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Book Review: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair
MacIntyre
Authors(s):Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen
One of the most important issues in Islamic social and political thought
since the nineteenth century has been the confrontation of traditional
Muslim societies with European modernism, and one of the most important
facets of modernism about which Muslim thinkers are concerned is that of
political liberalism. MacIntyre's writings are interesting in this context
because, like many Muslims, he is very strongly opposed to many aspects of
modernism and liberalism for what turn out to be ultimately religious
reasons.
Authors(s): Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen
Category: Comparative Religion
Journal: Vol.14, N.2
Publisher(s): Ahlul Bayt World Assembly
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Table of Contents
Book Review: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair
MacIntyre ..................................................................... 3
Introduction ................................................................. 3
After Virtue ................................................................. 5
Relativism ................................................................... 5
Liberalism ................................................................... 9
Religion ................................................................... 13
History .................................................................... 14
References ................................................................ 16
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Book Review: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by
Alasdair MacIntyre
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, 410 pp, index.
By
Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen
Introduction
This is an important book, a book with which Muslims, in particular,
need to become acquainted. The author,
Alasdair MacIntyre, is one of the most profound and most controversial
moralists and social thinkers of our time.
The book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Is not an easy work it
requires some familiarity with various details of Western culture, in
particular its moral and political philosophies.
So, rather than merely summarize the work, I will try to show why I
think it is important for Muslim thinkers to read and criticize it. For this
purpose I begin with a general discussion of the work's importance in the
context of MacIntyre's other writings, and then turn to two of the major
topics discussed in the work, relativism and liberalism. Finally, I offer some
humble criticisms of my own, and suggestions for further research.
Of all those who have stood against the currents of modernism, Alasdair
MacIntyre stands out as the philosopher who has offered the most profound
critique. His After Virtue, which was first published in 1981, sent shock
waves through the Western intellectual world.1 He committed what for
many was an unforgivable sin when heclaimed that the project of the
Enlightenment period of European thought was a failure.
This rejection of modernist thinking was focused upon moral philosophy,
but it attracted the attention of a readership much wider than what could be
expected for a book in ethics.
There were even articles in the popular press about the revival of
Aristotelian thought initiated by MacIntyre's work, and in the article on the
history of twentieth century Anglo-American Ethics in the Encyclopedia of
Ethics, Alan Donagan predicts that MacIntyre's attention to Thomistic
thought will influence the philosophical work to be done in the Twenty first
century.2
MacIntyre's work has also sparked controversy among political theorists
and social critics, as well as professional philosophers.3 Conferences have
been convened to discuss his ideas, critical studies of his work have been
compiled, and several of his books and articles have been translated into
foreign languages.
In the field of ethics, MacIntyre has spawned a revival of interest in
Aristotelian ethics with such force that it is now generally recognized as a
serious rival to the two major strands of moral philosophy that have been
dominant in the West since the Enlightenment utilitarianism and
Kantianism. Numerous books and articles have been written since the
publication of After Virtue proclaiming the advantages of an Aristotelian
virtue ethics over utilitarian consequentialism and Kantian deontology.
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In political theory, there has been a steady stream of writings in which
liberalism is defended against MacIntyre’s criticisms, or those criticisms are
elaborated, often in the form of a communitarian theory which MacIntyre
himself has repudiated.4
In religious thought, MacIntyre's work has prompted a renewed interest
in Neo-Thomism, especially as it is related to ethics and social political
thought.
MacIntyre's emphasis on the importance of history has also led to heated
discussions in which he has often been accused of being a relativist. It was
largely in response to this sort of misunderstanding which followed the
publication of After Virtue that MacIntyre was motivated to write the sequel,
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
MacIntyre's rejections of historicism and relativism in this latter work
have also contributed to the depth of the discussions of these issues.
So, one reason for reading MacIntyre is because his work has been
tremendously influential, even among those who disagree with his positions.
Another reason would be interest in the topics he discusses: history, politics,
ethics, religion, epistemology, philosophy in general and the relations
among them. For Muslims, however, there are additional reasons to read
MacIntyre.
One of the most important issues in Islamic social and political thought
since the nineteenth century has been the confrontation of traditional
Muslim societies with European modernism, and one of the most important
facets of modernism about which Muslim thinkers are concerned is that of
political liberalism. Muslims who argue that liberal ideals and institutions
are compatible with Islam are usually classified as modernists.
At the other extreme are those who would claim that liberal and Islamic
thought agree on nothing. The vast majority of Muslim intellectuals and
scholars, however, fall somewhere between these extremes. The interesting
discussion in contemporary Muslim social thought is not over whether
modernists or conservatives hold a more defensible position, but what
aspects of liberal thought may be accommodated and what aspects must be
rejected.
MacIntyre's writings are interesting in this context because, like many
Muslims, he is very strongly opposed to many aspects of modernism and
liberalism for what turn out to be ultimately religious reasons. Furthermore,
the philosophical perspective he seeks to defend, a form of Neo Thomism
with a strong emphasis on Aristotle, is more similar to the philosophical
perspective of traditional Islamic thought than are any of the other major
tendencies to be found among contemporary Western philosophers.
Of course, there remain important differences between the attitudes of
Muslims and those expressed by MacIntyre, to be discussed below, but
regardless of our differences, the thought of the most profound critic of
modernism and liberalism in the West should be of great interest to those
who feel a need to resist the imposition of modernist and liberal thought on
Muslim societies, such as those inspired by the warnings of the Grand
Leader of the Islamic Revolution against the `cultural invasion.'
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Muslim liberals who await a repetition of the European Enlightenment in
Islamic culture would also be well advised to read MacIntyre, who has
declared the Enlightenment project to be a failure and ultimately incoherent.
Perhaps if Muslim modernists would read MacIntyre they would become
more critical of the claims made on behalf of liberalism, and would come to
recognize the need to examine the intellectual history of their own
traditions, as well as those of the West, to find the way forward. Perhaps
MacIntyre's books can serve as a kind of vaccination against the infatuation
with Western culture which Persians call gharbzadigi.
After Virtue
The book which initially provoked the great storm of controversy was
After Virtue, and in order to understand the true significance of Whose
Justice? Which Rationality? One must understand something about the
earlier work.
After Virtue begins with the disquieting suggestion that moral discourse
in the West has lost its meaning, that it serves as a disguise for the
expression of preferences, attempts to gain power, emotions andattitudes,
but that it has ceased to have any relation to what is truly good or right.
MacIntyre pins responsibility for the collapse of Western ethics on the
Enlightenment. Much of the book goes on to criticize various aspect of
Enlightenment thought in Hume, Kant, the Utilitarian’s, the emotivists, and
in contemporary liberal political philosophy, especially as elaborated by
John Rawls.5
MacIntyre sees only two ways to pass beyond the errors of modernism
and liberalism: either we must accept a Nietzschean nihilism or we must
return to an Aristotelian ethics. However, the Aristotelian alternative is not a
simple return to Greek or medieval systems of thought. For the
Enlightenment criticisms of scholasticism to be successfully answered, the
return must be to a reformed Aristotelianism consonant with modern
science.
This means that the telos or end of man is not to be understood as
determined by biology, rather it is to be fathomed by reflection on history,
and the human practices and traditions that have evolved over the course of
history. The second half of After Virtue consists in MacIntyre's elaboration
of this historically grounded Aristotelianism and its development as a theory
of the virtues.
Relativism
Like the Nietzschean critics of the arrogance of the Enlightenment,
MacIntyre accepts that there is no absolute standpoint from which we can
arrive at absolute moral truths. Each of us must view the world from his
own position in history and society. It is this admission that led many critics
of After Virtue to accuse him of relativism or historicism, and it is largely in
response to this criticism that Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Was
written.
Unlike the Nietzscheans, or genealogists as MacIntyre refers6 to those
often called post- modernists, MacIntyre does not accept the claim that
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because we are bound to our finite perspectives conditioned by history and
social position, we are barred from certainty or absolute truth.
Rather, he holds that man has the ability to understand rival perspectives
even when one cannot be translated into the idiom of the other. On the basis
of this understanding, rational evaluation and judgment can be made with
regard to the strengths and weaknesses of the rival world views and
ideologies.
MacIntyre extends this discussion in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
Beyond ethics, which was the focus of his attention in After Virtue, to the
very principles of rationality, thus bringing the insights of his ethical
thought to bear on epistemology.
There are two major themes developed in Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?: first, there is a continuation of the critique of liberalism found
in After Virtue coupled with an affirmation of a religious perspective and
second, there is a rejection of relativism coupled with an insistence on the
significance of historical considerations for the adjudication of disputes
across traditions.
When two traditions of thought are so different that what is considered
self-evident or obvious in one tradition is considered dubious or
incomprehensible in the other, the very principles of reason come under
question. In contemporary Western thought, what are often considered to be
principles of reason are those which have proven indispensable to the
natural sciences and mathematics.
If one wants to judge whether this view of rationality is correct or that,
for example, found in the works of Muslim philosophers, one must be very
careful to avoid begging the question by using the very principles in one's
evaluation that are under dispute. Relativists have considered such
controversies to be irresolvable.
They claim that we are stuck inside our own world views, unable to make
judgments on any of them. MacIntyre distinguishes two forms of relativism,
which he terms relativist and perspectivalist. The relativist claims that there
can be no rationality as such, but only rationality relative to the standards of
some particular tradition.
The perspectivalist claims that the central beliefs of a tradition are not to
be considered as true or false, but as providing different, complementary
perspectives for envisaging the realities about which they speak to us.
MacIntyre argues that both the relativist and the perspectivalist are wrong.
They are wrong because they fail to admit the absolute timeless character of
the truth, and would replace truth by what is often called warranted
assertibility.
Instead of truth, they hold that the best we can attain is the right or
warrant to assert various statements in various circumstances. Macintyre’s
solution to the problem of how to reach absolute truth from a historically
limited position is that attention to history itself may reveal the superiority
of one tradition over another with respect to a given topic.
To have passed through an epistemological crisis successfully enables
the adherents of a tradition of enquiry to rewrite its history in a more
insightful way and such a history of a particular tradition provides not only a
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way of identifying the continuities in virtue of which that tradition of
enquiry has survived and flourished as one and the same tradition.
But also of identifying more accurately that structure of justification
which underpins whatever claims to truth are made within it, claims which
are more and other than claims to warranted assertibility.7 The concept of
warranted assertibility always has application only at some particular time
and place in respect of standards then prevailing at some particular stage in
the development of a tradition of enquiry.
And a claim that such and such is warrantedly assertible always,
therefore, has to make implicit or explicit references to such times and
places. The concept of truth, however, is timeless.8
MacIntyre argues that since a tradition can fail to pull through an
epistemological crisis on its own standards, the relativist is wrong if he
thinks that each tradition must always vindicate itself. MacIntyre further
argues that there are cases of cultural encounter in which one must come to
admit the superiority of an alien culture in some regard, because it explains
why the crisis occurred and does not suffer from the same defects present in
one's own culture.
It is in this way that the people of Rome could come to accept
Christianity, and the people of Iran, Islam. Eachpeople saw that their own
traditions had reached a point of crisis, a point at which further progress
could only be made by the adoption of a new religion. The relativist claims
that there is no way in which a tradition can enter into rational debate with
another, “But if this were so, then there could be no good reason to give
one's allegiance to the standpoint of any one tradition rather to that of any
other.9
To the contrary, MacIntyre claims that the question of which tradition to
which one is to give one's allegiance is far from arbitrary, and the
intellectual struggle of all those who have changed their minds about the
correctness of an intellectual or spirit” tradition is more than ample evidence
that the question, “Which side are you on?” is one which requires rational
evaluation, however much other factors may come into play.
Perhaps MacIntyre is reflecting here on his own brief membership in the
Communist Party and subsequent rejection of Marxism and conversion to
Catholicism. One who adopts an intellectual position must always ask
himself if it can adequately respond to criticism, criticism which can mount
to produce what may be termed an epistemological crisis. “It is in respect of
their adequacy or inadequacy in their responses to epistemological crises
that traditions are vindicated or fail to be vindicated.”10
MacIntyre also argues that the position of the relativist is self-defeating.
The relativist pretends to issue his challenge from a neutral ground where
different traditions may be compared and truth may be proclaimed relative
to each of them. But this is as much a claim to absolute truth as any other.
This argument and others similar to it which are to be found in Whose
Justice? Which Rationality? Have provoked penetrating criticism. John
Haldane has argued that one need not assume that there is some neutral
ground from which to issue the relativist claim.11 Within an intellectual
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tradition, one may observe that there are other incommensurable traditions
and decide that relativism best explains this.
MacIntyre accepts Haldane's point, admitting that the case against
relativism in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Needs to be amended at
the same time, 'he points out that within every major intellectual tradition,
various claims are presented about morals and rationality as absolutely true.
The problem is then raised as to how this anti-relativistic commitment to
truth can coexist with the recognition of rival intellectual traditions with
their different standards of rationality and morality.
MacIntyre's solution is that common standards are to be sought, even
where none exist, by dialectical interchange between the rival viewpoints.
One tradition of inquiry will be in a position to uphold the truth of its claims
against rivals in which those claims are not recognized when it develops the
intellectual apparatus to explain the rival viewpoint, and why the
disagreement has arisen, and why the rival is incorrect.
In other words, through intellectual conflict between traditions, a
tradition can vindicate itself only when it can enrich its own conceptual
resources sufficiently to explain the errors of its rivals. This kind of conflict
and progress is only possible when there is a commitment to finding the
truth.
With relativism there can be no intellectual advancement, because there
is no attempt made to adjudicate among different theoretical viewpoints, and
without the attempt to reach a more comprehensive position in which truth
and falsity can be distinguished, traditions cannot evolve rationally, nor can
they maintain their previous truth claims.
MacIntyre sees relativism as tempting those who despair of intellectual
advancement, and for the sake of intellectual advancement, he sees it as a
temptation that must be avoided.
MacIntyre dismisses the perspectivist position with the rebuff, “theirs is
not so much a conclusion about truth as exclusion from it and thereby from
rational debate.”12 The perspectivalist, like the reductive religious pluralist,
states that rival traditions provide different views of the same reality, and
none can be considered absolutely true or false.
MacIntyre objects that the traditions really do conflict with one another,
and the fact that they are rivals itself bears testimony to their substantive
disagreements over what is true and false. The claim that there is no ultimate
truth of the matter is really just a way of avoiding the work that needs to be
done in order to determine exactly where and in what respects in each of the
rival traditions.
The truth lies, and when the differences in the rivals is so deep that the
very principles of rationality are called into question, the rivalry produces an
epistemological crisis, but even here, the need and duty to provide a rational
evaluation of the rivals remains.
MacIntyre contends that epistemological crisis occurs when different
traditions with different languages confront one another. Those who learn to
think in both languages come to the understanding that there are things in
one language for which the other does not have the expressive resources,
and thereby they discover a flaw in the deficient tradition.
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In this way he shows how rational evaluation of different traditions is
possible, although this evaluation itself must begin from within a specific
tradition. His emphasis on the fact that the starting point of our inquiry is
tradition-bound is comparable to a common theme among writers in the
hermeneutic tradition, such as Gadamer.
The fantasy of universal standards of reason to which all rational beings
must submit by virtue of being rational has been abandoned. This separates
MacIntyre from traditional writers, as Thomas McCarthy has observed,
Even arguments like Alasdair MacIntyre's for the superiority of premodern
traditions are not themselves traditional arguments but the traditionalistic
arguments of hyperreflexive modems.13
What distinguishes MacIntyre from others who share his sensitivity to
context dependency is his robust sense of the truth. The incommensurability
of competing traditions, according to MacIntyre, is not as absolute as some
have imagined.
Logic retains authority, even if its principles are disputed, and what is
sought is truth, and although he rejects correspondence theories of truth that
would pair judgments to facts (because he considers the concept of fact to
be an invention of seventeenth-century European thought), the theory of
truth to which he gives his allegiance is still a correspondence theory.14
In response to a sympathetic comparison between his position and views
current among certain philosophers of science, MacIntyre objects.
I had hoped that what I had said about truth in enquiry in Chapter 18 of
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Would have made it adequately clear
that I regard any attempt to eliminate the notion of truth from that of enquiry
as bound to fail. It is in part for this reason that I regard the Nietzschean
tradition as always in danger of lapsing into fatal incoherence.15
MacIntyre's solution to the problem of relativism is especially important
for Muslims because it offers a way to break the deadlock between Muslim
intellectuals who, over impressed with the intellectual traditions of the
West, deny that Islam asserts any absolute truths that man is capable of
grasping, and those `Mama' who insist on the self evidence of the
fundamental troths of their own traditions.
Without seeing that such claims are ineffective against rival systems of
thought in which there are profound
differences about what, if anything is to be considered self-evident. The
solution MacIntyre offers is one in which there is hope that the absolute
truths of Islam can be rationally defended against opponents as certain, but
onlyby developing the Islamic intellectual traditions to the point that they
are able to explain the successes as well as the failures of their rivals.
Liberalism
MacIntyre's disappointment with liberalism is more extensive and more
profound than that of other Western critics more extensive because it applies
to the political theories of both the left and the right, more profound because
it traces the failings of liberalism to its origins in the Enlightenment, and
traces the injustice of the modern nation-state to its very essence.
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As Ronald Beiner observes what makes MacIntyre unique is that for him
the problem is not merely individualism or liberalism but modernity as such.
Therefore he includes even Marxism within the scope of his critique.16
In some ways, MacIntyre's rejection of liberalism is similar to his
rejection of relativism. Just as the relativist contradicts himself if he would
proclaim the absolute truth of the proposition that there are no absolute
truths, the liberal contradicts himself by proclaiming neutrality between all
ideologies, when, in fact, liberalism itself is an ideology.
Liberalism is an intellectual tradition as ideological as any other, and it
allows for scholarly inquiry only after initiation into accepted modes of
appraisal which deny the worth of serious challenges to liberalism itself.
Just as Haldane argued that the relativist need not claim that relativism is
absolutely true, independent of any tradition, defenders of liberalism have
responded to MacIntyre's criticism of liberalism by admitting that liberalism
is an ideology, that it is not absolutely neutral.17
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre responds that liberalism is
a defective and ultimately incoherent ideology. His insight into the defects
of liberalism is one which was first expressed in his first book, Marxism an
Interpretation, which was written when he was only twenty three years old.
In the revised edition of this work MacIntyre emphasizes the need for an
ideology on the scale of Christianity or Marxism that can offer an
interpretation of human existence by means of which people can situate
themselves in the world and direct their actions to ends that transcend their
own immediate situations. He argues that liberalism is an ideology that
cannot function effectively as such.
The axis about which the failure of liberalism turns is its assertion of the
fact/value gap.18 Liberalism fails as an ideology because it does not permit
one to discover one's own identity and appropriate ends by gaining
knowledge of nature and society, or by understanding human existence in
relation to al-Haqq, the Exalted.
In liberalism, all values are personal except the value of respecting
personal values, and this is simply not sufficient to orient one's life.
Modernism inhibits orientation because from the point of view of modern
liberalism, religious traditions seem irrational.
The standards of rationality to which the religious traditions of enquiry
appeal are so different from those which dominate the natural and social
sciences in the West today that traditional and modernist ways of thinking
have become nearly mutually incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, a tradition may come to be rationally accepted by those
who live within the horizons of Western liberal culture once they come to
recognize themselves as imprisoned by a set of beliefs which lack
justification in precisely the same way and to the same extent as do the
positions which they reject but also to understand themselves as hitherto
deprived of what tradition affords, as persons in part constituted as what
they are up to this point by an absence, by what is from the standpoint of
traditions an impoverishment.19
The impoverishment of which MacIntyre speaks here is one which Islam
excels at eradicating. What the individual posited by liberal theory lacks is
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an effective ideology to provide understanding and purpose on the basis of
which communities can be established.
Modern liberal thinkers imagine themselves to be independent, but
MacIntyre charges that from an Aristotelian point of view they have refused
to learn or have been unable to learn that “one cannot think for oneself if
one thinks entirely by oneself,” and that it is only by participation in rational
practice-based community that one becomes truly rational.
MacIntyre admits that this kind of recognition amounts to a sort of
conversion. Individuals at the point of conversion will invite a tradition of
enquiry to furnish them with a kind of self knowledge which they have not
as yet possessed by first providing them with an awareness of the specific
character of their own incoherence and then accounting for the particular
character of this incoherence by its metaphysical, moral, and political
scheme of classification and explanation.
The catalogs of virtues and vices, the norms of conformity and deviance,
the accounts of educational success and failure, the narratives of possible
types of human life which each tradition has elaborated in its own terms, all
the invite the individual educated into self-knowledge of his or her own
incoherence to acknowledge in which of these rival modes of moral
understanding he or she finds him or herself most adequately explained and
accounted for.20
Not only does MacIntvre explain how someone in a liberal society may
evolve to the point of being able to convert to a religious tradition, his astute
observations regarding the logic of liberal thought also helps to illuminate
the West's failure to understand the current Islamic movement and its
hostility towards it. The liberal's moral analysis is one which begins by
abstracting the claims to be debated from their contexts in tradition, and
then proceeds with an evaluation of rational justifiability which is supposed
to convince any rational person.
The liberal fantasy of universal progress implies that the most rational
standards are those which dominate the most recent trends of its own
thought. To the extent that Muslims are unwilling to adopt the standards of
modernism, they are thought to be irrational. Islamic intellectual traditions
are taken to be more or less the same as what the West progressed beyond
when it abandoned medieval scholasticism.
The caricature of Islam drawn by the liberal West requires neglect of the
particularities of character, history, and circumstance. This makes it
impossible to engage in the kind of rational dialogue which could move
through argumentative evaluation to the rational acceptance or rejection of a
tradition. Thus, the kind of debate which is enforced in the public forums of
enquiry in modern liberal culture for the most part effectively precludes the
voices of tradition outside liberalism from being heard.
Materialistic consumerism is a direct result of the liberal's pretense of
neutrality. Since all the citizens of the liberal state are supposed to be free to
pursue their own happiness, and since despite their differences about what
ultimate happiness is, the vast majority seem to be in agreement on the idea
that its pursuit is aided by ever increasing acquisition and consumption,
which goes by the euphemism of economic development,
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It becomes nearly self-evident that it is in the national interests of the
liberal state to pursue economic development.21 MacIntyre explains that
those who adhere to the standpoint dominant in peculiarly modern societies
recognize that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensable to continuous
and limitless economic growth, and one of their central beliefs is that
continuous and limitless economic growth is a fundamental good.
That a systematically lower standard of living ought to be preferred to a
systematically higher standard of living is a thought incompatible with
either the economics or the politics of peculiarly modem societies. But a
community which was guided by Aristotelian norms would not only have to
view acquisitiveness as a vice but would have to set strict limits to growth
insofar as that is necessary to preserve or enhance a distribution of goods
according to desert.22
From the Aristotelian point of view advocated by MacIntyre, the problem
with the modern liberal state goes way beyond its worldliness. There is no
way, MacIntyre insists, for those who rule in a modern state to avoid doing
injustice.
Modern nation states which masquerade as embodiments of community
are always to be resisted. The modem nation state, in whatever guise, is a
dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand
as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to,
but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as
a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay
down one's life on its behalf it is like being asked to die for the telephone
company. To empower even the liberal state as a bearer of values always
imperils those values.23
His criticism of the liberal state is so harsh that it could be mistaken for a
form of anarchism was it not for the fact that he explicitly advises his
readers to cooperate with the state by paying their taxes.
What sort of politics does MacIntyre advocate? MacIntyre suggests that
the focus of the political life of an Aristotelian of the sort he lauds should be
“the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, the parish, and the school, or
clinic, communities within which the needs of the hungry and the homeless
can be met.”24
Are we then to leave the state to “the barbarians” mentioned at the close
of After Virtue?25 And what are we to do about the hungey and homeless
who live outside our parish? Is it not incumbent upon a religious society to
take the reins of state power out of the hands of those who are driving it to
ruin, even if the nation-state of its own momentum will not readily change
course?
A more realistic political Aristotelianism than the one advocated by
MacIntyre would not shun the need to shoulder the burden of the modern
state in full recognition of its deficiencies and in the hope that it could be
transformed into something better. MacIntyre does not see this as a live
option because he seems to be thinking of Europe and the U.S.
Whereas the prospects for anything better than liberal government are
unpromising, because the major alternative there to liberalism is
nationalism, and nationalism easily degrades into fascist rage we have
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witnessed in the attempt to exterminate the Muslims of Bosnia. Within
Muslim societies, however, there is an alternative to both nationalism and
liberalism which is not taken seriously by Western theorists?
MacIntyre's retreat to the local takes the punch out of his critique of
liberalism. Liberals do not oppose local associations with substantive
ideologies, values and purposes. Liberal political theory is a theory of
government, not of local voluntary associations. If MacIntyre had
announced at the start of his book that his quarrel with liberalism was over
how local associations are to be organized, and not about government, it
would not have attracted the attention it has.
Indeed, if one were to read Whose Justice? Which Rationality? from the
start with the assumption that the
critique of liberalism was not to extend to liberal theories of government,
much, of what MacIntyre says would not make any sense. Consider the
passage quoted above in which limits to economic growth are advocated.
What is at issue here is how whole societies conduct their economic
affairs, and no matter how large and thriving the private sector of any
society is, the role of governments in directing the economic affairs of the
societies they rule is undeniable. So, what MacIntyre is objecting to is the
flaws of liberal governments and of liberal theories of how governments
should conduct their affairs.
Here again, MacIntyre's work should be helpful for those engaged in the
development of Islamic political theory. If we accept MacIntyre's critique of
the modern form of nation state, the creation of Islamic republics cannot be
the ultimate goal of Islamic political activity, but only an intermediary stage
in a development leading to more perfectly Islamic forms of governance,
culminating in the governance of the Wali al-`Asr(ajtf), may his emergence
be hastened.
Religion
Muslims share a common cause with Western critics of liberalism, such
as MacIntyre and others who have launched their criticisms from a religious
standpoint. By examining this work it may even be discovered that this sort
of criticism is more appropriate from an Islamic standpoint than from a
Neo-Thomist one.
The alienation expressed by MacIntyre is a social one, but there are
deeper forms of alienation, which from the religious point of view have their
source in distance from God. The sort of community MacIntyre seeks is one
whose rival paradigms are those of the Christian Church and the Muslim
ummah. But the source of the cohesion of these communities is their
harmony with the divine order.
If the methods of evaluation of rival traditions as outlined by MacIntyre
are to be employed to compare Christendom and the ummah, it will be
necessary to examine the ways in which the intellectual traditions within the
two communities have responded and continue to formulate responses to the
challenge of liberal modernism.
For his own part, MacIntyre concludes that the Thomistic synthesis of
Augustinian and Aristotelian thought has been confirmed in its encounter
with other traditions. But the analysis he offers is not specific to the defense
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of Catholicism, but rather may be used to support various forms of
traditional thought against the secular liberal scientism which prevails in the
West.
Indeed, a major flaw in all of MacIntyre's writings is that it fails to pay
any attention to Islam at all. When MacIntyre compares competing
traditions of liberal, Marxist and religious thought, the term religious can
always be replaced by Christian without altering the intended meaning.26
Prior to his conversion to Neo-Thomism, which occurred some time
between the writing of After Virtue and whose Justice? Which Rationality?
MacIntyre could be scathingly critical of Christianity, even if, at the very
same time, appreciative of its strengths.27
The weaknesses of Christianity to which he drew attention in his first
book were its dogmatism and otherworldliness its inherent tendency to
disown its own revolutionary vision, to circumscribe itself within the
spiritual and to accommodate itself to the status quo, even if this meant
tyranny Nothing in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Explains how these
criticisms are to be answered.
Islam, on the other hand, has not disowned its revolutionary vision, nor
has it had an episode comparable to Galileo’s encounter with the
Inquisition. This is not to deny that terrible injustices have been and
continues to be perpetrated in the name of Islam, nor that fanatical
intolerance has not marred doctrinal disputes among Muslims.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the dogmas accepted by Muslims
have not prevented them from accepting the natural sciences or technology,
nor from the adoption of Western social institutions when it has appeared
(rightly or wrongly) rational to do so. It must also be admitted that the call
for justice issued by Islam, particularly in its Shia version, retains its ability
to inspire revolutionary fervour.
The hope for a just society in this world has not been abandoned by
Muslims. Because it began as a political no less than spiritual movement,
Muslims cannot deny that Islam demands them to seek justice in the here
and now. Because of the priority of the spiritual, however, Islam is able to
provide the moral basis and orientation lacking in secular ideologies.
MacIntyre's failure to answer his own criticisms of Christianity have left
at least one-Muslim reader with the impression that his work provides a
better defense of Islam than it does for the Christianity he himself professes.
History
The review I have presented thus far of Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? may give the false impression that the book consists of highly
abstract discussions of such issues as relativism, liberalism, rationality and
religious traditions. Such discussions are indeed to be found between the
covers of this volume, but the bulk of the work is history.
The concepts of justice and practical rationality are examined through
their historical developments in four traditions Aristotelian, Augustinian,
Human and modern liberal. The book is divided into twenty chapters, the
first of which is an introduction. There follow seven chapters on the
evolution of the concepts of justice and practical rationality from the
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Homeric period, through Plato and culminating in Aristotle's conceptions of
justice and practical rationality.
Next come three chapters on Augustine and the synthesis between
Aristotelian and Augustinian thought formulated by Aquinas. This is
followed by five chapters on the Scottish Enlightenment, ending with a
critique of Hume.There is only one chapter specifically devoted to modern
liberalism, and then three more to draw conclusions.
MacIntyre contends that the concepts of justice and practical rationality
must be studied through the examination of the traditions in which these
concepts have emerged. But the history MacIntyre tells is not a mere
recounting of what was said or written in the past; rather, it is a critical
history in which triumphs and defeats are evaluated, and lessons drawn for
contemporary thinking on the relevant issues.
The critique of liberalism, for example, is not confined to the chapter
devoted specifically to this topic, but is a theme which recurs amidst
historical discussions of earlier traditions of enquiry. As a result, the history
of ideas recounted by MacIntyre is not a mere succession of doctrines
espoused and then forgotten.
But it is a history of how ideas become influential, are misunderstood
and are reformed and synthesized with others through an ongoing process of
rational evaluation in which the very standards of rational evaluation
themselves take part in the process.
It is here that MacIntyre may be misunderstood as advocating
historicism, the view that reality is beyond the reach of the human intellect
because the intellect is forever held captive to the prejudices and other
shortcomings of its historical situation. This sort of historicism is said to
result from subtracting the notion of Absolute Mind from Hegels philosophy
and it is not uncommon among twentieth century philosophers.
Versions of it have been propounded by Dewey Rorty, Gadamer and
Foucault. But MacIntyre explicitly rejects historicism in both its Hegelian
and its more recent formulations. And here our discussion of the role of
history in MacIntyre's work returns us to the rejection of relativism.
Contrary to the relativist historicists, he holds that it is precisely through
the study of the history of rational debate that the timeless truth reveals
itself, and furthermore, he claims that this approach to reality is advocated
by Aquinas.
MacIntyre is aware that it will be objected that rational justification,
according to both Aristotle and Aquinas, is a matter of deducibility from
first principles, in the case of derived propositions, and of the self-evidence
of these first principles -as necessary truths.
MacIntyre responds that this objection fails to recognize the difference
between rational justification within a science and the rational justification
of the sciences. It is only the former sort of justification that proceeds by
way of deduction and self-evidence.
Rational justification within a perfected science is indeed a matter of
demonstrating how derivative truths follow from the first truths of that
particular science, in some types of case supplemented by additional
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premises; and the justification of the principles of a subordinate science by
some higher-order enquiry will be similarly demonstrative.28
As for the rational justification of the sciences, however, this method is
inadequate, for here we face disagreement about what is self-evident. But in
the face of this disagreement we are not to despair, for the intellect has the
capacity for dialectical as well as deductive reasoning. The passage quoted
above continues.
First principles themselves will be dialectically justifiable; their
evidentness consists in their recognizability, in the light of such dialectic, as
concerning what is the case per se, what attributes, for example, belong to
the essential nature of what constitutes the fundamental subject matter of the
science in question.
MacIntyre continues with the admission that there are some firstprinciples, such as the logical relations between wholes and parts that any
rational being must find undeniable. But these alone will not be sufficient to
provide the necessary basis for the deductive justification of the sciences.
The self-evident principles admitted by rival traditions of enquiry will
not be sufficient to settle the disputes between them. For disputes at such a
fundamental level there is no alternative but examination of the history of
thought on the disputed subject, an appreciation of the insights to be gained
from each of the rival modes of enquiry, and an attempt to find a place in
one's own tradition for the truths formulated in the rival tradition.
In this way, we find suggestions in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
for a programme which would lead to the development of Islamic thought,
and whose successful completion would result in the revival and vindication
of its traditions of enquiry in the international marketplace of ideas Islamic
centres of learning, God willing!
References
1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). The translation of this work into Farsi by
Mr. Shomali and Mr. Shahriari is near completion. A lengthy serialized review by the
translators continues to appear in Ma'rifat. The translation of whose Justice? Which
Rationality? Into Farsi is being undertaken by Mr. Mustafa Malikiyan.
2. Lawrence Becker, ed. Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 543
3. See Peter McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (London: Rutledge,
1994), and After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed.,
John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
4. Communitarians emphasize the importance of reference to one's community in
accounts of the self, moral agency and practical reasoning; and they advocate a politics
designed to nourish the community and its values at the expense of individual autonomy
and liberal rights. More will be said about MacIntyre's rejection of communitarianism later
in this review.
5. The most important defense of political liberalism in the twentieth century is Harvard
professor John Rawls'. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
6. In his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
7. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 169.
8. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 363.
9. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 366
10. Ibid.
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11. See John Haldane, “MacIntyre's Thomist Revival: What Next?” in After MacIntyre,
pp. 96-99, and MacIntyre's response in the same volume, pp. 294-297. Haldane is Director
of the Center for Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St. Andrews.
12. Whose Justice? Which Rationality, p. 368.
13. Thomas McCarthy, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in David Couzens Hoy and
Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 47. McCarthy is an
expert in contemporary German philosophy and social thought at Northwestern University.
14. See Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 356f.
15. After MacIntyre, p. 297 298. Here Madntyre is responding to the Hegel scholar,
Robert Stern of the University of Sheffield.
16. Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), p.
35. Beiner is a political philosopher at the University of Toronto.
17. See Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd ed.,
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
18. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1984), p. 124.
19. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 396.
20. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 398.
21. For a critique of unrestrained development by the Muslim American scholar of
tasawwuf, William Chittick, see his “Toward a Theology of Development,” Echo of Islam,
October 1994, the Farsi translation of which by Narjess Javandel appeared in Marifat, No.
14, pp. 40-49.
22. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 112.16. Ronald Beiner, What's the
Matter with Liberalism? p. 164.
23. After MacIntyre, p. 303.
24. Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre in the American Philosopher, Giovanna Borradori
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 151.
25. After Virtue, p. 263. There he writes, “What matters at this stage is the construction
of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be
sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the
virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without
grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
26. MacIntyre admits his neglect of Islam, despite its importance, “not only for its own
sake but also because of its large contribution to the Aristotelian tradition,” in the first
chapter of nose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 11.
27. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1984).
28. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? p. 173.
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