Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography

Will liberalism survive? Should it? There may be no philosopher more widely associated with these questions than Alasdair MacIntyre, and a new generation of antiliberals has claimed his mantle. It is an opportune moment, then, for the recent translation of Perreau-Saussine's intellectual biography, originally published in 2005. The author describes the book as “a way to outline the biography of a problem.” That problem is liberalism and its discontents.Perreau-Saussine offers three ways into the problem — through the politics of the New Left, the moral philosophy of mid-twentieth-century Oxford, and the secularism that emerged in response to the Wars of Religion. In each case, he shows what MacIntyre diagnoses as the ills of modernity: A conception of the person and of liberty that secures individual freedom while undermining the shared norms and narratives that help people discern what to use their freedom for (that is, what ends are worthy of pursuit).The book is a serious engagement with MacIntyre's criticism of liberalism, and it situates the turns of his thought among the major intellectual currents of the twentieth century, but it rarely delves into the practical life of the man. Fair enough: This is an intellectual biography. But with the exception of the chapter on politics, which breezes through MacIntyre's brief affiliations with Marxist organizations and publications of the 1950s and 1960s, the book tells us little about the concrete social practices and communities in which the great theorist of tradition was himself embedded and on which he based his sweeping judgments about liberalism.MacIntyre theorized tradition as the necessary context in which one's choices could make sense. But real-world social practices and communities, unlike idealized traditions, are never as coherent or unambiguous as our theories and theologies suggest they might be. They rarely eliminate the need to make the sorts of choices about what to do or how to live that render moral, religious, and political life complex and full of conflict. It is too easy to blame liberalism for such conflicts, when actually they are liable to appear in any community of finite and fallible human beings. Whether people are able to cope with the conflicts that inevitably arise has less to do with whether they have a shared conception of the good and more to do with what sorts of relationships, practices, and institutions they have in place.Given the political impact of MacIntyre's antiliberalism, it matters what particular practices and communities his assessment of our ethical and political life was grounded in. And it matters if his idea of tradition has ever existed anywhere outside of ideal theory or theology. Perreau-Saussine wrote Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography twenty years ago, when a liberal framework of rights and freedoms could still be taken for granted as the ideal of governance in much of Europe and the United States. No longer. Perreau-Saussine's conclusion, then, that “liberalism only lasts if we periodically counter it with our objections” — a conclusion intended to temper MacInytre's own — now strikes me as too meager. The objections rule the day. The criticism of liberalism has been met with the embrace of authoritarianism, the diminishment of the rights and freedoms of many, and the expansion of the power and wealth of a few. And these changes are justified in the name of a “tradition,” a nation narrowly conceived, and a “common good” that is not good at all for the vast majority of people. If MacIntyre is the moral philosopher of the moment, as so many of his eulogists insist, then so much the worse for us.