CHAPTER 6 MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC COMMUNITARIANISM "We know what to do....It does not occur to us to do otherwise." -- Alasdair MacIntyre (1957, 106) Where the optimistic communitarians take for granted the unquestioned status of liberal norms, suggesting that only the individualistic understanding of these norms embedded in liberal ontology (Sandel, Taylor) or epistemology (Walzer) stands in the way of their full implementation, MacIntyre is not so sanguine. This is not, however, to suggest that MacIntyre is any less complacent about the validity of equal freedom, or any less committed to defending an epistemology that, by overcoming individualism, will bring equal freedom into existence. What makes MacIntyre a pessimist is that his alternative to individualism requires not a change in people's attitudes, but in the institutional context that shapes their character--a much more formidable task than merely awakening Americans to the reality of their "intersubjective being" or to the republican essence of their identity, as Sandel would do; making Westerners conscious of the social particularism involved in their nationalism, or of the hypergoods that constrain their particularism, as Taylor would; or even fundamentally altering the institutions of distribution, as Walzer would--since the way Walzer would do so is to appeal to people's already existing
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CHAPTER 6
MACINTYRE'S PESSIMISTIC COMMUNITARIANISM
"We know what to do....It does not occur to us to do otherwise."
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (1957, 106)
Where the optimistic communitarians take for granted the unquestioned
status of liberal norms, suggesting that only the individualistic
understanding of these norms embedded in liberal ontology (Sandel,
Taylor) or epistemology (Walzer) stands in the way of their full
implementation, MacIntyre is not so sanguine. This is not, however, to
suggest that MacIntyre is any less complacent about the validity of
equal freedom, or any less committed to defending an epistemology that,
by overcoming individualism, will bring equal freedom into existence.
What makes MacIntyre a pessimist is that his alternative to
individualism requires not a change in people's attitudes, but in the
institutional context that shapes their character--a much more
formidable task than merely awakening Americans to the reality of their
"intersubjective being" or to the republican essence of their identity,
as Sandel would do; making Westerners conscious of the social
particularism involved in their nationalism, or of the hypergoods that
constrain their particularism, as Taylor would; or even fundamentally
altering the institutions of distribution, as Walzer would--since the
way Walzer would do so is to appeal to people's already existing
Friedman 243
"shared understandings." For MacIntyre, such solutions are
superficial; and to the extent that they would strengthen the power of
the state, they are steps in the wrong direction.
MacIntyre started out as a Marxist, and he retains the Marxist
de-emphasis, relative to other varieties of "liberal" (in the sense of
the term I have been using), on achieving income equality as a means to
the end of equal freedom. Whereas the point of Rawlsian "primary
goods" is that they are instrumental to whatever ends individuals may
have, and so should be distributed as equally as possible consistently
with increasing the quantity available to the worst off, MacIntyre has
always viewed equal freedom as something much less threatened by
poverty than by interpersonal coercion or manipulation. Therefore,
where the key to the political stratagems of Sandel, Walzer, and Taylor
is found in their critiques of Nozick--their uses of non-individualist
metaphysics to defend social democracy--MacIntyre is and always has
been interested in revolutionizing much more than economic
distribution. Empowering people to pursue their ends is less crucial to
him than ensuring that they do not treat each other as means.
Since the 1960s, MacIntyre believed that a non-coercive community
requires that its members have the same ends, so they need not
manipulate each other to get their way. MacIntyre met the need to
legitimate such a community with a succession of strategic claims
(rarely embroidered with non-strategic argument) for the normative
value of particularist communal ends. These claims are, themselves,
outgrowths of MacIntyre's entirely "political" critique of liberalism
Friedman 244
on the grounds that it makes universal claims that separate facts from
the values--freedom and equality--that he shares with liberals, but
that are, he maintains, ineffective sources of communal moral
authority. MacIntyre would substitute an is-ought bridge consisting of
those communally given ends in which he finds normative authority. Not
only in his intention of solving what he sees as the political weakness
of individualistic liberalism, but in his embrace of liberal values--
albeit with less emphasis on equal economic distribution--MacIntyre's
view is of a piece with those of Taylor, Walzer, and Sandel.
The similarities extend to the likeness of MacIntyre's
intellectual background to that of the other three communitarian
philosophers. Walzer's complacent communitarianism might very
plausibly be seen as a flower of the democratic, anti-Stalinist New
Left. He attended Brandeis University in its great early years of the
mid-1950s, where he studied under such New Left paragons as Irving
Howe, Lewis Coser, and Herbert Marcuse. In this milieu it would be
easy not only to take for granted the unchallengeable legitimacy of
equal freedom-cum-socialism, but to view the question as strategic, not
philosophical: should socialism be pursued in elitist or in democratic
fashion? Sandel, who is younger, received his education when the New
Left was in full bloom, presumably making its liberal normative
assumptions, and its democratic strategic approaches, seem even more
unquestionable. Most importantly, he was a student of Charles Taylor,
whose ideas Sandel would go on to apply to American philosophy and
political history. Taylor, in turn, was present at the creation of the
Friedman 245
British New Left at Oxford in the mid-1950s. There, he contributed to
Universities and Left Review, which in 1960 merged with The New
Reasoner to form New Left Review. Taylor then served on NLR's initial
board--alongside his Oxford friend Alasdair MacIntyre, who had
previously worked on The New Reasoner. MacIntyre had been "a member of
the International Socialists (IS), one of the more intellectually open
and creative of the Far Left groups" (McMylor 1994, 8). He, too, was
immersed from the beginning in a context that took the legitimacy of
equal freedom for granted, and in which the main questions were
strategic, not normative.
Reading Sandel, who cites neither Marx nor Hegel, it is easy to
forget the pivotal role played in the origins of the New Left by the
development of a humanist interpretation of Marx: an interpretation
that brought Marx closer to his Hegelian roots by making individual
freedom, not scientific prediction, the key to Marxism. Taylor was
deeply marked by this interpretation, which prompted him to turn back
to Hegel, whom he de-historicized. This is what renders Taylor's use
of communitarian means to achieve liberal ends incoherent as a truth-
claim, since it deprives his Hegelianism of the historical telos that
ratifies one form of community, the liberal one reached at the end of
history.1
MacIntyre encounters similar difficulties, but he reaches them
directly through Marx. MacIntyre's work has never stopped evolving;
but this renders all the more striking the stability, across the many
stages of his thought, of the liberal-communist ethical commitments
Friedman 246
that, as of After Virtue, stood exactly where they were when he first
found them in Marx.
MacIntyre begins and ends After Virtue with discussions of Marx.
Because these discussions are not uncritical, it is often assumed that
they represent a repudiation of MacIntyre's youthful Marxist
allegiances. But MacIntyre's Marxism was never uncritical. Does this
mean he was never a Marxist? I will not attempt to answer this
question by inquiring into the "essence" of Marxism. I will contend,
however, that the liberal values and the communist vision that animated
the young MacIntyre are intact in MacIntyre's mature communitarianism,
as is a "strategic" approach to justifying them that is just as
politically complacent as that of the optimistic communitarians. If
being a Marxist means accepting Marx's commitment to the proletariat as
the agent of the new society, then MacIntyre was a Marxist for only a
short time; if it means accepting Marx's philosophy of history, then he
was never entirely a Marxist. But if it means dedication to a society
embodying equal freedom by its rejection of capitalism, and to
justifying this society by rejecting "bourgeois philosophy," then
MacIntyre has always been a Marxist, and still was when he produced his
canonical works. The pessimism of these works stemmed from the radical
scope of his communist ambitions, not from any doubts about their
legitimacy.
In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre traces the themes of
the book to two of his preoccupations: first, the conflict between the
historical and the abstract, or in our terms, the particular and the
Friedman 247
universal; second, his ongoing attempt, "since the days when [he] was
privileged to be a contributor to that most remarkable journal The New
Reasoner" in the 1950s, simultaneously to reject both Stalinism and
"the principles of that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism
originated." MacIntyre adds that he "continue[s] to accept much of the
substance of that criticism" (1984a, ix).
This passage demands close attention, for Marx's critique of
liberalism had nothing to do with the liberal aspiration to achieve
freedom for all. Instead, Marx's complaints were that liberal
complicity with capitalism, and the limited liberal definition of
freedom, betrayed liberal normative aspirations. These criticisms,
like the liberal values on which they are based, are shared by
MacIntyre, who goes Marx one better by extending them to Marxism
itself. Although Marxism "is only a marginal preoccupation" of After
Virtue, MacIntyre allows that "the conclusion...embodied in" the book
"is that Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to
which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the
distinctively modern and modernizing world." The implication of these
prefatory remarks, arguably, is that MacIntyre has come to think that
both liberalism and Marxism betray what I have been calling liberal
values.
One indication of this is found in the conclusion of After
Virtue, where MacIntyre considers the "claim that by means of Marxism
the notion of human autonomy can be rescued from its original
individualist formulations and restored within the context of an appeal
Friedman 248
to a possible form of community in which alienation has been overcome,
false consciousness abolished and the values of equality and fraternity
realized." This formulation of the Marxist normative claim takes for
granted the legitimacy of the ideal of equal freedom. MacIntyre
questions only whether Marxism can rescue this ideal from
individualism, and he concludes that it cannot. For Marxism tends to
degenerate "into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or
utilitarianism," due to "a certain radical individualism" that is
"secreted within Marxism from the outset." This radical individualism
is illustrated by Marx's failure to tell us "on what basis" socialist
man "enters into his free association with others....At this key point
in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately
supplied" (1984a, 261).
In identifying the problem with Marxism as the inadequately
specified path to its ideal of free association, MacIntyre assumes the
overriding legitimacy of (MacIntyre quotes Marx) "'a community of free
individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of
the means of production and to various norms of production and
distribution (ibid.)." The defect in Marxism is not the end, but
Marx's failure to explain how to achieve it (ibid.).
MacIntyre concludes his discussion of Marxism by raising a
connected issue, Marx's assumption that capitalism contains the seeds
of its supersession by socialism:
However thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and
Friedman 249
bourgeois institutions may be, [Marxism] is committed
to asserting that within the society constituted by
those institutions, all the human and material
preconditions of a better future are being accumulated.
Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism
is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are
these resources for the future to be derived? (1984a,
262.)
Presumably it is Marx's naive neglect of this question that led him to
omit an explanation of the moral basis for the free association of
socialist man with man. So MacIntyre adds, to his claim that Marxism
degenerates into Kantianism (now dubbed "Weberian social democracy")
and utilitarianism (now labelled "crude tyranny") a third form of
degenerate Marxism: the "Nietzschean fantasy," entertained by Lenin and
Lukacs, that the deficiencies of advanced capitalism can be overcome by
a sort of socialist Ubermensch. The result of Lenin's experiment in
using Marxism as a guide to practice--the Soviet Union--was, according
to MacIntyre, not "in any sense a socialist country....The theory which
was to have illuminated the path to human liberation...in fact led to
darkness" (1984a, 262).
MacIntyre goes on to say that since he accepts the inevitability
of this unfortunate result--given the foundations of Marxian socialism
in capitalism--he is a pessimist. And a Marxist pessimist, MacIntyre
asserts, "would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For
Friedman 250
he would now see no tolerable set of political and economic structures
which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced
capitalism." Thus, although Marxism is "still one of the richest
sources of ideas about modern society," MacIntyre declares that it is
"exhausted as a political tradition" (1984a, emphasis original). From
MacIntyre's pessimism follows his famous conclusion that we are in a
period comparable to the decline of the Roman Empire, in which our task
is to construct "new forms of human community within which the moral
life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might
survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness" (ibid., 263).
There is a certain lack of clarity in MacIntyre's pessimism.
Conceivably, it may be global, such that he is not just claiming that
the moral poverty of capitalism makes it inconceivable that any
"tolerable...political and economic structures" could "replace the
structures of advanced capitalism" (1984a, 262), but that some inherent
unfeasibility of noncapitalist political economic structures makes
advanced capitalism inescapable. But MacIntyre offers no argument to
this effect; and the reasons he cites for his pessimism--the
indictments of Marxism I have just recounted--seem compatible with the
possibility that communism could, at some point in the future, emerge
from a different kind of society than that of advanced capitalism, and
thus gain MacIntyre's support.
Is communism an impossible dream under any circumstances, or
simply under present ones? The latter is much closer to MacIntyre's
view of the truth. MacIntyre's communitarianism is justified, and can
Friedman 251
only be coherently explained, by its role in "supplying the lacuna"
MacIntyre finds in Marxism: its failure to provide the foundation on
which to build a community of free individuals. MacIntyre's project
has always been, and remains, the identification of this foundation.
MacIntyre's Communism
MacIntyre's first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953), published
when he was 24, sets forth the Marxian normative framework that remains
essential to understanding his thought.
The governing ideal of Marxism, as described in this early book,
is of a society in which the freedom of each is compatible with that of
all, inasmuch as the free activity of each is not directed toward ends
that are antagonistic to the ends of his fellows. Each, then,
voluntarily treats his fellows as equals--ends in themselves rather
than means to one's own ends, as MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue
(1984a, 23). MacIntyre does not question the desirability of such a
society. The only question he addresses is how to bring it about. His
initial answer combines Christianity with Lukacs's Hegelian
resuscitation of "strains in Marx's thought whose fullest expression
had been in the Paris manuscripts of 1844" (MacIntyre 1994, 288).
The young MacIntyre follows the young Marx in objecting to
Hegel's rosy picture of the status quo. Hegel's unwarranted "optimism
about the outcome of history" stemmed from his blind acceptance of Adam
Smith's claim that the invisible hand of the market transforms self-
Friedman 252
interest into the public interest; "surely Hegel should have
seen...that rising capitalism did not in fact produce the common good,
but rather the misery of many" (1953, 27). Furthermore, by conceiving
of history as a dialectical progression of conceptual opposites, Hegel
overlooked the concrete sources of social alienation and convinced
himself that contemporary Prussia was the apex of freedom. Still,
MacIntyre endorses "the core of Hegel's thought," which Hegel "takes
from the Bible": "the distinction between man's essence"--freedom--"and
man's existence" (ibid., 28). The flaw in Hegel is his tendency toward
idealization--both of history and of freedom. Just as he comes close
to assuming that to live in Prussia is to be free, he believes that "to
be free...is to understand the laws that necessarily govern nature and
society," a belief with "grave consequences for practice" (ibid., 30).
In short, Hegel's historical metaphysics is to be condemned for
strategic reasons: instead of validating the kind of society MacIntyre
assumes is good, a communist society of true freedom, it indirectly
lays the groundwork for Stalinism.
Rectifying Hegel's metaphysical errors, MacIntyre continues, was
the task of the Left Hegelians, preeminently Ludwig Feuerbach, who put
aside enough of Hegel's scholasticism to return to the young Hegel's
essentially political concerns. Feuerbach accomplished this task by
bringing Hegel down to earth. Man and the universe are not
instantiations of abstract thought patterns; rather, "thinking is a
social activity," and its various forms are (MacIntyre quotes
Feuerbach) "'manifestations or revelations of the human essence.'
Friedman 253
It is worth pausing to notice that MacIntyre takes for granted
the equation of philosophical concreteness with the social, which in
turn reveals what is "normative"--the "human essence." Like Sandel
(1998a, 153 and passim), who equates moral cognitivism with the
cognition of socially constituted ends, MacIntyre gives no argument for
this claim. He simply assumes its truth.
What, then, is the human essence? 'The human essence can only be
found in the unity of man with man,'" or, in MacIntyre's words,
"freedom in community" (MacIntyre 1953, 36, emphasis added). Yet even
Feuerbach is too idealistic, since for him "love is the source of human
community" (ibid., 35). It was left to Marx to find a more realistic
strategy for bringing about communal freedom.
For Marx, too, "the ideal state was to be the expression of the
free society of men" (MacIntyre 1953, 41), but Marx recognized that
neither the Prussian state nor the British economy were realizations of
this ideal. "On the one hand Hegel and Feuerbach have reinterpreted
for him the Christian vision of human freedom in the free society; on
the other hand, he cannot but see the reality of work, degradation and
suffering which is the lot of the majority." Marxism answers two
questions: "How did this contrast arise? And, how is it to be ended?"
(ibid., 45). The answers to both questions revolve around labor.
Heretofore, as MacIntyre glosses Marx, labor has not been enjoyed as a
part of "man's essential humanity, but rather merely [as] an
opportunity to earn a living, a bare physical subsistence, which will
enable him to go on working" (ibid., 51, 50). We do not labor freely,
Friedman 254
but out of necessity; far from embodying equal freedom, the society
built on such labor is torn by antagonisms of interest. MacIntyre
quotes Marx: "'The estrangement of man from his own essential being
means that a man is estranged from others, just as each is estranged
from essential humanity'" (ibid., 51).
Implicit in Marx's view, MacIntyre claims, is Hegel's equation of
the human essence with individual freedom, and a recognition of the
egalitarian pressupositions of freedom. Individual liberty is possible
only where there is a community of interests--which is to say, where
there is communism. When interests are common, as among equals, my
freedom of action does not impede others, nor does theirs impede me:
equality enables freedom. Socialist equality is, in fact, an ethical
but not an economic return to the state of nature:
In the beginning there is simply the community of
men, producing to satisfy their basic needs...living
together in families and working together as need
demands. The bonds between them are the social bonds
of material need and of language. In its [sic]
earliest simplicity man is still largely animal in his
social life. But here the division of labour intervenes.
...It makes of each individual a hunter, a fisherman,
a shepherd and so on, who to maintain his livelihood
must fulfil the demands that the community makes upon
his calling rather than the demands of his own nature.
Friedman 255
Hence we find for the first time a clash between the
interest of the individual and that of the community:
it is the latter interest which takes political form
in the state, an instrument for the coercion of the
individual. (MacIntyre 1953, 62-63)
What communism means, then, is the abolition of the coercion that has
been brought about by the division of labor.
The early Marx saw human beings in their essence as free because
they had no antagonistic interests. Communist society will be natural
--true to the human essence--in that it will reinstate this freedom.
Communist man will not be compelled to labor; instead he will do so
freely, to meet his needs, and the abundance created by the previous
stage of history, capitalism, will make it possible to do so without
falling into a division of labor and of interests, with the attendant
hierarchical and inegalitarian power relationships. Under communism,
men will once again be able to "deal with other men, neither as with
capitalists nor as with proletarians, but as with men"--beings whose
freedom does not conflict with community because the latter embodies
concretely what was in Feuerbach only an idea: "philanthropy, love of
men" (MacIntyre 1953, 55).
What, then, is the young MacIntyre's criticism of Marx?
Marx, according to MacIntyre, failed to recognize that the
ethical imperative at the heart of his vision--the impetus to equal
freedom-- comes from Christian myth. Feuerbach, MacIntyre (1953, 36)
Friedman 256
noted, in positing man's essence as "freedom in community," had
"retain[ed] the biblical conception of human nature" as essentially
free. But in trying to "rid [Christianity] of myth," he had
sidestepped the question of what foundation could otherwise undergird
"the true community of Feuerbach's humanistic version of Christianity."
Marx's attempt to expel religion from his system similarly deprived it
of its foundations: how can he justify a free society simply by
describing historical progress toward it? The attempt to do so also
robbed Marxism of plausibility when its historical predictions were
falsified. This, in turn, transformed Marxism into a force for evil,
since it required Marxists to impose an oppressive orthodoxy on
themselves in order to keep on fighting for a future that was patently
failing to materialize. In short, like Hegel and then Feuerbach, Marx
had failed to provide an effective strategy for achieving freedom.
MacIntyre condemns Marx for writing, in The German Ideology, that
"'the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,
but real premises...verified in a purely empirical way'" (MacIntyre
1953, 69). To this, MacIntyre responds that morality
can never have the kind of certainty that scientific
method can give us. Morality is always to some degree
ambiguous, metaphysics a commitment that can never be
fully justified. The tragedy of Marxism is that it
wished to combine the scope of metaphysics with the
certainty of natural sciences. It was therefore forced
Friedman 257
on the one hand to reject religion...and on the other
hand to oversimplify all questions of technique. (Ibid.,
71.)
What MacIntyre means by "technique" is what he will, nearly 30 years
later, single out as the lacuna in Marxism: the absence of a plausible
path to a free society. Marx predicts that freedom will be achieved,
but MacIntyre points out that such a prediction requires, for its
realization, that a great many human beings will first accept the
theory behind it as the motive for their action. That this will
necessarily occur is simply an unwarranted assumption, especially since
"those structures of power which man in society has created" are too
strong to be assumed away. There is moreover "an unpredictability" to
history that makes it resistant to "human rationality" (ibid., 71). In
short, Marx's error is that he "wishes now to speak of what is rather
than what ought to be." Marx's decision "to eliminate from his
doctrines the last traces of the biblical and Hegelian theme of
estrangement...leads Marx to deny any moral foundation to a vision
whose whole origin lay in moral concerns" (ibid., 69-70, emphases
original). This decision leads Marx to substitute prediction for
prophecy.
Prophecy is a call to action, a vision of what the future could
be, based on a recognition of present estrangement. The Paris
Manuscripts were prophetic; The German Ideology and Capital are not.
"Prophecy does not bear a date, prediction does. Moral denunciation
Friedman 258
does not wait on the completion of processes, prediction must" (1953,
75). What happens if, on the predicted date, capitalism does not
collapse? Either Marxism is abandoned, as it was by Germany's Social
Democratic Party at the end of the nineteenth century; or it is made
into an orthodoxy. In the latter case, the process of defending the
prediction from falsification turns the doctrine justifying the
prediction into an object of veneration. As well, the scope of
salvation is narrowed down from humanity as a whole to the ranks of
those who accept the doctrine. This narrowing eventually sanctioned
Lenin's use of "a small highly-disciplined group bringing the truth to
the masses" (ibid., 102, 103). "The concomitant of orthodoxy is the
persecution of heretics" (ibid., 103).
Prophecy as the Is-Ought Bridge
Christianity, MacIntyre maintains in 1953, is a corrective to "the
worst in Marxism." Far from being, as Marx assumed, a superstitious
explanation of the natural phenomena investigated by science,
Christianity is a critique "of every social order," based on the
recognition "that no human order can ever be adequate to the perfection
which God ordains and which is displayed in Jesus Christ" (1953, 77).
True religion perceives "the corruptibility of communist society as
clearly as that of any other society. Such a religion can see the
reality of redemption only in a society which is able continually to
question and to criticise in radical terms its own achievements"
(ibid., 83).
Friedman 259
Tragically, the "a priori canons of rationality" (MacIntyre 1953,
84) that Marx inherited from the Enlightenment via Hegel and Feuerbach
led him to equate the 'free association of producers' under communism
with the existence of "some standard of rationality and intelligibility
to which human relations should conform," a standard that is to result
in "'perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations as between man and
man and as between man and nature'" (ibid., 85, quoting Marx). Because
"religious beliefs do not accord with these standards," relying as they
do on "myth and image," Marx repudiated religion indiscriminately. But
"human relations have in them something more than the merely human,
something which demands that allegiance for which only God can ask"
(ibid.). This something is invoked "when a man prays," for he then
"envisages himself in a dramatic, rather than a speculative,
relationship to God. The drama which he envisages takes the form of
religious myth," and religious myth inspires "the vision of a unifying
pattern in history" (ibid., 86, 87). Such a vision is the basis of
prophecy and therefore of what is good in Marxism: "Marxism begins with
the mythological vision of the good society which it finds in
Christianity" (ibid., 88). In his "transition from prophecy to
prediction," Marx lost sight of the fact that "some things can only be
said obscurely in extended metaphors" (ibid., 89).
It may seem that the distance between the young and the mature
MacIntyre is even greater than that which MacIntyre thinks separates
the young and the mature Marx. Social practices, virtues, and
traditions play no role in Marxism: An Interpretation. But that is
Friedman 260
just the point. MacIntyre does not begin from the preoccupations that
would signal a philosophical communitarian in the making. His
communitarianism is eventually devised as an initial solution to the
strategic problems of a political theory, Marxism. These problems
ultimately derive from Marxist concessions to the same enemy that
preoccupies MacIntyre in After Virtue: emotivism. And the solution to
them is narrative, not because narratives make our lives satisfying
wholes, as one might be tempted to conclude from After Virtue, but
because narratives convert facts into values.
"Moral judgments," the young MacIntyre writes, "announce our
decisions. The problem is, what kind of argument do we use to solve
problems of decision? The emotive theory suggests that it is all a
question of feelings and that no rational pattern can be discerned in
such an argument." But emotivism rests on a disjunction between facts
and values that is disproven by "the description of the novelist or the
dramatist," (1953, 114), which
is always itself the evaluation....It is not the
case that we read Engels' description of England in
1844 and then draw the conclusion that this system
ought to be condemned. Any such conclusion would be
superfluous. The description itself is the
condemnation. (Ibid., 114-15.)
Now we gain a clearer idea of what MacIntyre meant by comparing
Friedman 261
prayer to a drama, and by chiding Marx for shunning the extended
metaphors in which alone some things can be adequately said. The is-
ought gap presupposed by the emotivist is bridged by the prophet or the
novelist, who confers meaning on the world by picturing it as a
dramatic narrative. In the context of such a narrative, moral
obligations follow directly (if not always unambiguously) from facts.
When Marx decided to speak only of what is, not what ought to be, the
problem was not that he spoke of what is, but that he spoke only of
what is. We do need to start with what is, but we need to derive from
it what ought to be, and Marx forgot this when he exchanged prophecy
for prediction.
The nonhuman "something" to which we appeal in prayer makes
morality compatible with reason, albeit a different form of reason than
the a priori, transparent, Enlightenment version. The nonhuman
something is not God but a religious myth, a normative narrative, which
has moral authority because it is built on what "is." This myth is
what gave rise to the young Marx's critique of capitalism. MacIntyre's
first attack on emotivism, and his narrative alternative to it, spring
from his effort to remedy the defect of Marxism by returning to Marx's
prophetic inspiration.
The defect of Marxism is that its emancipatory, egalitarian
aspirations have somehow resulted in tyranny. Marxism turns out, in
short, to be a worse-than-ineffective strategy for achieving the "true
community" of freedom. The young MacIntyre's explanation of this
problem, and his solution to it, rest on his discernment in Marx's
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thought of a scientistic deviation from its religious origins, which
produces in Marxism a gap between what is and what ought to be. In
turn, MacIntyre develops an understanding of religion as able to close
the is-ought gap by deriving value from fact in the form of myth. This
makes religion profoundly antiscientistic, although not antiscientific.
Science uses facts to predict; religion uses facts to prescribe. The
problem with prediction is not that it is an attempt to bridge the is-
ought gap. Rather, the problem is that it subordinates the ought to
the is, in the form of the is that will be. Confidence in what will be
slides easily into orthodoxy and tyranny when history does not
cooperate. Reconfiguring Marxism as a prophetic vision, then, will
rescue Marx's normative impulses from the Stalinist form they had taken
by MacIntyre's day. A prophetic vision bridges the is-ought gap in a
way that avoids the subversion of communal freedom that follows from a
predictive is-ought bridge.
As early 1953, then, we can find in MacIntyre's thought a number
of suggestions for the proper interpretation of After Virtue.
Foremost, of course, is MacIntyre's endorsement of the vision of
human freedom that he finds explicit in the young Marx and implicit in
the mature Marx. MacIntyre objects to Marx's attempt to predict the
future, but not to the kind of future he predicts. From the very
beginning, MacIntyre embraces the liberal ends pursued by Marx while
criticizing the means of obtaining them: Marx's philosophy of history.
Second, MacIntyre's unquestioning adherence to Marx's normative
vision enables him to subordinate epistemic to strategic
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considerations. Taking for granted the legitimacy of his communist
aspirations, the only question becomes how to enact communism, not how
to justify it. It is obvious to MacIntyre that capitalism is unjust:
merely to describe it is to prescribe its antithesis. Even to have to
condemn capitalism "would be superfluous. The description itself is
the condemnation" (1953, 115). By giving certain facts (such as the
conditions in Manchester described by Engels) the aura of values,
MacIntyre's normative self-assurance will make him a lifelong builder
of is-ought bridges. These bridges are a means to a predetermined end,
equal freedom as embodied in communism. The means to that end are as
indisputably true as the end is good.
Immersed in the world of British communism, MacIntyre is
understandably preoccupied with differences between advocates of
various strategies for achieving the socialist utopia. By 1953 he has
already chosen the side of the anti-Stalinists, so he tailors his
philosophical conclusions to produce a new form of Left politics that
will bring communism without repression. If the root of Stalinism is
Marx's proclivity to predict the future, then a different form of is-
ought bridge must be sought--and if found, it must be valid, not just
expedient: that is the nature of is-ought bridges. They collapse the
distance between valid ends and expedient means.
In 1953, MacIntyre locates the bridge in religious prophecy,
since it retains enough of a normative edge, derived from the
perfection of God, to serve as a platform for criticizing Stalinist
orthodoxy. In truth, however, this means that the "ought" overwhelms
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the "is"--as, conversely, when the bridge is predictive, the "is"
obliterates the "ought." Religious prophecy of the sort MacIntyre has
in mind is, in fact, "moral denunciation" (1953, 75) that is so self-
assured that it presumes to be a mere statement of fact. No mere
statement of fact, however, reveals what ought to be--although it can
reveal the complacency of the prophet who equates his norms with facts.
Third, MacIntyre's initial critique of emotivism is as strategic
as is his proposed "factual" alternative. MacIntyre condemns emotivism
precisely because it would call the morally obvious into question.
Certainly MacIntyre's opposition to emotivism, at least as of 1953, has
nothing to do with any worries about psychological consequences that
might follow from value uncertainty, worries that such commentators as
Holmes (1993, 92) detect in MacIntyre's mature thought. And the idea
of narrative that reappears in After Virtue is, when first employed in
Marxism: An Interpretation, unrelated to any psychological benefits
associated with being able to view one's life as a unified whole.
Indeed, narrative unity is, at least in 1953, wholly compatible
with the possibility that different people's views of moral truth will
be incommensurable with each other. It is even compatible with
relativism. The purely strategic foundations of MacIntyre's early
endorsement of is-ought bridges (as opposed to the truth-conclusions
MacIntyre unwarrantedly draws from them), like the strategic
foundations of his parallel condemnation of emotivism, are revealed
definitively by the subjectivism that afflicts his alternative to
emotivism. This comes out in an essay MacIntyre published in 1957,
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"The Logical Status of Religious Belief," a critique of that variety of
emotivism embodied in the logical positivist thesis that religion, as
distinguished from morality, merely expresses emotions.
MacIntyre (1957, 189) answers this form of emotivism by asserting
that the truth-claims made in the course of worship "always occur as
part of a total narration in which a dramatic wholeness of vision is
presented." Such narratives, "commonly denominated myths...are
stories...with a plot and a culmination," in which "God figures as the
predominating character" (ibid., 189-90). To place God in the
narrative in this way, each religion relies on "an authoritative
criterion" that has "no logical justification outside" itself (ibid.,
199, 198). In accepting this authority, "we discover some point in the
world at which we worship, at which we accept the lordship of something
not ourselves" (ibid., 202). Echoing Sartre and explicitly following
Kierkegaard, MacIntyre writes that "the only apologia for a religion is
to describe its content in detail: and then either a man will find
himself brought to say 'My Lord and my God' or he will not" (ibid.,
205). There can be no justification of religion apart from such a
radical individual choice; religion is "beyond argument" (ibid., 211).
This is, it seems, why MacIntyre had earlier juxtaposed, against Marx's
scientism, the uncertainty and ambiguity of ethico-religious judgments.
Prophecy as an is-ought bridge allows for a multitude of conflicting
moral codes based on individuals' acceptance of a variety of competing
prophecies, each with its own narrative authority.
MacIntyre has, in short, produced an individualistic version of
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pure, relativistic communitarianism. The individual rather than the
community is the one whose perception of morally charged facts is
unchallengeable, making disagreements between individuals unbridgeable.
This brings out an instructive aspect of MacIntyre's thought: its
tendency toward relativism precedes, and is independent of, his
communitarianism. Communitarianism is but one version of the
relativism that flows from the equation of facts with values--at least
when the facts in question are subject to plural interpretation.
In the schema implicit in MacIntyre's 1957 paper, each
individual's choice among contradictory religious commitments is both
arbitrary and valid. The validity of the individuals' potentially
contradictory choices, however, is proved not by any argument about the
nature of religious or moral truth, but by the assumption that morality
is an obvious matter, akin to the perception of a fact. By
generalizing his own moral complacency into a general account of moral
epistemology--by moving from a specific moral conviction about the
indubitable evil of capitalism to a generalized prophetic alternative
to emotivism--MacIntyre goes beyond the strategic purpose of his
critique of Marxian predictivism, but at the price of inadvertently
relativizing all values. On the one hand, prophetically deriving value
from fact serves to allow dissent from Stalinist orthodoxy, the better
to achieve the unquestioned goal of communist freedom. On the other
hand, by failing to perceive this move as strategic, MacIntyre makes a