Abstract
The translation of the late Émile Perreau-Saussine's work into English (by Nathan J. Pinkoski) comes at a moment in which American liberal politics has been undermined by the resurgence of Cold War-era rivalries and violence and fresh articulations of fascism in Western democracies. One of the most striking elements in the Foreword by Pierre Manet and throughout Perreau-Saussine's subtle rendering of Alasdair MacIntyre's intellectual contributions is the recognition that liberalism is deeply flawed as a social-political ideology and yet at the same time, cannot be abandoned as a political framework because it allows for subjective ethical freedom. Today, the liberal consensus appears more fragile than ever. What does this mean for how we read MacIntyre's work and evaluate its impact?
MacIntyre grappled with the issue of liberalism as a necessary political, yet morally inadequate, framework in ways that led to contradictions within his work. Perreau-Saussine argues that MacIntyre's unity of purpose across his corpus of work was to understand the history and nature of anti-individualism. MacIntyre privileges the centrality of the role of community, through tradition, in shaping moral agency and the quest for the good. Indeed, some of our most pressing ethical questions today pertain to what it means to be a critically thinking member of overlapping communities in relation to one another. How ought we to live in communities of disagreement, even polarization, when the overriding temptation is to shut down conversation completely rather than engage in agonistic context?
Perreau-Saussine argues, compellingly, that MacIntyre's work reflects a one-sided reading of Aristotle. In MacIntyre's lack of theorizing about the political—or his focus on the Nichomachean Ethics instead of the Politics—we might consider whether and how MacIntyre unwittingly ceded ground to a kind of political neo-traditionalism with an authoritarian political bent. MacIntyre, as Perreau-Saussine observes, staunchly criticized the concept of Hobbesian sovereignty and the liberal marginalization of religion from politics. For MacIntyre, liberalism stands for egocentric individualism, abstraction, and alienation—all traits that render impossible the formation of intellectual community and the authentic use of practical reason. He saw the danger in reducing morality to the will-to-power. And yet somehow MacIntyre overlooked the use of religious traditions to justify forms of fascism and political nihilism.
Perreau-Saussine argues that the majority/minority problem is at the heart of MacIntyre's assumptions about liberalism, relating it to the theologico-political problem. He was deeply influenced by communitarians like Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor. As communitarians belong to religious minorities, Perreau-Saussine notes, ‘they take a certain cultural and religious pluralism for granted’ (p. 120). Thus MacIntyre's theory of the primacy of traditions ‘presupposes liberalism's success: it comes after liberalism’ (p. 120). Liberal democracy affords religious minorities a basic measure of safety and ethical freedom, even as religious minorities may embody and advocate for traditions that directly contradict liberal values. At some level MacIntyre realized this, and perhaps that is why his work neglects public life, and he aligns himself with a tradition that never places politics at the center. But of course this comes at a cost. MacIntyre sought a path forward in Thomas Aquinas, informed by an interest in the teleology of natural law which was deeply influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. But while staking out a position that was sympathetic to communitarianism and seeking to ground morality in natural law, MacIntyre actually did very little to elaborate on the reality of pluralism and the ethical necessity to theoretically engage it meaningfully. Perreau-Saussine asks, why did he not see coexistence among different groups and identities as a worthy ethical goal?
MacIntyre adopted the communitarian position that religion had to be protected from the overreach of the State, with the implication that a society ordered by secularism thwarted the fundamental search for the good/God. The communitarians of the 1980s and 1990s were specifically focused on religious minorities like Jews, the Amish, the Quebecois. A kind of single-mindedness prevailed in constructing notions of ‘community’ against the ‘State’. Yet simultaneously, there were minority theologico-political movements afoot within the United States that had begun to amass substantial political power. Some Christians within both Protestant and Catholic groups formed political coalitions in reaction to the successes of the Civil Rights and feminist movements, centered on political resentment and grievance, and using the language of ‘tradition’ and the sensibility of persecuted minorities to persuade people of their cause. In more recent developments, American religious leaders and ecclesial authorities have successfully imposed their (minority) moral vision on the general population using the mechanisms of federal and state law.
Considering this book was published nearly twenty years ago, it is important to think about this reluctance to address pluralism within and outside of traditions, and its relationship to the ascendancy of neo-traditionalism in the American right. What would MacIntyre say about developments in the American Catholic Church in which ‘belonging’ in the community is often equated with adherence to a kind of political orthodoxy on issues like abortion? It is interesting to remember that MacIntyre was skeptical of movements that required ideological purity—in no small part on account of Stalinism's quest for purity and the violence it engendered in the twentieth century. And yet, one is inclined to wonder, how does one engage in a political search for the good without imposing it on others? What responsibilities do moral agents have to communities which are not their own, and yet with whom they share a common world?
MacIntyre did not address these questions in depth, and perhaps he could not fathom the direction that contemporary world politics would trend. Perhaps it is up to us to conceptualize the ways in which a grounding in various traditions allows citizens to do the difficult work of living together and imagining a common political project. If, according to MacIntyre, modernity is helplessly fragmented, it also offers possibilities for pluralism, for bricolage, for imagining new possibilities for freedom by grounding oneself in ‘tradition’. Recall Jeffrey Stout's observation about MacIntyre: ‘When I consider his traditionalist theory of rationality and the story he wants to tell about modernity, I cannot help suspecting that he may himself be the best case against his own central claims’ (Democracy and Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 139). What is tradition but an amalgamation and reformulation of other traditions, adapted by people in creative ways to confront the challenges of the present moment? MacIntyre's contradictions, in many respects, are our own. We may now, twenty years after the initial publication of Perreau-Saussine's book in French, have a greater awareness of the risks of ceding the ground of ‘tradition’ to the politically purist forces that would destroy it.