Compact Magazine has published, as an essay, the introduction the eminent French thinker Pierre Manent has penned for a French intellectual biography of Alasdair MacIntyre. Pleased to say, my friend Nathan Pinkoski has translated it into English for Notre Dame. I give you a few quotes. The beginning, a beautiful statement of an obvious problem we tend to ignore:
Liberalism, that’s the enemy! Thus we could summarize the opinion that, in a diffuse & insistent way, inspires the works of those who offer their views on our political, social, & economic situation. At the same time, we agree to recognize that the alternatives to liberalism have lost all credibility. Never has a principle organizing human association been more criticized while triumphant, or more triumphant while discredited. What should we make of this enigma? We need not look for the answer either in the particularity of circumstances or in the universal character of human dissatisfaction. Surely it is liberalism itself that supplies the best explanation of its strange situation in opinion. But how do we conduct this enquiry into liberalism? Must we reconstitute liberalism’s intellectual history? Or its political history? Or that of its social and moral effects, direct & indirect?
Manent’s praise of MacIntyre:
Before “taking a stand” in society & in history, & in order to do it wisely, we need in the first place to recover the understanding of what it is to act. & good action will then appear in the first place as completed action, as that which best fulfills the nature of action. We should be grateful to MacIntyre for identifying the central lacuna in our approach to the human world—namely, our inadequate understanding of human action & our reason’s abandonment of its “practical” register. First, we must understand what acting means!
Finally, some criticism:
We find the strength & weakness of MacIntyre’s approach in his recourse to a philosophy of man as a “social animal,” disdaining real interest in man as a “political animal.”
We understand how this mutilated Aristotle comes to serve the oppositional political posture from which MacIntyre has never departed. MacIntyre is always “for” the subpolitical community threatened by the political community that rises in power, & “against” the latter. Caught between the sovereignty of the individual & that of the nation-state, the local community—fishermen’s village, craftsmen’s guild, Benedictine monastery—always incorporates the sana pars of human practice, or is the place where this practice takes refuge. MacIntyre’s contribution to the analysis of the life of practice & his phenomenology of the good as “internal” to a practice (therefore incommensurable with the criteria of “money” or “rights”) are often highly incisive. But what is the ultimate validity of a conception of the human world that, in the name of practice, evacuates the human world of its political part?
Read the whole thing, you will find a Tocquevillian praise of American society & some thoughts on how to retrieve Aristotle’s political teaching, surely the most important task for intelligent conservatives! The translator, Nathan Pinkoski, also gave a very good interview to Notre Dame Press about the translation, which I commend to our readers. Perhaps our own C.J. Wolfe & Paul Seaton, or perhaps Dan Mahoney, will comment on MacIntyre & Manent’s criticism.
Thanks for this.
MacIntyrean types amp-up the sections of Aristotle's political/ethical writings that are the most theoretical and universalist, and which can be made to fit with their anti--capital-L--liberalism hobby horse points. The places where Aristotle dips into the details of governance and shades of regime classification, or even alludes to the impact of specific political actors, and thus partially joins the kind of thinking about the Polis and other political entities engaged in by Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, etc., are ignored. Ignored, in part, because they reveal the tragic paradoxes of polis life. Rightly understood, Plato is part, a key part, of that tradition also.