's thought to economics and social theory is McMylor's, PeterAlasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar

21. Knight, Kelvin, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” p. 885.Google Scholar Knight is quoting E.R Thompson's lament that MacIntyre abandoned this line of inquiry. See Thompson, E. P., “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,” in The Socialist Register, ed. Miliband, and Saville, (London: The Merlin Press, 1974), pp. 58–59.Google Scholar

22. Dependent Rational Animals, p. 142.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 133. In this context MacIntyre praises those responsible for passing the Americans with Disabilities Act.

24. Ibid., p. 131.

25. After Virtue, p. 237.Google Scholar

26. In the context of the passage just quoted, MacIntyre adds that “modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected” (ibid, p. 237). MacIntyre does not say precisely what he means by “systematic politics,” although in the immediately preceding pages he has criticized the political theories of Nozick and Rawls. Between their approaches and that of MacIntyre stand a host of other political theorists, including a number of Thomists, who can hardly be said to be naive about the prospects for virtue in the modern state. I am thinking of Yves R. Simon, Russell Hittinger, and Anthony Lisska, among others. Toward the end of this essay, I will take up MacIntyre's objection to a certain kind of political theorizing. This much is clear-MacIntyre has clearly not shown that all types of theorizing about politics in the modern state are vulnerable to his objections.

27. MacIntyre does precisely this, if only briefly, when he sides with liberals against communitarians in holding that the nation-state “should remain neutral between rival conceptions of the human good” and that “shared visions of the good” should be articulated in “the activities of subordinate voluntary associations” (“A Partial Response to My Critics,” in After MacIntyre, ed. by Horton, John and Mendus, Susan [Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1994], p. 302).Google Scholar Among the essays in this volume that address MacIntyre's political views, see especially Taylor, Charles, “Justice After Virtue,” pp. 16–43Google Scholar and Pettit, Philip, “Liberal/Communitarian: MacIntyre's Mesmeric Dichotomy,” pp. 176–204.Google Scholar

28. “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,” p. 248.Google Scholar

29. One might argue that MacIntyre's defense of local communities has been the centerpiece of at least one influential modern, political theory, namely, that of Alexis de Tocqueville, who praised the New England townships as the very model and source of a robust democratic politics. But the comparison fails in three respects. First, the townships were much more accommodating of certain kinds of economics than MacIntyre's communities would be. Second, Tocqueville describes the citizens of the townships as transferring their allegiance from the local community to the nation, whereas the members of MacIntyre's communities must see themselves in a state of undeclared war with the nation-state. Third, the emphasis in Tocqueville on the primacy of the township for the practice of self-government does not preclude reflection on, and taking positions about, issues of modern constitutions, national politics and so forth.

30. Marxism and Christianity, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. xv.Google Scholar

31. “The Spectre of Communitarianism,” Radical Philosophy 70 (1995): 35Google Scholar, quoted in Kelvin Knight, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” p. 894.Google Scholar

32. Marxism and Christianity, p. xxvi.Google Scholar MacIntyre would undoubtedly defend the commitment to local communities not just or primarily on the basis of a radical politics but as the appropriate response for anyone committed to thinking about politics in the tradition of the common good. As he puts it, an “adequate sense of tradition manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present” After Virtue, p. 223.Google Scholar

33. “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” p. 248.Google Scholar

34. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, pp. 326–88.Google Scholar

35. “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” p. 252.Google Scholar

36. See, for example, his discussion of hand-loom weavers in Lancashire and Yorkshire at the end of the eigtheenth century (”The Theses on Fuerbach,” p. 231Google Scholar).

37. See Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, pp. 349–69.Google Scholar

38. All quotations from Aristotle's, Politics are from the Jowett, Benjamin translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941).Google Scholar

39. “The Theses on Fuerbach,” pp. 225–28.Google Scholar

40. Strauss, Leo, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, edited and introduced by Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 51.Google Scholar

41. Nichols, Mary, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle's Politics (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1992), especially pp. 85–123.Google Scholar

42. See “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,” p. 251Google Scholar and “An Interview with Giovanna Borradori,” p. 265.Google Scholar

43. “The Theses on Fuerbach,” p. 280.Google Scholar

44. “Natural Law as Subversive,” p. 68.Google Scholar

45. “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” p. 247.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 247.

47. “Natural Law as Subversive,” p. 80.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., p. 66.

49. See Murphy, Mark, “Consent, Custom, and the Common Good in Aquinas's Theory of Political Authority,” Review of Politics 59 (1997): 323–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Murphy's, “MacIntyre's Political Philosophy,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Murphy, , pp. 152–75.Google Scholar

50. Aquinas also addresses the regimes in On Kingship, to the King of Cyprus, Book I, chapters 1–6, transl. by Phelan, Gerald B. and introduced by Eschmann, (Toronto: PIMS, 1978).Google Scholar This treatise is, in its examples and style, less Greek than Roman. The examples of political life are not from Greek city-states but from the Roman Republic. On the debates surrounding the manuscripts and authenticity of On Kingship, see Torrell, Jean-Pierre, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume I, The Person and His Work, transl. By Royal, Robert (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 350.Google ScholarTorrell, also discusses the incomplete Commentary on the Politics (p. 344).Google Scholar

51. “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” p. 247.Google Scholar

52. “The Theses on Fuerbach,” p. 285.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., p. 286.

54. Furthermore, one might wonder whether MacIntyre's own thought fits his model of effective theorizing. That is, one needs to ask, out of what concrete, communal practice does MacIntyre's own theorizing arise? He tends to cite as admirable examples local communities with which he is clearly very familiar but not ones in which he has been an active participant. Is not his theorizing in some ways exactly parallel to the sort engaged in by Aristotle and Aquinas?

55. At least this is the thesis advanced by the contemporary, French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, whose two most important books are The City of Man and The Nature of Democracy. But the elaboration of that position must await another day.

56. “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” pp. 236–37.Google Scholar