PART THREE—
CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
4—
The Tradition of Political Theory as Political Instruction
One of the most trenchant critics of political theory in its contemporary manifestations is Allan Bloom. In The Closing of the American Mind , published in 1987 to wide critical acclaim, Bloom synthesized arguments he has been advancing for some years into a relentless critique of modernity as illuminated by the problems of American universities. He is committed to counterposing to contemporary political theory a particular view of the tradition of political philosophy that, he believes, contains forgotten insights about politics and human nature, insights that are essential to understanding our contemporary problems. Bloom's view of the tradition is derived from the teaching and writing of Leo Strauss, and his arguments can be understood only in the context of that commitment. But Bloom's mode of argument and its characteristic insights and difficulties are of more general interest and come into central focus whenever the authority of a canon of texts is appealed to as a source of critical standards for evaluating conventional political and cultural practices.
To include a discussion of so radical an anticonventionalist and antihistoricist as Bloom in an analysis of appeals to context and history in contemporary political theory might seem odd, but to take this view would be to miss noteworthy dimensions of his argument. Certainly Bloom, with his avowedly premodern moral and political predilections, would reject out of hand the postmodern inclination to abandon concern with foundational questions. Indeed, he would likely see this suggestion as but one more instance of the nihilism inherent in the modernist project. But as I explain below, his analysis of that project is intended to render problematical the Enlightenment aspiration of grounding politics on reason in a way that is instructively compared with Rorty's. In at least some of its formulations, Bloom's historical argument is an attempt to show
that the Enlightenment project was deeply misguided and to explain why it issues in our time in arguments like Rawls's. Bloom shares a radical antimodernism with the postmodernists, then, even if he draws different conclusions from it.
I. Bloom's View: Exposition
Bloom's attack on contemporary political theory is rooted in what he sees as its failure to come to terms with the crisis of modern culture. Just what that crisis consists in will concern us shortly; note for now that in the intellectual world it is reflected in, and to a degree caused by, a thorough ignorance of the Western tradition of political philosophy. This ignorance leads contemporary theorists to miss the fundamental insights of the masters who make up that tradition and to lose sight of the fundamental problems of political philosophy. Both of these deficiencies are, for Bloom, epitomized in Rawls's A Theory of Justice , which takes for granted a fundamental premise of moral and political equality. Rawls's book "begins by dismissing discussion of its egalitarian premise. It is only an analysis of what an egalitarian society should be, if you accept that equality is just" (Bloom 1980: 120; see also Bloom 1975a: 654–57).
(i) The Crisis of Modernity
The precise nature of Bloom's alleged crisis of modernity is difficult to pin down, although it centers on the breakdown of extrinsic conceptions of the good following the Enlightenment, the rise of historical consciousness, and a view of the decline of Western culture identified most famously by Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History . Strauss conceived of "three waves of modernity," which Bloom describes as "modern natural right, prepared by Machiavelli and developed by Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, and Locke; the crisis of modern natural right and the emergence of history, begun by Rousseau and elaborated by Kant and Hegel; [and] radical historicism, begun by Nietzsche and culminating in Heidegger." Each of these waves "began with a Greek inspiration, but these returns were only partial and ended in a radicalization of modernity" (Bloom 1974a: 384).
In The Closing of the American Mind , Bloom elaborates on this account. His basic distinction between ancients and moderns is that the former were convinced that political institutions could not be based on reason, while the latter thought that they could. For the ancients contemplation was seen as the highest form of life, and those who engaged in it must first and foremost ensure that prevailing political conditions allow it
to be engaged in. The difficulty, as Socrates discovered, is that the philosopher's commitment to truth makes him seem politically dangerous to most people because it leads him to question the opinions on which their institutions rest. The ancient philosophers therefore allied themselves to "the gentlemen" who did not fully understand the philosopher but could "glimpse something noble in him," those who voted for Socrates's acquittal for example. Because there was no hope of philosophers actually leading society, Bloom, following Strauss, holds that in, The Republic Plato was actually intent on demonstrating the impossibility of an ideal city rather than advocating one[1] the philosophers must humor the gentlemen to get their support, "making themselves useful to them, never quite revealing themselves to them, strengthening their gentleness and openness." The gentlemen exhibit this openness because" they have money and hence leisure and can appreciate the beautiful and useless" and because "they despise necessity." The ancient philosophers capitalized on this, realizing that philosophy's best response to the ever-present possibility of a hostile civil society was" an educational endeavor, rather more poetic or rhetorical than philosophic, the purpose of which is to temper the passions of gentlemen's souls." The ancient philosophers were "to a man proponents of aristocratic politics, but not for the reasons intellectual historians are wont to ascribe to them." They believed in principle that reason should rule and that only philosophers can be fully devoted to reason. But this was "just a theoretical argument" because philosophers can never rule; thus the ancient philosophers "were aristocratic in the vulgar sense, favoring the power of those possessing old wealth, because such men are more likely to grasp the nobility of philosophy as an end itself, if not to understand it" (Bloom 1987: 275–77, 279, 281, 284).
The moderns appeared to reject this logic for the more ambitious view that reason could be made to reign in politics. The Enlightenment thinkers "understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective." Philosophy, he announced, "can be used to conquer fortune," and it was this expectation that grounded the Cartesian and Hobbesian scientific projects of the seventeenth century, issuing in the doctrines of the social contract
[1] This is perhaps the most problematical of all Strauss's interpretive claims—endorsed by Bloom in his translation of The Republic as well as The Closing of the American Mind —because it undercuts the claim that the ancients were in basic agreement on this question. Aristotle clearly interpreted Plato to be arguing what he appeared to be arguing (and disagreed with it) rather than the opposite, which Strauss and Bloom attribute to him. See Miles F. Burnyeat (1985: 30–36) and Nussbaum (1987: 20–26). For an extended critique of Bloom's and Strauss's readings of Plato, see Klosko (1986: 275–93).
that decisively shaped the modern West. These doctrines rested on a notion of individual natural rights that are "nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which it emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and the fear of divine punishment" (ibid.: 263, 286, 287).
The most basic and universal source of human motivation was understood to be the fear of death; thus the life-preserving passions "act as the premises of moral and political reasoning." It was in attempting to base politics on them that Machiavelli "blamed the old writers for building imaginary principalities and republics that neglect how men actually live in favor of how they ought to live." He argued instead that princes and philosophers alike should "accommodate themselves to the dominant passions." As a result of embracing this injunction, the philosophers "switched parties from the aristocratic to the democratic." They now assumed that the people, "who were by definition uneducated and the seat of prejudice," could be educated if we changed our expectations about education and came to see it not as "experience of things beautiful" but rather as "enlightened self-interest" (ibid.: 287–88, 285–86, 288).
Yet the Enlightenment philosophers "had no illusions about democracy" and knew they were "substituting one kind of misunderstanding for another" because they did not believe that there could be a unity of theory and practice. They were "as much philosophers as were the ancients" because they "were perfectly conscious of what separates them from all other men." This gulf, they knew, could not be bridged. Their new posture toward politics was more daring because of the expectations it could engender from politics. From the Enlightenment onward the issue, Bloom tells us, is this: "Does a society based on reason necessarily make unreasonable demands on reason, or does it approach more closely to reason and submit to the ministrations of the reasonable?" The danger, once "politics has been theoreticized and philosophy politicized," is that "there is no theory and no practice" and that the "distinction between the eternal and the temporal" is overcome. This result of the Enlightenment may not have been inevitable and "goes counter to the intentions of the Enlighteners," but it decisively shaped the politics of modernity (ibid.: 289, 290–91).
Modernity is largely of these philosophers' making, and our self-awareness depends on understanding what they wanted to do and what they did do, grasping thus why our situation is different from all other situations…. Whether it is called liberal democracy or bourgeois society, whether the regime of the rights of man or that of
acquisitiveness, whether technology is used in a positive or a negative sense, everyone knows that these terms describe the central aspects of our world. They are demonstrably the results of the thought of a small group of men with deep insight into the nature of things, who collaborated in an enterprise the success of which is almost beyond belief. (Ibid.: 292, 293)
In Bloom's view the Enlightenment view of science and the rights-based theory of contract were the heart of the American constitutional experiment. The United States "is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature." We are a people founded on "rational principles of natural right," the core commitment of which is "uniting the good with one's own" (ibid.: 39).
Bloom's sense of crisis has a more immediate dimension rooted in developments since the 1960s and particularly in what he takes to be the triumph of egalitarian ideals, initially in the student movement and more generally as its generation achieved positions of power in dominant institutions. The "old view" of the American melting pot implied that "class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers," but the 1960s were fundamentally about rejecting this notion. That era generated an "openness" that "pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive." The "movement away from rights to openness" promoted a kind of "cultural relativism." Democracy and liberalism were detached from their natural rights foundation, and students were taught "that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress." John Rawls's argument that all are equally worthy of self-esteem "is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone" (ibid.: 27, 28–29, 30).
For the founders, minorities were "in general bad things, mostly identical to factions, selfish groups who have no concern as such for the common good," but today they are given a legitimate, even special, status. The new openness was "designed to provide a respectable place for these 'groups' or 'minorities'—to wrest respect from those who were not disposed to give it—and to weaken the sense of superiority of the dominant majority." Yet, Bloom argues, the dominant majority "gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions."
Thus although the early civil rights movement operated within the dominant traditions of American politics and could thereby charge whites "not only with the most monstrous injustices but also with contradicting their own most sacred principles," by the late 1960s separatists like the black power movement were rejecting the principles of the American regime and the melting pot ethos as racist and demanding black identity, not universal rights (ibid.: 31, 32–33).
Since the 1960s an "egalitarian effervescence" has permeated establishment institutions, turning the movement for equality of opportunity into a relentless drive for substantive equality. The triumph of this "McCarthyism of the Left" has meant that "a whole range of thought about the alternatives for man has vanished." Indeed, for Bloom the 1960s were far more damaging to American universities than the 1950s, when McCarthyism—which was so patently antiacademic—gave universities a "sense of community, defined by a common enemy" that has since been lost. By contrast the 1960s were the American Weimar, defined by the ethos that commitment is "profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old." The 1960s were "an exercise in egalitarian self-satisfaction that wiped out the elements of the university curriculum that did not flatter our peculiar passions or tastes of the moment." This led to the destruction of the European traditions on which so much of the curriculum had been based, so that the "longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young." We are doomed to an egalitarian mire, and its influence penetrates so deeply that the prospects for change are minuscule (Bloom 1974b: 63–64; 1987: 324, 314, 320, 145).
The 1960s should, however, be understood as the culmination of a long decline. For at least half a century the "unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage" has been under attack. Carl Becker's economic analysis of the Declaration of Independence, Dewey's pragmatism, and "Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety" all treated the past "as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present." These works are geared toward "trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes." The New Left is yet another instance of this delegitimation, for "the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist" (Bloom 1987: 55–57).
Although the current generation of students is bored, docile, and narrowly instrumentalist, it is the unwitting inheritor of the actions of its
predecessors. Students now take for granted the routinized, unthinking egalitarianism that has made it impossible for universities to pursue genuinely educational ends. The liberal arts are now the "decaying rump of the university," the social sciences are governed by the search for ever more deterministic explanations of human action, and philosophy, understood as the search for objective standards of truth and justice, "is not only not practiced, its very possibility is denied." No wonder our students are led "by force or interest": we teach them nothing else, and we fail to inspire them even to consider other possibilities (Bloom 1974b: 65, 63).
Central to the more general diagnosis of the crisis of the West to which Bloom subscribes is the rise of historicism, relativism, nihilism, and subjectivism, terms that have more frequently been strung together as poignant symbols of contemporary evil than analyzed or even distinguished from one another by Strauss and his followers, a deficiency for which they have, with some justice, been criticized.[2] But the main claim appears to be that the very possibility of objective judgments about the good is foreclosed in contemporary culture and by its dominant intellectual spokesmen, that "the modern historical consciousness has engendered a general skepticism about the truth of all 'world views,' except for that one of which it is itself a product" (Bloom 1968: viii). The very possibility of political philosophy—understood as the search for objectively valid moral judgments—"is doubted, nay denied, by the most powerful movements of contemporary thought. And that crisis is identical with the crisis of the West, because the crisis of the West is a crisis of belief—belief in the justice of our principles" (Bloom 1980: 113–14).
The tenor of much of Bloom's writing suggests that this problem may be beyond resolution, for he believes that the only hope lies in a return to the study of the texts of the tradition we have forgotten. Our thought and politics "have become inextricably bound up with the universities," yet we are ignorant of the intellectual developments that have played so large a part in the creation of our circumstances. "To return to the reasons behind our language and weigh them against the reasons for other language would in itself liberate us"; as a result Bloom sees his appeal to tradition as providing "the outline of an archeology of our souls as they are" (Bloom 1987: 382, 239). Returning to the texts of tradition may enable us to break out of the "circle of subjectivism" in which contemporary culture is trapped (Bloom 1980: 127; 1975a: 662).
[2] Thus Bloom's declaration: "Science's latest attempts to grasp the human situation—cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme" (Bloom 1987: 38–39). See also Strauss (1953: 1–80).
(ii) Philosophical Prescriptions
The peculiar horror of modern tyranny has been its alliance with "perverted philosophy," Bloom remarks in reference to the fates of the writings of Rousseau and Nietzsche. Rousseau did not cause the Reign of Terror or Nietzsche the Nazis, "but there was something in what they said and the way they said it which made it possible for them to be misinterpreted in certain politically relevant ways." Because Strauss had a "respect for speech and its power," he exercised self-restraint (ibid.: 387, 388–89). Yet it is not simply the self-restrained and disinterested pursuit of truth that impresses Bloom but that this pursuit is conducted via the study of the greats making up the tradition of political philosophy.
Central to his conception is the view that the writings of the greats are part of a single tradition defined by common preoccupations. "Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic," he tells us, "man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul, expressed in the opposition between desire and virtue. In principle he was supposed to long to be all virtue, to break free from the chains of bodily desire." It was in reaction against this central preoccupation that the moderns defined their concerns. Machiavelli "turned things upside down" by arguing that happiness could be achieved in this life (which the ancients had denied), and building on this, Hobbes "blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul)." This move informed Locke's philosophy and Rousseau's critique of the early contract theorists; the "psychology of the self" became and remained the central problem of political philosophy (Bloom 1987: 174, 175, 178–79). Although the moderns rejected the assumption of the ancients that philosophy and politics could never be combined, even this rejection indicates a basic "unity of the tradition." The Enlightenment was "an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents." The modern attacks on academic institutions "made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him" (ibid.: 267–68).
Perhaps Strauss's greatest achievement, for Bloom, was that he "addressed himself to the whole tradition." He "liberated himself" from the misleading glosses of contemporary commentators "and could understand writers as they understood themselves. He talked with them as one would talk with a wise and subtle contemporary about the nature of things." The
proof that Strauss had achieved this understanding of the tradition is his "late writings read in conjunction with those writings about which he wrote." Although they are difficult for us to grasp, they are simple in form and expression because they penetrate to fundamentals, and although this simplicity earned him something of a reputation for innocence, he rather enjoyed the label because it "meant that he had in some measure succeeded in recovering the surface of things" (Bloom 1974a: 384–85).
(iii) Practical Prescriptions
An irreducible sense of political despair permeates Bloom's diagnosis. Neither The Closing of the American Mind nor any of Bloom's other writings contain any practical injunctions beyond a plea for the reading of old books, and Bloom's despairing tone often implies that we may well be beyond salvation. Although a liberal education is intended to open the young to the possibilities from the past, our students cannot hear its message. "As long as they have the Walkman they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say." Yet, "after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf" (Bloom 1987: 81).
The general purpose of appealing to the tradition is to get us to see that what we take for granted can and should be questioned, as it was in the past, and that the possibility of a neoclassical politics in the contemporary world should not be discounted. There is an apparent tension between this appeal to the tradition—on its face remarkably un-Greek—and Bloom's affirmation of classical Greek values. Strauss's view on this subject is a matter of some dispute among both followers and critics, but it seems clear that although the ultimate goal may be to practice Platonic philosophy—unbounded by tradition—to discover and contemplate the truth about the nature of things, we must first return to the tradition that modern thinkers in the wake of Machiavelli have abandoned. This is why, for Strauss, philosophy and history are inseparable.[3]
From the standpoint of practical prescriptions, however, this view has to be qualified in two respects, both deriving from most people having neither the intellectual capacity nor the education to tread this difficult path. The first concerns one of Strauss's most contentious claims: that because only a tiny minority of philosophers can grasp philosophical truth, it is hopeless to try to found politics on reason. A reverence for tradition should be instilled in the rest of us not because "the tradition" can provide rational philosophical foundations for political institutions—ultimately
[3] See Gunnell (1978: 122–34; 1985: 339–61), Drury (1985: 315–37), and Tarcov (1983: 5–29).
it cannot—but because society must inevitably rest on some opinion.
Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about "all things" by knowledge of "all things"; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes, and thus it endangers society. Hence philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small minority, and philosophers or scientists must respect the opinions on which society rests. (Strauss 1959: 221–22)
This reasoning generated Strauss's distinction between esoteric and exoteric writing. When communicating with one another, philosophers should (and do) employ various literary devices to obscure their meanings, lest what they say undermine the opinion on which society rests. They "will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to very careful and well-trained readers after long and concentrated study" (ibid.: 222). It is always disguised by what Bloom (1987: 279) refers to as the "gentle art of deception."
Even when modern philosophers allied themselves with the claims of democracy, "they were substituting one kind of misunderstanding for another." Despite their claims to be founding politics on a rational fear of death, the moderns knew "that the rational, calculating, economic man seeks immortality just as irrationally as, or even more so than, the man who hopes for eternal fame or for another life." For this reason the great modern philosophers were "as much philosophers as were the ancients." They knew "that their connection with other men would always be mediated by unreason" (ibid.: 289–90).
There is a tension, then, between revealing the truth and the requirements of society. For Strauss, because social science reveals and stresses the "arbitrary character of the basic assumptions underlying any given society," he thought it politically dangerous: "if I know that the principles of liberal democracy are not intrinsically superior to the principles of communism or fascism, I am incapable of wholehearted commitment to liberal democracy" (Strauss 1959: 222). Despite Strauss and his followers' railings against the relativism of modernity, there is thus a significant sense in which they are indifferent to the nature of the regime, as long as it is not hostile to philosophy. Notwithstanding all the talk about objective values in the tradition, then, the exoteric message is conceived of instrumentally
and is, ironically, basically conventionalist in nature, even if part of what makes the exoteric message effective requires denying that this is the case.
It is less than clear what the exoteric message should be when it is believed that a society is in foundational crisis. This unclarity is reflected within the Straussian movement in disagreements over whether and how to become involved in day-to-day politics and whether to affirm or attack the principles of liberal democracy. Some, like Nathan Tarcov, hold that Strauss's argument was not that liberal democracy is itself pernicious but that it has been undermined. It is not "modern liberalism but loss of confidence in it [that] constitutes the crisis." In this view Strauss's purpose "is not to undercut liberalism practically but to find a theoretical solution to the problem posed by its having already been undercut" (Tarcov 1983: 9). If this is so, exoteric teaching should, presumably, be geared toward restoring confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Bloom's view is at once more radical and more conservative. He thinks that instilling the values that he perceives to be central to the tradition offers the only possible escape from the ever-increasing excesses of liberal democracy and the seemingly relentless drive toward substantive equality.
Bloom is aware that most people, even most intellectuals, do not study what he conceives the tradition to be. His work with Harry Jaffa on Shakespeare was in part motivated by this realization, for although "the most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and their imagination," Shakespeare's plays and poetry continue to be read and might in principle be used as a source of public morality. In the past Shakespeare has provided that common understanding; he was recognized as a great author and constantly returned to as a source of meaning and value. Marlborough, for instance, said that he "had formed his understanding of English history from Shakespeare alone." Although a revival of such reverence is unlikely, "Shakespeare could still be the source of education and provide the necessary lessons concerning human virtue and the proper aspirations of a noble life," for he "is respected in our tradition, and he is of our language" (Bloom and Jaffa 1964: 1–2).[4]
[4] To perform this role, however, Shakespeare must be rescued from the new post-Romantic critics, who deny that poets had intentions that we can discover or teachings that are pertinent to our circumstances. Shakespeare needs to be read naively because "he shows most vividly and comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens, [and so] can move the souls of his readers, and they recognize that they understand life better because they have read him; he hence becomes a constant guide and companion" (Bloom and Jaffa 1964: 2–3).
II. Bloom's View: Four Difficulties
Later in this book we will see that Bloom's suspicion that no system of political institutions can in the end be shown to rest on rational foundations merits serious attention, as does his claim that the central task of political philosophy is to discover and articulate the truth. But these insights do not have the implications that Bloom would have us believe they do, and they must be extracted from four unpersuasive aspects of his analysis. These aspects concern Bloom's diagnosis of our circumstances, his identification and description of the tradition, his assumptions about interpretation, and his prescriptions.
(i) Diagnosis
If the difficulties we confronted in Rorty's discussion of postmodernism in chapter 2 revolved around his uncritical endorsement of the prevailing institutions in contemporary American culture, with Bloom we confront an opposite problem: his attitude toward every manifestation of modernity is so unrelentingly negative that it, too, precludes any useful critical argument. Like Rorty's postmodernism, Bloom's antimodernism leaves us without any satisfying critical purchase on contemporary political reality or argument. Why is this?
The first reason is that Bloom does not offer a single diagnosis. He oscillates between the claim with which he begins The Closing of the American Mind —that departures from the natural rights philosophy of the founding fathers have fatally undermined liberal democracy—and the claim that the founding principles were themselves flawed and contained the seeds of their own destruction. Bloom tells us first that the melting pot ideal and its eschewal of factions was a great strength of the founders and that the rejection of "integrationism" as "just an ideology for whites and Uncle Toms" was thus the most damaging aspect of the 1960s because it created a separatist ideology that has now been institutionalized in the practice of affirmative action. We are told that Locke's ideas were abused at Cornell and elsewhere in the 1960s; "under pressure from students the Founding was understood to be racist, and the very instrument that condemned slavery and racism was broken." After that, "the theory of the rights of man was no longer studied or really believed," and as a result "its practice also suffered" (Bloom 1987: 31, 94–96, 318–19, 335).
Yet in many places Bloom insists that the Lockean principles, on which he takes the American regime to have been based, have always been flawed. In this mood Bloom endorses Tocqueville's dictum that "in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself," and argues that although this preoccupation
with self has intensified in recent years, it is the manifestation of an "inevitable individualism, endemic to our regime." Whereas he previously complained that the separatist ethos of black power and affirmative action was destructive because it was inimical to the basic Lockean principle of equal natural rights, Bloom subsequently regrets the destruction of ethnic difference. Although an Italian immigrant in 1920 lived a life that "was by necessity and choice Italian, and he lived with Italians," Bloom bemoans the egalitarianism that mandates that the immigrant's grandson at Harvard will be friends with individuals he likes independent of their ethnicity. His "sexual attractions, and hence his marriage, will not be influenced by his national origin or even by his traditional Catholicism." On this telling the principles of the regime are themselves flawed. Thus Bloom endorses Nietzsche's argument that modern democracy (rather than its perversion) is at fault, that its "rationalism and its egalitarianism are the contrary of creativity" (ibid.: 66, 86, 88, 97, 143).
Bloom's oscillations between these two diagnoses seem to explain his schizoid attitude toward American values. He complains bitterly in many places that we have lost pride in our ethnocentricity and argues repeatedly that this loss is contributing to the fragmentation of American culture. Yet elsewhere his account oozes with antipathy for all things American; in these formulations the problem appears to be that we have lost touch with European culture. The Europeans are said to produce children with "a vastly more sophisticated knowledge of the human heart than we are accustomed to." We are repeatedly told that we lack cultural depth, as is shown by the fact that it is "possible to become an American in a day"; we are incapable of the "collective consciousness" to which a "high work of art" like Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk is directed (ibid.: 47, 53, 54, 97).
A second defect in Bloom's diagnosis concerns the sheer generality of his attack on all Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, institutions, practices, ideals, and conflicts. His assault on modernity is conducted from such a great height, with so little reference to its constituting detail, that it is irrelevant to the concerns of almost all contemporary political agents. To some extent this is unavoidable for Bloom because his thesis is that most people live in an ideological frame of reference that prevents their even perceiving the genuine questions of politics. To the charge that he fails to speak to their concerns, then, is the natural response that they have the wrong concerns, that they assume away all the interesting and important questions, and that it would be to abdicate the basic purpose of political philosophy as Bloom sees it to forsake his terrain for theirs.[5]
[5] It is amusingly ironic that a book with this message has climbed the nonfiction bestseller lists and catapulted its author to national prominence.
One suspects that Bloom does not particularly care whether his arguments have a lasting impact, indeed he might even consider such success a sure sign of their imminent corruption. Just as he finds reticence to publish impressive in others, so in his own work he may be more at home raging against modernity than seeking to influence it. Discrediting existing institutions from the standpoint of an ill-depicted but earnestly desired premodern past becomes an end in itself; there is no other point to Bloom's political commentary. In this regard he is more precisely termed reactionary than conservative, for the essence of conservatism lies in that which Burke and Tocqueville shared with Peel: the view that change and innovation should be countenanced to the extent needed to preserve existing institutions and practices with as much integrity as possible. It is a pragmatic and adaptive doctrine, sensitive to the demands of changing circumstances and conditions. For Bloom, by contrast, there seems to be nothing in the existing array of institutions and practices worth preserving: they are all objects of his alternating rage and scorn.
A third defect in Bloom's diagnosis derives from his implausible, if implicit, causal idealism. Despite the metaphorical talk about the waves of modernity, there is a notable lack of any identifiable causal argument in Bloom's account of our decline or in Strauss's discussion from which Bloom borrows. We are told that the modern Western systems of government are "surely a result" of the Enlightenment, that "modernity is largely of these philosophers' making" (ibid.: 291, 293), without being told how this happened. It is unclear whether the rise of historical consciousness, the emergence of "modern natural right," the three waves of modernity, or the growth of contemporary "relativism" and "nihilism" are the causes of changes in contemporary culture (in which case one wonders how) or the results of some other causal processes (in which case one wonders what these were).
Even the nature of the alleged changes is difficult to pin down. Although at the outset of The Closing of the American Mind Bloom denies that he intends to say that "things were wonderful in the past" or that "any comparison with the past [is] to be used as grounds for congratulating or blaming ourselves" (Bloom 1987: 22), almost every subsequent page effectively refutes this claim. "Parents do not have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World," he laments in his remarks on the family. The decline of the family has resulted "in nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it." Our loss of faith in the Bible and all equivalent moral texts has led to a "gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes in the souls of the young." In the educational developments of the last half-century there has been a "fudging of the
distinction between liberal and technical education." Our students have "lost the practice of and the taste for reading"; they are so ignorant that we are "long past the age when a whole tradition could be stored up in all students" because the "old teachers who loved Shakespeare or Austen or Donne, and whose only reward for teaching was the perpetuation of their taste, have all but disappeared." In the world of music we are told that the "romanticism that had dominated serious music since Beethoven appealed to refinements—perhaps overrefinements—of sentiments that are hardly to be found in the contemporary world."
Today, by contrast, we are asked to picture a thirteen-year-old doing his homework, wearing a Walkman, or watching MTV. He is nothing more than a "pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." We are told repeatedly that our civilization is "weak and exhausted," that we have become deaf to what "the great tradition has to say," that our families and communities and traditions "have been rationalized and have lost their compelling force," that the human political impulse has been "so attenuated by modernity that it is hardly experienced," and that "the administrative state … has replaced politics." Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are "not what they used to be—the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy" (ibid.: 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–65, 70, 75, 76, 79, 81, 85, 89). And so on.
For Bloom to introduce these claims (a small subset of his idealizations of the past) with the denial that he intends any moralizing about the present is disingenuous. To the extent that it is possible to pin him down, he seems to be an idealist in the classical sense, that is, he believes that ideas shape institutions, that corrupt ideas corrupt institutions, and that the only potential for liberation from corrupt institutions lies in returning to uncorrupted ideas. It is characteristic of idealist appeals of this kind that the Golden Age is more a point of theoretical reference than any historical society, or even set of beliefs about society, that can be depicted in a systematic way, let alone substantiated with even illustrative evidence. Yet this fact is scarcely an argument for acceptance of those appeals. In Bloom's case, the failure to supply even the rudiments of a defensible causal account of the decline that he insists has occurred means that he is unlikely to persuade anyone who is even mildly skeptical of his thesis.
(ii) Parochialism in Identifying the Tradition
Whereas Marxists identify the texts canonized in traditions as making up or reflecting a dominant ideology, for Bloom they are the key to liberating
us from it, not in the sense that we can come to perceive a hold they had on us of which we were previously unaware but rather in that they contain forgotten truths that we need to relearn. But what is the tradition to which we must open ourselves? As Bloom himself frames the dilemma, "Who are these men to whom such reverent attention should be paid?" How do we find out who they are, especially when Bloom is arguing "that we are in large measure ignorant about what we need to know" (Bloom 1980: 123)?
Bloom supplies two answers. The first, which he admits to be less than entirely adequate given the nature of his complaints against prevailing consensual values, is to appeal to (an unidentified) consensus: "One can begin from the general agreement about who the great philosophers were, especially the farther away they are in time," when fads have "dissipated" (ibid.). Yet it is difficult to see how this constitutes even a beginning for two reasons. First, if the ignorance of professional academics and establishment intellectuals concerning the fundamental problems of political theory is so complete and if their misreadings and misuses of the texts of the tradition are so pervasive, then it is difficult to imagine why their agreement concerning which texts constitute the tradition should be of any significance. It is dubious, second, that there is a consensus about the nature of the tradition over time and space, and it is at the very least true that when different establishments attribute canonical importance to certain writers, it is often for widely different reasons, as anyone who has worked in more than one philosophical tradition knows.[6]
Even within a single intellectual culture there are great variations over time and space. Hobbes, for instance, so pivotal in the Western tradition as perceived by political theorists, is a comparatively minor figure from the philosopher's standpoint, and the converse is true of Berkeley. Many others are discipline centric in this way: Tocqueville and Leibniz, Burke and Descartes, Montesquieu and Carnap. What then is the tradition? Even within a single academic establishment canonized figures displace one another as historiographical concerns change. Fads do not dissipate as Bloom suggests; preoccupations come and go that lead us to reread the past in
[6] For example, the undergraduate who studies philosophy and political theory in an English university will likely learn that there is a fundamental divide in the Western tradition or even that there are two major Western traditions: naturalist and antinaturalist, the first traceable to Aristotle and the Second to Plato. Yet the comparable American undergraduate is much more likely to be taught that the basic division is between ancients and moderns and will learn what Plato and Aristotle allegedly had in common. This difference goes a long way toward explaining the congenital inability of English intellectuals to take Straussian historiography seriously. See, for example, Burnyeat (1985: 30–36).
different ways for different purposes.[7] For instance, the current revival of interest in Bodin is mainly a result of the rediscovery of the state by political scientists; his writings are thought by some to shed light on the modern state's genesis. Does this mean that fads have now dissipated and Bodin is clearly part of the tradition or have we simply developed a different agenda that gives him a renewed relevance? What are we to make of the revival of interest in Tocqueville, whose works had been out of print in English for many years? To appeal to academic consensus as a way of identifying an enduring tradition of thought will not do. The most that could be said is that different figures are often thought to stand for various competing philosophical positions and that as these positions become relevant to contemporary debates their arguments are constantly invoked or attacked. Yet even this claim is questionable and would at least require a good deal of defending because writers like Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx have, at different times, been pressed into the service of virtually every imaginable political and intellectual causes.[8]
Bloom's "second and sounder criterion" for identifying the tradition derives from "what the thinkers say about one another." The essential claim here is that the greats of the tradition identify one another, that the "men of quality know the men of quality" (ibid.: 123–24).[9] Just how they are supposed to know them and how we are supposed to know that they know them are both exceedingly unclear. At times Bloom appears to think that the answer lies in an identity of views on the fundamental issues of political philosophy, superficial differences notwithstanding.[10] Yet he is aware that it would be absurd to posit general agreement on all fundamental issues of political philosophy among the various people he designates as greats and, indeed, he takes others to task for taking insufficient account of differences among these thinkers.[11] Bloom's claim appears to be that, although they do not agree on answers, what unites them and gives them their coherence as a tradition is their agreement on what the questions
[7] For a useful demonstration of how definition of the tradition can change, as a kind of "victor's history," see Kuklick (1984: 125–39).
[8] For a useful illustration of this, see Dickenson's (1976: 28–45) discussion of changing interpretations of Locke's views after 1688.
[9] See also Bloom (1987: 292) for a discussion of this thesis in connection with Rousseau, who, although he disagreed with the Enlightenment thinkers "in crucial respects," also allegedly knew that they were his "theoretical kin."
[10] Thus Bloom is impressed by Tocqueville's debt to Rousseau in his discussion of the role of virtue in egalitarian institutions. Although he does not argue that "Tocqueville is simply the same as Rousseau" he claims that "the more I think about it, the difficulty is more on the side of differentiating them than of assimilating them" (Bloom 1980: 137–39).
[11] See, for instance, Bloom (1975b: 573–76).
are. Even when they disagree, the underlying agreement on the terms in which their disagreement is cast is significant. Tocqueville's and Rousseau's alleged disagreements with "Hobbes and Locke" concerning whether civilized life is superior to man's natural state tells us something about the "crucial question" evaded by "modern thought." Hobbes's attack on Aristotle shows us that Aristotle "is the man to attack" (ibid.: 136, 123).
Yet it is difficult for two reasons to see how this kind of disagreement can be regarded as significant. First, Hobbes criticized many besides Aristotle who are not regarded by Bloom as greats: why is Aristotle singled out rather than the medieval scholastics or Coke or the many others that Hobbes explicitly or implicitly attacked? Why does Locke's First Treatise not reveal that Filmer is "the man to attack"? Bloom never explains the principles for selecting significant antagonists, which is a serious omission, for the notion that the greats identify one another even when they disagree cannot otherwise be salvaged. This aside, the authors Bloom identifies as making up the tradition do not agree on what the fundamental questions of politics are. To take his own example of Hobbes and Aristotle, it is surely beyond argument that for Hobbes the central issue of politics is power and that the central questions of his political theory deal with its nature, implications, and harnessing. Aristotle, by contrast, is mainly concerned with virtue in political communities, human potential, and a related set of issues that are difficult even to raise in Hobbes's mechanistic and nominalist conception of the world. Such differences may, if accurately described, illustrate that politics was thought about in fundamentally different terms in seventeenth-century England and in classical Greece, but they can indicate preoccupation with the same "permanent questions" only in the most trivial and attenuated sense. If Hobbes and Aristotle agree on the fundamental questions of political philosophy, so does everyone else.
Even among the moderns Bloom's is an exceedingly difficult case to make. Locke and Hegel, Rousseau and Mill can be argued to have had some common preoccupations from some points of view; but they differ so greatly in their views of history, method, human nature, and the purposes of politics that it is nonsense to identify them as constituting a tradition in virtue of their agreement on the permanent questions while professing fidelity to their intentions as the basic exegetical axiom. The same is surely true of the ancients, despite the heroic attempts by Strauss and his followers to minimize their differences and establish the identity of their concerns. We need not go all the way with Burnyeat's claim that Plato and Aristotle had nothing in common to hold that it only makes
sense to see them as making up a tradition from one of several possible points of view and to acknowledge that there are others.[12]
There is a deeper circularity to the claim that "the men of quality know the men of quality." If it takes one to know one, how can Bloom be sure of who the greats are and of who they are not? How can he be certain, for instance, that Rawls is not a new member of the tradition, or, put differently, supposing by hypothesis that he is, how could we find out? A case could certainly be made on the basis of all Bloom's exegetical tools, which he so obviously violates in reading Rawls. He accuses Rawls of taking egalitarianism for granted and thereby avoiding the central questions posed in the tradition of political philosophy. Yet a close reading of A Theory of Justice reveals a deep ambivalence on the subject of equality, and there is little in Rawls's argument that is necessarily egalitarian. Indeed, highly inegalitarian distributions of income and wealth, including in some circumstances regressive systems of taxation, are all consistent with his distributive maxims. Likewise on subjectivism, which Bloom regards as the bugbear of modern liberalism, Rawls is quite equivocal, and his concept of primary goods is intended to permit some objective or interpersonal moral judgments that ordinal conceptions of utility notoriously foreclose.[13]
One suspects, however, that it is not with the technicalities of the difference principle, reflective equilibrium, or primary goods that Bloom is concerned when he complains that Rawls takes egalitarian premises for granted but with Rawls's attempt to derive principles of justice from a fundamental (unquestioned) assumption of people's moral equality. Yet in this connection two points must be noted. First, such assumptions of moral equality fail, for Bloom, to disqualify Hobbes, Locke, and Kant from membership in what he takes the tradition to be, so why should it, in itself, disqualify Rawls? Second, a more subtle "Bloomian" reading of Rawls might be argued to reveal that he speaks in an egalitarian vernacular because it is impossible to do otherwise in contemporary America but that his esoteric message is that we should find ways to limit the egalitarian consequences of widely accepted egalitarian premises. This is a level of argument, it might be claimed, that "is not immediately accessible on the surface" of A Theory of Justice . We can only get at it "by way of ever-deepening reflection" on the book as it "relate[s] to the problems of the world." There is no "short cut to the initiation" into this alleged deeper purpose of Rawls's, for "great books are full of hidden references and quotes which reveal themselves only to initiates" (Bloom 1980: 134–35).
[12] See Burnyeat (1985: 30–36) and Klosko (1986: 275–93).
[13] See Rawls (1971: 17–83, 90–95, 48–51) and Shapiro (1986: 204–70).
In short, it is impossible to demonstrate whether such an interpretive claim is true or false. There is enough depth and ambiguity to Rawls's discussion of and assumptions about equality and subjectivism to ensure that it is not absurd on its face; once we move from this fact to a set of assertions about hidden agendas and messages available only to initiates, who is Bloom to dispute them? The would-be canonizer of Rawls will simply claim that Bloom is not enough of an initiate to understand Rawls's subtle and complex purposes.
(iii) Tensions Between "Fundamental Intention" and Tradition
The difficulties we have encountered with Bloom's parochial identification of the tradition raise more general questions about the nature of traditions, their significance, and how to study them. Central to Bloom's anti-modernism is his claim that we must not read a text for a particular ideological purpose but that we must try to regain the fundamental intention of its author via intensive textual analysis. Bloom is caught in a double bind, however, because if there is an interesting and illuminating view of the tradition of Western political theory identified by Strauss, it has little to do with the intentions of the authors composing it. Further, if Bloom and Strauss's other followers take Bloom's view of exegesis seriously, they cannot embrace Strauss's conception of the tradition. Let me explain why.
Any text can be studied from at least two points of view, which I have identified elsewhere as internal and external.[14] An internal reading is concerned with what the author conceived herself to be doing in writing or at least with what she could in principle be brought to accept as an accurate description of her task. Recovering an author's fundamental intention is an enterprise of internal reading in my sense, leaving aside, for now, what exegetical tools are best suited to this purpose. External readings are, by contrast, concerned with received meanings, with at texts are taken to stand for by others, with their ideological functions and their canonization. External meanings typically change with time and are greatly influenced by the contexts in which texts are read and the goals their readers are trying to achieve. The internal meaning of a text does not change, although opinions about what it is may change and may in some cases, perhaps even typically, be incorrect. But whatever we know, or think we know, about the Second Treatise, Locke intended whatever it was that he intended when he wrote it.
Traditions can be relevant to both internal and external readings. Locke
[14] See Shapiro (1982: 535–78; 1986: 8–11).
may have seen himself as responding to particular problems within the natural law tradition he inherited from Saint Thomas Aquinas, and if he did his intended meaning cannot be grasped without reference to that tradition and his comprehension of it. In addition, however, Locke's text subsequently became part of a number of traditions in political theory and took on different meanings in those different traditional contexts. Locke's concept of consent had a meaning in the context of the religious and constitutional conflicts of seventeenth-century England quite different from its meaning for the American founding fathers, and it has quite another meaning for contemporary libertarians like Robert Nozick. It may be that one (or none) of these is closest to Locke's intended meaning, but each locates Locke's text in an evolving tradition of ideas within which it is thought, or argued, to have significance.
What divides most schools of textual exegesis from one another is that one external reading is alleged to capture the internal meaning of the text and is thereby legitimated as definitive, so that Locke was "really" a bourgeois theorist, or a neo-Thomist, or a proponent of modern natural right. It is unlikely that there is a general system of exegetical rules that will divulge the internal meaning of all texts (different writers employ different styles and techniques in different circumstances for different purposes), but it can be said with some confidence that broadly conceived traditions, extending well into the future from the standpoint of the texts that compose them, are likely to consist mainly of external readings in my sense. The process of canonization could not otherwise occur. The intentions of authors whose texts are subsequently read into traditions are often quite parochial, at least from the point of view of such catchall concepts as "ancients," "moderns," "bourgeois modes of thought," or "the decline of Western civilization" that generally drive traditions.
This does not mean that broadly conceived traditions are not interesting or illuminating or that they do not explain aspects of our thought and action, but that the sorts of abstraction from original historical context necessary to place texts in these sweeping historical constructions will almost inevitably distort an author's intended meaning. Life is too complex, the demands on traditions too unpredictable and diverse, the texts that make them up too ambiguous to expect anything else. Indeed, one might speculate that only writers whose intended arguments are ambiguous enough to be claimed by many sides in intellectual disputes will become canonized. Their persistence in traditions over long periods of time may well indicate the exact opposite of what Bloom contends: they may contain no single determinate meaning or message, or if they do that message will likely be sufficiently flexible that although it places some limits on the
range of possible external readings, it does not render a particular external reading definitive.[15]
What is difficult to swallow, then, is that the internal meanings, the fundamental intentions of the authors that Bloom, following Strauss, identifies as making up the tradition, can be linked to one another at the same time as they are placed in his own sweeping account of Western civilization, the fundamental divide between ancients and moderns, the rise of historical consciousness, and the three waves of modernity culminating in Nietzsche's nihilism. Skepticism toward the Straussian exegetical claim is confirmed by the fact that, as interpretations of authors' intended meanings, several of Strauss's readings have been shown to be seriously vulnerable in recent years by the historical work of the new Cambridge historians Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock (on this side of the Atlantic), and their students.
This group blazed its exegetical trail not by rejecting the idea that the purpose of exegesis is to recover authorial intention but by undermining the notion that this can be done by reading the text, in the phrase of John Plamenatz, "over and over again." Rather the intentions of the author must be decoded from their historical and linguistic contexts in their view; an author's intention cannot be said to have been understood until we understand him as his historical contemporaries did, which requires detailed historical knowledge of the conflicts he was engaged in and the goals he was trying to achieve. Skinner and his associates have also argued that this is the best way to study the history of ideas as the history of ideologies, a more dubious claim.[16] Yet whatever the broader historical significance of the results of their historical research may be, if one accepts that the basic goal is to recover intentions, the findings of the Cambridge historians cannot be ignored by seekers after authorial intention. The Cambridge historians and the Straussians are engaged in this same enterprise: to recover with as much certainty as possible precisely what the author intended.[17]
[15] For elaboration and defense of this exegetical point, see Shapiro (1986: 8–11).
[16] For a critical analysis of it, see Shapiro (1982: 535–78).
[17] In Skinner's (1969: 28) words, no agent can be said "to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done." More recently, Skinner and some allies have talked of their view of the history of ideas in the surprisingly Straussish metaphor of a "convocation of resurrected thinkers" who are brought, by various exegetical devices, to an authentic understanding of one another's intentions. The goal of studying the history of ideas is elaborated by reference to an imaginary encyclopedic Intellectual History of Europe, which each of those discussed reads and "endorses the description of himself as, though of course insufficiently detailed, at least reasonably accurate and sympathetic," so that they are able to converse authentically with one another about their disagreements (Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner 1984: 1–2).
It is a basic methodological commitment of the Cambridge historians that this kind of recovery of authorial intention is normally possible, that "there are always what have been called 'rational bridgeheads'. … which have made conversation possible across chasms" (Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner 1984: 2). Yet these historians have done more than talk about method; they have undertaken masses of historical research on English, European, and American political thought, no doubt of varying degrees of quality and persuasiveness.[18] In the area of early modern thought, for instance, we now know that Locke's theology was central and indispensable to his theory of rights, that the modern idea of natural right did not emerge with the writings of Machiavelli or Hobbes; rather there were several conflicting views of natural rights in the seventeenth century, parts of competing Ockhamist, Gersonist, and Conciliarist traditions that are traceable to the beginning of the Florentine Renaissance at least. We know that the exclusive natural rights theories of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf differed fundamentally from Locke's inclusive theory of common property. At the very least those who speak of Hobbes and Locke in one breath as standing for "the doctrine" of modern natural right, or who claim that Locke did not really believe in his theory of natural law, take on a heavy burden of proof in the light of this scholarship.[19]
Strauss was a notable intellectual figure because he developed a distinctive view of our culture and parts of its intellectual heritage, which latter he approached through the canonized tradition of political philosophy as he perceived it. What makes him significant is not whether he was right or wrong about this or that passage in Plato or Locke but that he had a genuinely distinctive point of view. This was, no doubt, bound up with his particular biographical history, in particular the impact that the Holocaust had on him, and his point of view of course informed his approach to the tradition. If this meant that he had a tendency to discover in its texts
[18] The writings of this school on the eighteenth century have proved vulnerable, particularly the attempts by Donald Winch (1980) to reread Adam Smith into the civic humanist tradition. See Harpham (1984: 764–74). Skinner's reading of Machiavelli has also attracted heavy critical fire. See Tarcov (1982: 692–709). I dispute Pocock's readings of Harrington and the neo-Harringtonians in chapter 6.
[19] On Locke's view of natural law, see Dunn (1969); on his theory of property, see Tully (1980), who also undertakes a comprehensive analysis of various competing natural law theories of property in Locke's day. On the medieval origins of natural rights theories, see Skinner (1978), especially volume 1, and Tuck (1979).
observations and insights relating to his central preoccupations, we can scarcely be surprised, for it is characteristic of distinctive thinkers. No doubt this predilection will at times produce quirky readings. But such writers are not historians at all, and most historians would likely bore them. Neither do such writers achieve unideological readings; it is often the ideological dimensions of their arguments that make them interesting.
Commentators such as Gunnell, Burnyeat, and Drury are persuasive, then, that Strauss's purposes were at bottom rhetorical and aimed at the problems of the twentieth century as he conceived them, that a good many of his historical claims are seriously vulnerable, and that his corpus should be approached "as an example of political theory as evocation" (Gunnell 1985: 339).[20] For Strauss's construction of the tradition was intimately linked to, and dictated by, his contemporary political concerns. As such Strauss will doubtless be remembered as one of the distinctive social critics of the twentieth century, but those like Bloom and Tarcov (1983: 5–29) who want seriously to defend his particular external reading of the tradition as an historically accurate rendition of the intentions of its authors face what is likely an impossible task.
Leaving aside the issue of Strauss's alleged authentic communication with the canonized authors of the tradition, it seems beyond question that the position of his followers with respect to that tradition is different from his. His followers approach texts not directly, as Strauss claimed that we should and as they claim that he did, but rather indirectly, always mediated by Strauss's interpretations and eager to defend them from what is seen as hostile and ideologically motivated criticisms.[21] Bloom is thus happy to acknowledge that his interpretation of Plato is derivative of Strauss's and even interprets this charge as a compliment. Bloom seems almost eager to prostrate himself before Strauss's alleged greatness, apparently unaware of the irony of simultaneously claiming that part of that greatness consisted in rejecting doctrinairism. To say that it is proof that Strauss understood the writings of the greats to read his interpretations of them in conjunction with the texts, without any appeal to external evidence of any
[20] See Gunnell (1978: 122–34; 1985: 339–61), Burnyeat (1985: 30–36), and Drury (1985: 315–37).
[21] See, for instance, the slew of responses published by the New York Review of Books on October 10, 1985, in response to M. F. Burnyeat's review of Strauss's Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy . The degree of cultish persecution mania surrounding the Straussian movement is astounding, epitomized for this author by the graduate student who maintained in all seriousness that the New York Review of Books had revealed its "anti-Straussian bias" by publishing Harry Jaffa's response to Burnyeat on the grounds that it was a weak letter that could be predicted to harm the Straussian cause.
kind, is bizarre at least. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to imagine what, for Bloom, could count (even in principle) as demonstrating an error in any of Strauss's readings at any point in any text.
(iv) Prescriptions
We saw earlier that Bloom's prescriptions are difficult to pin down for two reasons. The first is that in his diagnosis he oscillates between the more conventional (conservative) Straussian claim that we have lost faith in sound liberal-democratic institutions and the more radical (reactionary) position that the institutions themselves have become corrupted and, by implication, need to be replaced. Second, at least at times, Bloom seems to think our problems are beyond resolution. This confusion is further complicated by the fact that his proffered solution—respectful study of the tradition as interpreted by an intellectual elite—differs with respect to that elite and to the rest of society. Modern culture evidently feels the lack of both the esoteric and the exoteric meanings of the tradition.
With respect to the intellectual elite, and assuming the diagnosis to be that we have lost faith in institutions that are fundamentally sound, the main reasons for returning to the tradition seem to be two: to rediscover that the project of founding political institutions on reason is both intellectually impossible and politically dangerous and to interpret the tradition for the rest of us in such a way as to restore our lost faith in our institutions. We have seen that the first of these goals assumes a far greater homogeneity within the tradition of political theory, even as defined by Strauss and his followers, than has ever existed and rests on exegetical maxims that assume what they allegedly establish.
The difficulties become more serious when we move to the impact these prescriptions are intended to have on society at large. First, there are the large assumptions, never acknowledged let alone argued for, that the intelligentsia studying the humanities in universities can have an effect on the world at large and that if they can it will be the effect they intend. Certainly the latter (and, I would argue, the former) is questionable historically. Could Hobbes, a pragmatic conservative, have predicted that his ideas would pervade the liberal tradition centuries after his death? Could he have had even the vaguest idea of what that tradition would be like? Could Marx have had the slightest notion of how his ideas would eventually be used? Bloom seems to assume that only the esoteric message is dangerous and needs to be hidden. But there are many possible exoteric messages, with widely different political and social implications, and the purveyor of those messages can have no more or less confidence in what, if anything, their political impact will be than he can have with respect to
the esoteric message. It is surely naive to suppose that values like "the duties of citizens," "the character of good rulers," and "the relations of friends," which Bloom believes can be learned from Shakespeare,[22] cannot be pressed into the service of evil regimes as well as good ones.
In this light we see that there is a deep tension between advocating the doctrine of exoteric teaching and claiming simultaneously that readings of the texts on which this teaching are based are unideological. Depending on one's theory of meaning, a case for ideological neutrality might in principle be made for esoteric meanings, but because the point of the exoteric meaning is precisely to have certain political effects and not to have others, it must be ideological in Bloom's sense by definition. It is surely the doctrine of exoteric meaning that such critics as Gunnell (1978: 122–34; 1985: 339–61), Burnyeat (1985: 30–36), and Drury (1985: 315–37) have in mind when they argue that Strauss had an implicit political agenda. I argue in chapter 9 that political theory should indeed be committed to discovering and articulating the truth rather than advancing any particular ideological program, but we will see there that this view cannot be rendered consistent with any variant of the doctrine of exoteric teaching.
Second, there is the difficulty that Bloom's educational prescriptions bypass the vast majority of the population. Bloom's diagnosis of our vulgarization and his prescriptions for cure are cast entirely within the context of universities and the humanities at that. Even when distinguishing the small intellectual elite equipped to divine the esotericism of the tradition and pass it on from the rest of society, Bloom is thinking of the educated rest, the "gentlemen" or the modern-day equivalents of Marlborough. As far as the great mass of people who will never read Shakespeare (under what Bloom takes to be the corrosive influence of the New Critics or any other way) is concerned, this is surely all beside the point. It never seems to occur to Bloom that he is comparing contemporary mass culture with the elite culture of early modern Europe. Thus when he laments that "a young person walking through the Louvre or the Uffizi" sees only "colors and forms—modern art" because he is ignorant of the biblical, Greek, and Roman stories from antiquity that Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt took for granted in their audiences, he is surely not thinking of the masses of Renaissance Europe. Likewise when he complains that Kramer vs. Kramer "may be up-to-date about divorces and sex roles, but anyone who does not have Anna Karenina or The Red and the Black as part of his viewing equipment cannot sense what might be lacking," he is again indicting contemporary mass culture for its failure to live up to
[22] See Bloom and Jaffa (1964: 2–3).
the artistic standards of a tiny elite in the nineteenth century. Bloom's attack on rock music—which he alleges brought about the death of classical music for the young—rests on the same kind of inappropriate comparison. Bloom concedes that there has been a proliferation of classes in classical music in universities, but insists that this is the exception that proves the rule on the grounds that no more than 5 or 10 percent of the students take them. "Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand" (Bloom 1987: 63, 64, 69). Yet in an age when hundreds of thousands of students inhabit major universities, if 5 to 10 percent of them take specialized courses in classical music, that is a remarkable number. In the European past to which Bloom appeals, their socioeconomic equivalents would never have thought of higher education, let alone known anything about literature or classical music. Thus we are bound to ask ourselves how much of an indictment of modern culture it is that the contemporary masses, literate at all for the first time in history, fail to live up to the standards of "reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand" that Bloom identifies in the elites of Renaissance and early modern Europe.
Once we design to go beyond the world of the university to look at mass culture, the claim is preposterous that contemporary America is more vulgar than Elizabethan England. That world of the educated gentleman after which Bloom hankers was the world of a tiny elite, insulated by wealth and power from the vulgarity, poverty, and endemic violence with which the vast majority lived throughout their short and painful lives. Even assuming away all these facts as Bloom does, what is supposed to be the impact of naive readings of the greats by the educated elite on the beliefs, attitudes, aspirations, and values of the rest of society? Bloom seems never to perceive this question, yet it is surely centrally on the agenda if reading the greats by the intellectual elite is going to cure "the crisis of the West" and restore "our" faith in "traditional" values.
This language raises a hornets' nest of further difficulties because many, often conflicting, values can be considered traditional. Just as legal commentators who argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of natural law principles fail to notice that this simply pushes the problem back a step, that there always were widely differing and powerfully conflicting conceptions of natural law, so the appeal to traditional values is likewise question begging. This appeal assumes, without the hint of evidence or even theoretical argument, the existence of a morally homogeneous past in the tradition, in the culture, and in the relations between the two. Just where and when these happy circumstances are supposed
to have existed is never stated, and waving an Anglophilic hand across the Atlantic simply will not do. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of English history and culture knows that England was and remains as conflict-ridden as many other societies and that many of the values embodied in English historical practice are less than self-evidently desirable. The English ruling classes have spent not insignificant parts of their history slaughtering populations under their control both inside and outside the British Isles; they invented concentration camps and have often shown scant respect for the values of the societies they sought to dominate. In short, the English history Marlborough learned from Shakespeare was but one of many English histories, most of them less than flattering to the high culture Bloom so earnestly craves.
These difficulties are compounded when we consider Bloom in his reactionary mood and thus assume that the problem is not the loss of confidence in liberal-democratic institutions but the institutions themselves, with their open embrace of subjectivism, their "egalitarian effervescence," and their already accomplished destruction of what he takes the values of the tradition to have been. The notion that changing the attitudes (assuming we knew what to change them to) of a few intellectuals in universities would help solve this problem looks even less promising if this is the root complaint. The claim that intellectuals should be open to traditional values cannot cut much ice until we are told what those values are, why they are worthwhile, and how they might be implemented—at least in principle—in today's world.
III. Conclusion
At the start of this chapter we found ourselves with the problem that, as an alternative to neo-Kantian foundationalism, the arguments of the contextualists generate insufficient critical bite on the practices of contemporary politics. Yet Bloom's analysis suffers from an opposite malaise: it has so much critical bite that it swallows the entire modern world. Like Rorty, Bloom sees the Enlightenment goal of founding politics on reason as a failure with dangerous political ramifications for liberal democracies. But where Rorty thinks we should embrace liberal-democratic institutions while junking the metanarratives traditionally used to justify them, in most moods Bloom appears to think that liberal-democratic institutions are now so corrupted that although we should restore some version of the metanarrative, we should junk the institutions.
Bloom's diagnosis turns out on closer inspection to be two competing diagnoses issuing in contradictory arguments about the viability of the
egalitarian basis of American politics concerning whether the basic problem is the universalist egalitarianism built into the American regime from the beginning that people like Rawls, invoke or what Bloom takes to be our departure from that ethos since the 1960s. At times he writes as if the second is a logical outgrowth of the first; at other times, as if it is a flat rejection of it. In either case we saw that, like Rorty, Bloom fails to articulate any plausible (even identifiable) causal account of how our circumstances came to be what he takes them to be. Rorty and Bloom are both causal idealists who believe that the ideas of a few Enlightenment thinkers decisively shaped the politics of the modern West, but neither begins to describe, let alone defend, accounts of the causal processes that are supposed to have been involved. As a result it cannot be surprising that as historical anthropology of contemporary politics, both their arguments fail to persuade.
My discussion of Bloom's parochial view of the tradition reveals the dangers of believing that appeals to traditions can by themselves generate satisfying critical evaluations of contemporary moral and political problems. What we see as the tradition itself changes over time and space and is inevitably a subject of argument and debate. Just as my discussion of Walzer revealed the need to come to terms with conflicting interpretations within and among communities, so here I have established the need to come to terms with analogous conflicts within and among traditions. Appealing to tradition qua authority never settles moral and political disputes; traditions are by their nature too internally diverse and admit of too many conflicting interpretations for this to be so. Analysis of this issue led me to explicate the distinction between internal and external analysis in the history of ideas—external analysis being essential to a critical understanding of traditions in political theory—and of their relationship to social and political change. It is Bloom's failure to see this, or to render plausible the particular external account that he offers, that makes his historical argument so unsatisfying.
The weaknesses in Bloom's prescriptive arguments follow direct from those attending his diagnosis. He believes that egalitarianism should be questioned and that studying the tradition will teach people to question it, but he offers no account of what values he favors or of how they might influence contemporary politics or political argument. Bloom's diagnosis amounts to a self-righteous affirming of a fictitious past, and it is conducted from such a great height that it leaves no room for discriminating comparative political judgments about the actual political alternatives in the present, a problem that is reinforced by his conventionalist understanding of the exoteric dimension of the tradition. In the realm of prescription
we found that Bloom's account is a mirror image of Rorty's and by that token equally unhelpful. "Reject modernity!" turns out to be as useless a tool of critical argument as "transcend modernity!" We need more discriminating methods of political argument.
Yet there is one enduring insight in Bloom's view, namely, that there is a deep tension between the human desire to know and act on the truth and every rationalist attempt at the design of political institutions. Although Bloom offers neither reasons nor evidence in support of his claim that this tension exists, I argue in the final chapters of this book that there are good reasons for thinking that it does. But I also show that the nature of knowledge in the human sciences is such that the interest in knowing and acting on the truth cannot credibly be restricted to an elite (philosophical, scientific, or any other) and that as a result no variant of the doctrine of exoteric teaching is justifiable. On the contrary, I argue that finding out and publicly articulating the truth must lie at the core of any defensible account of the political theorist's enterprise. This means that the tension between rationalist projects in political theory and the human interest in knowing and acting on the truth has quite different implications from those that Bloom and the Straussians suppose.
5—
The History of Ideas as Therapeutic Diagnosis
Bloom and Strauss's other followers fail to render plausible accounts of the tradition as a vantage point from which the problems of contemporary politics can confidently be engaged, but this by no means exhausts historical approaches. The disillusionment of many at the failure of contemporary theorists either to resolve the internal disputes that litter their journals or to speak in any appropriate way to contemporary political issues has fueled a much more broadly based revival of interest in history and in the history of ideas.[1] One recurring set of concerns that permeates this revival revolves around the notion that the difficulties contemporary political theorists confront must themselves be understood historically. We have already confronted a variant of this claim in chapter 2, but Rorty's historical argument is highly schematic and it does not deal explicitly with the history of political theory . The claim that there is something distinctive about the dilemmas of contemporary politics and political theory that can only be resolved historically has been defended most forcefully by Alasdair MacIntyre, and it is to an examination of his arguments that I now turn.[2]
I. MacIntyre's View: Exposition
Like Bloom, MacIntyre contends that the central problems of contemporary politics can be understood only through recovering a lost tradition of
[1] See, for one of many possible illustrations, Richard Tuck's assertion that conflicts among various conceptions of individual, natural, and human rights that preoccupy contemporary political theorists can "be solved historically, by an investigation of how the relevant language … developed" (Tuck 1979: 1).
[2] MacIntyre's most explicit defense of this thesis appears in After Virtue, first published in 1981 and revised in 1984, and this work is my central concern here. In addition, I discuss some elaborations of and qualifications to his arguments that appear in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, published in 1988.
political theory Also like Bloom, MacIntyre believes that the tradition he invokes has been so seriously obscured by changing events and beliefs that most people are ignorant of it. But MacIntyre's diagnosis may initially be distinguished from Bloom's in two main respects. First, where for Bloom there is a radical disjunction—the tradition dictates a set of normative commitments from which all modern politics deviates and should be criticized for that reason—MacIntyre sees us and our politics as products of a tradition. We have corrupted the tradition rather than forgotten it, and as a result the first prerequisite for a clearheaded contemporary politics is the achievement of a historical understanding of the causal processes by which this corruption occurred. Second, MacIntyre's turn to tradition is a product of his disillusioned retreat from Marxism both as a science of contemporary political economy and as the source of a credible programmatic political agenda for the future.[3] His rejection of the science of historical materialism derives partly from a more general disillusionment with predictive social science. Our inability to foresee certain kinds of conceptual innovations, the conditional nature of many of our decisions on events that are yet to occur, the game-theoretic character of much social action that makes it contingent on the interacting and mutually conditional decisions of many agents, and the "pure contingency" of all social events combine to render the search for lawlike generalizations in the social sciences hopeless (MacIntyre 1984: 88–108).[4] Less generally, Marx's analysis
[3] For a good indication of how far MacIntyre has moved in this regard, compare his antipathy toward Marxism as an explanatory science and as the basis for a political program in After Virtue, discussed in the next several paragraphs, with the argument of Marxism and Christianity, published in 1968. There his argument is that, whatever the defects of Marxism as a political ideology, Marx humanized Christianity in such a way as to "present a secularized version of the Christian judgment upon, rather than the Christian adaption to, the secular present" and that "the Marxist project remains the only one we have for reestablishing hope as a social virtue" (MacIntyre 1968: 143, 116). With the writing of Whose Justice?, MacIntyre appears to have come full circle, identifying himself as an Augustinian Christian (MacIntyre 1988: 10).
[4] In MacIntyre's view, social scientists only manage to sustain the legitimating myths of their activities because they tolerate counterexamples to their generalizations in ways that would never be countenanced in the natural sciences, they state their generalizations too imprecisely to generate clear statements about the conditions under which they are supposed to hold, and they manipulate probabilistic generalizations systematically to evade counterexamples and hypotheticals beyond the limits of the original observation that they were adduced to explain. For these reasons they are not, strictly, generalizations at all, and despite their obsessional employment of the nomenclature of the natural sciences, social scientists will never discover predictive generalizations because there are none to be discovered. This is why, MacIntyre believes, in all but the most trivial instances the predictions of economists, demographers, sociologists, and political scientists have proved to be hopelessly wrong (MacIntyre 1984: 93–100, 91–92, 89).
of the dynamics of capitalism was simply wrong in some key respects, in MacIntyre's view. Marx's assumptions about base and superstructure, for instance, missed the fact that people's conceptions of their social allegiances and their senses of justice "are partly constitutive of the lives of social groups, and economic interests are often partially defined in terms of such conceptions and not vice versa " (ibid.: 253).
At the level of programmatic politics the central reason for Marxism's bankruptcy is its failure to deliver anything remotely approaching emancipation from capitalism either within its own terms or in those of some imagined future society. "The theory which was to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led into darkness," and the "deeply optimistic" faith behind revolutionary Marxism in all its variants is simply without foundation (ibid.: 261–62). Even in principle Marxism offers no adequate solutions. Its "moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world," and because MacIntyre's aim in After Virtue is to argue that we need to reject a large part of that ethos if we are to come up with "a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and act," we must be prepared to reject Marxism as a political program (ibid.: ix–x).[5]
(i) Tradition and Narrative in Political Argument
To get at what MacIntyre understands by the tradition of political theory, we must first attend to his distinction between traditions and narratives. Narratives exist within traditions; they are the first-order stories in terms of which we comprehend reality and make the chaos around us intelligible. Although traditions evolve over time, they provide relatively enduring normative structures that make political debate over first-order narratives possible. By way of illustration, MacIntyre might say that even Bloom's wholesale attack on what he takes to be the egalitarianism of modernity could not even be intelligible to us, we could not even disagree with it if we did not share something of a tradition of philosophical commitments with him. The existence of traditions does not preclude argument
[5] "For however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it [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? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Übermensch: Lukács's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy" (MacIntyre 1984: 262).
and conflict. On the contrary, for MacIntyre, it requires them. Just because a particular narrative interpretation makes partial sense of some realm of human experience via simplifying descriptive explanations, there will always be vulnerabilities and questionable assumptions in their component elements. "If I am a Jew, I have to recognize that the tradition of Judaism is partly constituted by a continuous argument over what it means to be a Jew" (MacIntyre 1977: 456). The narrative task "generally involves participation in conflict" (MacIntyre 1988: 11).
In MacIntyre's view, Kuhn is partly right but partly misleading to describe changes in scientific knowledge in terms of the conceptual incommensurability of contending paradigms.[6] In the evolution of scientific knowledge theories are complex narrative explanations that displace one another but always within broader traditions of understanding.[7] This view of knowledge and its evolution have direct consequences for MacIntyre's politics and political theory. Just as it is mistaken to think, in the philosophy of science, of periods of revolution as opposites of or disjunctions from periods of normal or traditional science, so it is misleading in politics to counterpose revolution to tradition. The "individualist mode" of thinking "deform[s] my present relationships" by cutting me off from that past that has made me what I am. But conservatives like Burke have misled us, for ideological purposes, by reifying traditions and refusing to acknowledge that "when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose." A living tradition is "an historically extended, socially embodied argument" (MacIntyre 1984: 221–22).
Why does MacIntyre use the term narrative? His aim is to disabuse us of our scientistic fetishes about theories by suggesting that understanding at every level of human experience is reducible to a storytelling form. To elucidate this, MacIntyre appeals to Bruno Bettleheim's account of how children create order out of chaos in the earliest stages of their development. Before the age of six the child's experience is chaotic; as he gradually begins to make some sense of the world outside him, the first type of descriptive explanation to which he can relate is a simple myth or fairy
[6] This version of the critique of Kuhn is more systematically developed by Toulmin (1970: 39–47), among others.
[7] "The criterion for a successful theory is that it enables us to understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the same time, enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejected or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory could have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating the past. It recasts the narrative which constitutes the continuous reconstruction of the scientific tradition" (MacIntyre 1977: 460).
tale. Fairy tales enable the child "to engage himself with and perceive an order in social reality" (MacIntyre 1977: 456–57). It makes much more sense to a six-year-old child to believe that the world is held up by a giant than it does to entertain the view that it is a spinning globe suspended in space. The child's early explanations prove increasingly inadequate to her experiences, prompting questions and the growth of critical faculties. As she sees the inadequacies of what she had hitherto believed, more complex narratives are constructed to answer the questions that continually press themselves on her. But the form of the narrative myth remains, becoming more complex and explaining new felt experience as well as the reasons for the inadequacies of earlier narratives. "To raise the question of truth [of a particular fairy tale or narrative myth] need not entail rejecting myth or story as the appropriate and perhaps the only appropriate form in which certain truths can be told" (ibid.: 457). MacIntyre wants to say that we never do reject stories as the appropriate form. "Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal." Just as depriving children of their stories leaves them "unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words," there is no "way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources." There is a significant sense, then, in which human beings' only resource is "psychological continuity" grounded in our "narrative concept of selfhood" (MacIntyre 1984: 216–17).
(ii) Diagnosis
MacIntyre wants to attack a particular set of narratives about human beings and their purposes that seems to him to permeate contemporary culture, but he wants simultaneously to argue that the tradition within which these narratives seem intelligible is in serious decay. Narrative and tradition reinforce each other in a mutually damaging symbiosis. Our only hope for avoiding the consequences of this is to recover and reconstitute the tradition in its original integrity, which will in turn enable us to escape the incoherent prison of our own narrative dilemmas (ibid.: 263).
MacIntyre thinks we live in a world dominated by instrumental politics where riches, power, status, and prestige, wholly detached from the pursuit of goods for their own sake, have become external rewards. This is reflected in a "rootless cosmopolitanism" characterized by "the late twentieth-century language of internationalized modernity" where people aspire to be at home anywhere except in "what they regard as the backward, outmoded undeveloped cultures of traditions." We are "in an important way citizens of nowhere." We live fragmented lives, manifested
in "divided moral attitudes expressed in inconsistent moral and political principles, in tolerance of different rationalities in different milieus, in protective compartmentalization of the self, and in uses of language that move from fragments of one language-in-use through the idioms of internationalized modernity to fragments of another" (MacIntyre 1988: 32, 388, 397).
MacIntyre aims to render this thesis plausible by describing and explaining its genesis. To get us to take it seriously at the outset, he describes symptoms of the disease. He notes that everyday disputes on such issues as nuclear disarmament, abortion, what, if anything, to do about racial discrimination, and public versus private provision of health care are interminable; they are never resolved and people do not, characteristically, expect them to be resolved. They think it normal for wide areas of disagreement on such questions to prevail, "people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be." Emotivism is thus "embodied in our culture" (MacIntyre 1984: 22, 253; see also 1988: 1–2).
It is an individualist culture, inhabited by "post-Enlightenment" people, who respond to "the failure of the Enlightenment to provide neutral, impersonal tradition-independent standards" of rational argument by concluding that no set of beliefs proposed for acceptance is justifiable. We live in a culture in which "individuals are held to possess their identity and their essential human capacities apart from and prior to their membership in any particular social and political order" (MacIntyre 1988: 395, 210, see also 343). Such persons "cannot understand the action of entering into any scheme of belief except as an act of arbitrary will, arbitrary, that is, in that it must lack sufficient supporting reasons." With the development in universities of a conception of scholarly competence based on the fiction that there could be an objective neutrality in terms of which moral questions could be debated, "considerations of belief and allegiance were excluded from view altogether." As a result there is "a deep incompatibility between the standpoint of any rational tradition of enquiry and the dominant modes of contemporary teaching, discussion, and debate, both academic and nonacademic" (ibid.: 396, 399, 400).
Yet emotivism runs much deeper than this for MacIntyre; he offers an almost Foucaultian analysis of its social and political consequences in terms of an obliteration of the distinction between "manipulative and non-manipulative social relationships" (MacIntyre 1984: 23–24). But where Foucault would see such a conflation as endemic to all forms of social organization, varying only in its institutional manifestations, for MacIntyre it is the distinctive feature of emotivist culture, dominated by
a fundamental indifference to all ends. Thus although the initial liberal aim was to "provide a political, legal and economic framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable principles would enable those who espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life" to live together in the same society, this has resulted in a "compartmentalized" self for whom no good is supreme and who takes an instrumental attitude towards the satisfaction of his own preferences. "What each individual and each group has to hope for from these rules [of liberal association] is that they should be such as to enable that individual or that group to be as effective as possible in implementing his, her, or their preferences." This instrumental rationality is epitomized for MacIntyre in Rawls's open embrace of an heterogeneous conception of the good with the remark that "although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice … it still strikes us as irrational or more likely as mad." In saying this "Rawls equates the human self with the liberal self" that "moves from sphere to sphere, compartmentalizing its attitudes (MacIntyre 1988: 335–36, 337).[8] The liberal acceptance of irreducibly different and competing conceptions of goods and ends makes the fragmented life of the emotivist self all but inevitable for MacIntyre; in moving into liberal modernity we "move into a world in which the exercise of practical rationality, if it is to occur at all, has to be embodied in contexts of fundamental disagreement and conflict" (ibid.: 325).
Kant distinguished ends from means by arguing that no human relationship can be informed by morality unless it is geared toward respecting others as ends. On MacIntyre's interpretation this at least involves offering to those affected by our actions "good reasons for acting in one way rather than another," leaving it to them "to evaluate those reasons." To respect the other as an end "is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other … judges to be good." This in turn requires an "appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge" (MacIntyre 1984: 23–24). Emotivism
[8] This is a misreading of Rawls's account of the good in that Rawls's primary good are intended to be universal and, in the terminology of political economists, at least in part interpersonally comparable. Rawls wanted to argue that his primary goods were things one would want more of rather than less of, whatever one's particular conception of the good turned out to be. See Rawls (1971: 87, 91–94; 1982: 164–85). The view that MacIntyre here attributes to Rawls—that the "recognition of a range of goods is accompanied by a recognition of a range of compartmentalized spheres within each of which some good is pursued: political, economic, familial, artistic, athletic, scientific" (MacIntyre 1988: 337)—is actually closer to Walzer's view. See chapter 3 above.
as an outlook is indifferent, by contrast, to the ways in which we try to influence one another, and indeed to our purposes in so doing.[9] In an emotivist world "the generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of normative rationality" (ibid.: 24). The quality shared by such distinctive characters of modernity as the aesthete, the bureaucrat, and the therapist is their indifference to social ends. The aesthete is consumption personified, the kind of character who occupies the intellectual milieu with which Henry James concerned himself in The Portrait of a Lady, where the use of others for personal gratification was accepted, even encouraged. It was a culture "in which the manipulative mode of moral instrumentalism triumphed." Although James was concerned with a small, circumscribed elite, MacIntyre's claim is that he captured the essence of a much larger tradition of moral commentary reaching back to Kierkegaard and Diderot. "The unifying preoccupation of that tradition is the condition of those who see in the social world nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom." The cultural impact of emotivism is exemplified for MacIntyre by the way in which the Bloomsbury group appropriated parts of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica to rationalize their elevation of aesthetic pleasure above all other goods, ignoring the dimensions of his theory that were hostile to emotivism (ibid.: 24, 25, 14–16).
Another facet of emotivist culture is illustrated by contemporary psychotherapy, in particular its indifference towards ends, its preoccupation with technique, with "transforming neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones." The therapist cannot engage in moral debate about ends from within his therapeutic role, and he thereby reinforces the emotivist tendency to regard them as exogenous. This means centric therapeutic mode of being extends outward from the professional's office; its idiom shapes vast areas of social and religious existence. But the contemporary character who embodies its spirit most powerfully and who gives emotivism its social content of "bureaucratic
[9] Despite this appeal to Kantian autonomy as the basis for this critique of emotivism, it is to Aristotle, not Kant, to whom MacIntyre ultimately turns. Given this, the nature and relevance of this implicit appeal to Kant is unclear, not least because Kant's conception of autonomy has been argued by many to entail a radically subjectivist ethics. See, for instance, Nozick (1974: 32, 228, 337n4, 338n1), Hayek (1976: 166–67), Rawls (1971: 31n, 43n, 251–57, 586; 1980: 515–72), and Shapiro (1986: 161–64, 242–46, 253, 276–84, 296–97).
individualism" is the manager who, once again, "treats ends as given, as outside his scope." His concern "is with technique, with effectiveness in transforming raw materials into final products, unskilled labor into skilled labor, investments into profits" (ibid.: 30). The bureaucratic manager is the embodiment of instrumental reason; his judgments are "in the end criterionless," for his very definition as a manager requires indifference to ends. Emotivism, then, is no defunct philosophical doctrine; many of the social roles we frequently think of as definitive of contemporary culture instantiate it as a social practice.
This state of affairs is perplexing for MacIntyre in that most people's "avowed theoretical standpoints" are not emotivist. People argue about moral questions in terms of all the forms of rational discourse; they argue from premises that they believe to be true to conclusions via chains of allegedly consistent and relevant reasoning. They criticize opponents' proffered premises for alleged lack of accuracy and opponents' reasoning for irrelevance and internal inconsistency. In short, people argue about moral questions in a terminology that would be entirely without point if there were no solutions to moral disagreements. That the moral argument of modernity is thus interminable we have come to accept. It is characteristic of "modern political orders" that they "lack institutionalized forums within which these fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted, let alone there being any attempt made to resolve them." Academic philosophy fares no better because it turns out "by and large to provide means for a more accurate and informed definition of disagreement rather than for progress toward its resolution." Professors of philosophy disagree with one another as much as anyone else about basic moral questions; thus the pursuit of neutrality in university teaching has confronted students with "an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument outside the natural sciences, an inconclusiveness which seems to abandon him or her to his or her prerational preferences" (MacIntyre 1988: 2, 3, 5–6, 400).
MacIntyre sees the paradoxical tension between the simultaneous presence of emotivist practices and the forms of rational moral argument as the central fact about contemporary culture that needs to be understood historically. He thinks that the very existence of this paradox should make us suspicious; it suggests that our inherited moral vocabulary may once have allowed for the resolution of moral disagreements. Hence his dual thesis is that the philosophical tradition we have inherited did once make moral agreement possible and that it has since been eroded so as to generate our current paradoxical circumstances. It is as if a cataclysmic revolution destroyed our normative tradition at some point in the distant past,
and all that remains are fragments of it, without the unifying assumptions that gave them their coherence as a tradition.[10]
(iii) Causal Historical Thesis
What happened? What was the tradition we destroyed and how did we destroy it? This is difficult to get at, partly because MacIntyre describes the processes of its disintegration backward. Although his account of the decline of the virtues that made possible the rise of emotivism is traced ultimately to the preclassical Homeric world, his central historical preoccupation is with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment Project—the central preoccupation of such different writers as Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, and Smith—was that of "justifying morality," of finding an incontrovertible basis for making moral decisions. This project revolved around a view in which "each science, each mode of knowledge and understanding" was seen "as deriving from some set of evident first principles, principles whose evidentness is such that they have no need of further rational support of any kind and whose status as first principles is such that they cannot have further rational support" (ibid.: 47–59; MacIntyre 1988: 225). Although the decline of religious bases for morality played a role in the formulation of the Enlightenment Project, religious justifications (here MacIntyre includes all the major religions)[11] are merely one class of teleological justifications, and thus he sees them as falling within the tradition that he characterizes as Aristotelian.[12]
The Enlightenment Project had to fail because the terms in which it was constructed were anti-Aristotelian in this sense: its proponents combined a search for a justification for morality with a rejection of all teleological conceptions of ethics. Hume's naturalism, Kant's rationalism, and Kierkegaard's "criterionless fundamental choice" define the universe of perceived possible justifications for morality during and since the Enlightenment, and adherents to variants of any one of these views typically establish it by refuting the other two (MacIntyre 1984: 49–50). But MacIntyre's claim is that all three are antiteleological views, and for this reason
[10] See MacIntyre's fictional analogy to a comparable destruction of the natural scientific tradition (MacIntyre 1984: 1–5).
[11] In the postscript to the second edition of After Virtue (ibid.: 278), MacIntyre acknowledges that there may be difficulties with his characterization of all religious and secular teleological arguments in the West as parts of the same tradition. But he gives no indication of how they might be dealt with.
[12] MacIntyre offers a more complex historical account of different Western traditions in Whose Justice? These differences do not bear on this thesis, as he notes (MacIntyre 1988: x), and are taken up further later in this section and in section II(i) of this chapter.
as modes of justifying morality they must fail. They represent competing narratives in a disintegrating tradition, and because the various protagonists are unaware of this, they cannot resolve their differences. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , MacIntyre equivocates on this claim. At one point he refers to liberalism as a tradition whose narrative history is yet to be written (MacIntyre 1988: 349), and at several points he portrays our political disagreements as emanating from traditions that speak past one another, rather than emanating from a single tradition that is in decay.[13] Much of his argument in Whose Justice? is aimed at showing how these traditions contended with one another historically and how difficult it was to make themselves mutually intelligible to one another.[14] Part of his positive thesis (taken up in detail in section II (iii) below) is that in defending a view of justice and rationality, one must inevitably appeal to one such contending tradition. This might be taken to imply a major departure from the main diagnosis of After Virtue , wherein MacIntyre argued that it was the destruction of tradition as such that was at the core of modernity's problems and our inability to resolve moral and political disagreements rather than a modern circumstance in which each person is confronted with "a set of rival intellectual positions, a set of rival traditions embodied more or less imperfectly in contemporary forms of social relationship and a set of rival communities of discourse, each with its own specific modes of speech, argument, and debate, each making a rival claim upon the individual's allegiance" (ibid.: 393). MacIntyre tries to render the two accounts mutually compatible by arguing that all the traditions he describes are inconsistent with contemporary liberalism's rejection of teleology. Modern liberalism is incapable of engaging with any of them and has driven them all from the field. "So-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in … contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals." In these circumstances there is little place "for
[13] Thus MacIntyre now distinguishes among the Aristotelian tradition, which "emerges from the rhetorical and reflective life of the polis and the dialectical teaching of the Academy and the Lyceum"; the Augustinian tradition, which "flourished in the house of religious orders and in the secular communities which provided the environment for such houses both in its earlier, and in its Thomistic, version in universities"; and the "Scottish blend of Calvinist Augustinianism and renaissance Aristotelianism," which "informed the lives of congregations and kirk sessions, of law courts and universities." He also refers to Judaism as a "tradition of enquiry" (ibid.: 349, 10).
[14] See, for examples (ibid.: 10, 11, 146, 164, 166–67, 182, 326, 329, 343, 349, 354, 369, 392).
the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question" (ibid.: 392).
Whereas for Rorty the problem since Descartes has been unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved in ethics (as in all other realms of philosophy) so that we have to abandon our fetish with incontrovertible solutions,[15] MacIntyre thinks definitive answers to moral questions are available in principle and were reached in moral debate at various times in the past when the traditions in terms of which they were rationally debated were intact. The possibility of definitive answers to moral questions was destroyed, albeit inadvertently, by the Enlightenment philosophers' conception of their project. They disassembled the concept of the ethical that they had inherited (via a long and intricate lineage to be sure) from Aristotle[16] and abandoned those components of it relating to human purposes that had made agreement about moral ends possible. The "general form of the moral scheme" analyzed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics was irreducibly teleological because it was defined in terms of "a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his- essential-nature." Ethics, for Aristotle, was the science that instructs men how to get from the one to the other.
We thus have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos . Each of the three elements of the scheme—the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics and the conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its- telos —requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible. (MacIntyre 1984: 52–53
This scheme, although "complicated and added to," survived more or less intact through various secular and religious metamorphoses until the eighteenth century. In its theistic incarnations, "whether Christian as with Aquinas, or Jewish with Maimonides, or Islamic with Ibn Roschd," its precepts were understood not merely as teleological injunctions but as divine injunctions as well. Although the Aristotelian table of virtues and
[15] See chapter 2, section 1(i).
[16] "The general form of the [Aristolelian] moral scheme … in a variety of diverse forms and with numerous rivals came for long periods to dominate the European Middle Ages from the twelfth century onwards, a scheme which included both classical and theistic elements" (MacIntyre 1984: 52).
vices had to be amended so that the concept of sin could be "added to" the classical notion of error, although man's true end can no longer be realized in this world, and although the law of God requires a "new kind of respect and awe," the threefold Aristotelian structure of moral reasoning "remains central to the theistic understanding of evaluative thought and judgment" (ibid.: 53).
The first signs of serious decay in this structure of moral reasoning can be seen in the rise of Jansenist Catholicism and Protestantism, with its new emphasis on the centrality of man's subjectively experienced individual relationship with God. But it was the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology, reinforced by the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism, that was decisive. It entailed a repudiation of all teleological argument and a concomitant rejection of any notion of "man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos ." With this move the language of morality, the point of which had been to enable man to pass "from his present state to his true end," became fragmented and incoherent (ibid.: 54). It left behind a moral scheme composed of the two remaining elements whose relationship to one another would necessarily become deeply problematical.
Since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate that human nature, they are clearly not going to be such as could be deduced from true statements about human nature or justified in some other way by appealing to its characteristics. The injunctions of morality, thus understood, are likely to be ones that human nature, thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey. Hence the eighteenth-century moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project; for they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of human nature, while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with each other…. They inherited incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action and, since they did not recognize their own peculiar historical and cultural situation, they could not recognize the impossible and quixotic character of their self-appointed task. (Ibid.: 55)
This inevitable failure of the Enlightenment Project of justifying morality laid the foundation for emotivism's Predecessor Culture, summed up by
the aesthetic moral flippancy of the Bloomsbury group, and subsequently worked its way into all the major cultural roles of the modern world. It is therefore with a rejection of the Enlightenment Project that we must begin if we are to revive the possibility of the moral life.
(iv) Prescriptions
For MacIntyre the basic choice that confronts us is between Aristotle and Nietzsche: between a return to the tripartite, teleologically based structure with its scheme of Aristotelian virtues and to an ever more egocentric philosophy of the will that underpins bureaucratic individualism. The merits of the choice are, for him, self-evident, for Nietzsche's "great man" turns out "not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather one more representative moment of its internal unfolding." Nietzsche is Aristotle's "ultimate antagonist," but in the end his stance "is only one more facet of that very moral culture of which Nietzsche took himself to be an implacable critic" (ibid.: 259).
MacIntyre has prescriptions both for moral theory and for practical politics, but his explicit attention is focused almost exclusively on the former. He recognizes that the metaphysical biology at the heart of Aristotle's account of the telos is unavailable to us, that Aristotle's account "presupposes the now-long-vanished context of the social relationships of the ancient city-state," and that where Aristotle saw conflict primarily as something to be "avoided or managed" deep conflicts about what human flourishing consists in occupy a central place in "our cultural history" (ibid.: 163, 162).[17] As a result MacIntyre advances a different and more complicated view than Aristotle's. He adopts what he takes to be the Sophoclean view that tragedy and the conflict it brings with it are not the mere result of flaws in an otherwise heroic character (as both the Aristotelian and Homeric views would have it) but that they are the result of "the conflict of good with good embodied in their encounter prior to and independent of any individual characteristics." To this aspect of tragedy Aristotle is necessarily blind in MacIntyre's view, because of his assumptions about natural harmony.[18] This blindness to "the centrality of opposition and conflict in human life conceals from Aristotle also one important source of human learning about … [the] practice of the virtues," for it is "through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are" (ibid.: 132, 163–64).
This raises the question of the extent to which MacIntyre's account is
[17] See also MacIntyre (1988: 10, 13, 35).
[18] For a different reading of Aristotle on conflict, see Yack (1985: 92–112).
Aristotelian, as he is well aware,[19] and to this MacIntyre responds by invoking his earlier distinction between narrative and tradition and the argument that it is in the nature of traditions that people disagree within them, that since "conflicting answers may be given within the tradition, the narrative task itself generally involves participation in conflict" (MacIntyre 1988: 11). So in his rejection of the account of natural harmony, for instance, he engages Aristotle within his own terms, attempts to recover what he thinks was the tradition as it appeared to Aristotle, suggests that in his disagreement with Sophocles, Aristotle partly misread him, and implies that had he not done so he would have taken a more central account of conflict and looked more critically at his own Platonic assumptions about unity and harmony (MacIntyre 1984: 162–64). Whether or not MacIntyre is right in these claims, the essential thesis from this standpoint is that the criticism of Aristotle is meant to be immanent, that he and Aristotle could, in principle, have argued intelligibly about it and, presumably, have resolved their differences. Argument about the nature and relevance of human conflict to the virtues is in this sense internal to the Aristotelian tradition. MacIntyre distinguishes this view from the "illusion" that morality is simply a matter of free choice. Thus "all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular" so that "the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion." The choice between mindless adherence to tradition and radical freedom is chimerical for him; morality is inevitably, and should self-consciously be, a matter of critical engagement with our inherited traditions. So, for MacIntyre, there is no way to possess the virtues "except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them" (ibid.: 126–27). It is this tradition that is Aristotelian and that "is not to be confused with that narrower tradition of Aristotelianism which consists simply in commentary upon and exegesis of Aristotle's texts." Although the term classical is too broad to capture it and Aristotelian ultimately too narrow, it is not as difficult to recognize as it is to name; after Aristotle "it always uses the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics as key texts, when it can, but it never surrenders itself wholly to Aristotle. For it is a tradition which always sets itself in a relationship of dialogue with Aristotle, rather than in any relationship of simple assent" (ibid.: 165).
Yet the Aristotelian tradition can also be characterized in more positive terms by reference to the alternatives to it, the main one being Stoicism. What is distinctive about Stoicism for MacIntyre is its exclusive focus on
[19] See MacIntyre (1984: 163)
law and what may legitimately be prohibited, to the exclusion of considerations of virtue. A community "which envisages its life as directed towards a shared good which provides that community with its common tasks will need to articulate its moral life in terms both of the virtues and of law"; it is therefore not surprising that Stoicism arose with the disappearance of such societies. "Just such a disappearance … was involved in the replacement of the city-state as the form of political life by first the Macedonian kingdom and later the Roman imperium ," which meant that "any intelligible relationship between the virtues and law would disappear" (ibid.: 169–70). Stoicism remains "one of the permanent moral possibilities within the cultures of the West," and "whenever the virtues begin to lose their central place, Stoic patterns of thought and action at once reappear." The crisis of the post-Enlightenment as MacIntyre conceives it was "strikingly anticipated" by Stoicism (ibid.: 170). Because we live in a neo-Stoic age (albeit extreme), Aristotelianism, the historical alternative to Stoicism, provides the needed perspective, revolving around the tradition of the virtues, from which to criticize it and within which to seek alternatives.
MacIntyre's analytic exploration of the concept of virtue begins with the notion of a practice, by which he means "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized." Not all human, or even all social, activities are practices in his sense: ticktacktoe, throwing a football with skill, bricklaying, and planting turnips are not practices. The games of football and chess; the inquiries of physics, chemistry, history, and biology; painting, music, and architecture; the "ancient and medieval" conceptions of the creating and sustaining of human communities, households, cities, and nations, politics "in the Aristotelian sense"—these are all practices (ibid.: 187–88). Although these examples suggest that a degree of cooperative complexity is the main criterion, MacIntyre specifically refrains from attempting to spell out what makes a practice a practice (the implications of which will concern us later) and moves on to distinguish goods that are internal from those that are external to practices. An internal good is bound up with the purpose of the relevant practice, whereas an external good is contingent with respect to that purpose. This distinction is of course relational and will vary with context, as MacIntyre recognizes, but in any particular circumstance it should be clear. There is a difference between winning a game of chess by mastering the rules and excelling at their sophisticated employment and winning by cheating. A good is internal to a practice, then, if "in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially
constitutive of, that form of activity," the participants realize that good, "with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended" (ibid.: 188, 187).[20]
Virtues are defined for MacIntyre in terms of internal goods. A virtue is "an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods " (ibid.: 191). In contrast to utilitarian conceptions of the good, which treat all pleasure as fungible, MacIntyre's conception differentiates among the virtues appropriate to different practices; in this sense these latter are analogous to Walzer's mutually independent spheres of justice, governed by different distributive mechanisms.[21] The parallel may be extended by noting that Walzer's conception of dominance is an analogue of MacIntyre's external goods, because MacIntyre wants to argue that only the goods internal to practices are conducive to the practice of the virtues and hence justifiable. A second difference with utilitarianism becomes clear when MacIntyre elaborates on what it means to participate in a practice. Just because practices are cooperative human activities that (in some form) typically outlive any given class of participants, any discussion of the virtues must take account of two related characteristics of human nature and action. Because we typically become involved in ongoing practices in which there are other participants, we have to accept the existing structure of rules, learn them, and accept the other participants with the purposes they are trying to realize through the relevant practice. We can achieve the goods internal to a practice only
by subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners. We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to
[20] In Whose Justice ? this account of internal and external goods is expanded into a more general distinction between goods of effectiveness and those of excellence. External rewards are characteristic of goods of effectiveness. They are goods that are defined solely in terms of winning, where the only thing that matters is the result and "no consideration counts as a reason except in respect of its actually motivating some person." In the case of such goods "any common good at which cooperation aims is derived from and compounded out of the objects of desire and aspiration which the rival participants brought with them to the bargaining process." Goods of excellence, on the other hand, are always defined internally with respect to the standards internal to an ongoing community practice, and it is on this notion that MacIntyre argues that Aristotle's ethics is built and of which he thinks we have lost sight. Modern societies are dominated by the goods of effectiveness (MacIntyre 1988: 31–32, 45, see also 37–38, 43, 69, 88, 108–9, 144).
[21] See chapter 3, section I.
take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts. (Ibid.: 191)
Maximizing our own satisfactions and pleasures is always contingent on the integrity of the relevant practice and, therefore, on the ability of others to satisfy their aspirations through it as well. "Under the normal conditions of life in human societies each person can only hope to be effective in trying to obtain what he or she wants, whatever it is, if he or she enters into certain kinds of cooperation with others and if this cooperation enables both him or her and those others generally to have potentially well-founded expectations of each other" (MacIntyre 1988: 36). A degree of reciprocity is thus essential to all human interaction, which in turn requires recognizing others' lives as narrative unities with independent purposes, and here we run into a quasi-Kantian element: every entering participant discovers other participants and cannot pursue her own life as a coherent narrative whole without recognizing that others have the same aspiration, for successful realization of her individual telos requires others' recognition, and even affirmation, of its realization.
Another distinctively antiutilitarian component of MacIntyre's account is that it makes history and tradition integral to the satisfaction of human aspirations. First, although we initially discover others in the context of discrete episodes, because our basic mode of understanding takes a narrative form, "we always move towards placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals concerned and of the settings in which they act and suffer…. We render the actions of others intelligible in this way because action itself has a basically historical character." Because we live our own lives and make them intelligible as narratives, "the form of the narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others" (MacIntyre 1984: 211–12). Second, the way in which we learn the rules that govern the practices we participate in has a necessary historical dimension. To enter a practice is to join an ongoing activity governed by rules and standards of excellence. It is "to accept the authority of those standards … [and] to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice." I have to learn rules and criteria of evaluation that existed before me, that have histories. Although they are not immune from my criticism and they change over time, I cannot criticize them or hope to influence their evolution without understanding their historical logic and, to a degree, accepting their authority (ibid.: 190). This, then, is an historicized version of the pragmatist thesis discussed
in chapter 2: just as we are constrained by the structure of the boat at sea in repairing it for Rorty's account,[22] here we cannot escape the histories of the practices in which we participate, even when we criticize them; to participate at all is to acknowledge that they have at least the authority of survival and additionally to give to them their future.
Yet MacIntyre's account is not as relativistic as it might seem because he thinks that our various individual practices must be thought of in the broader context of our overriding purposes, both individual and social, for "without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete." Unless there is a "telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of the virtues adequately." From this it follows that there are some virtues—those integral to this unifying human purpose—that either dominate the virtues appropriate to subordinate practices or regulate the mechanisms of their attainment. Honesty is such a virtue, for it implies that cheating (the pursuit of external goods)[23] is unjustifiable in any practice and that justice and courage are virtues on a similar regulative footing; they go not to what practices in which we engage but to how we engage in them. There are also substantive[24] virtues that attach to the overriding telos of a whole human life, the most important of which is integrity, constancy, or singleness of purpose. This notion can have no application "unless that of a whole life does" (ibid.: 202–3, 191, 203).
When MacIntyre confronts the question of whether there are inherently evil practices, he has two lines of response. To the question of whether torture or masochistic sexuality are such practices, he first replies that they are not practices at all. Recognizing, perhaps, the inherent vulnerability of this logic, he does not rest his argument there but argues in addition that although the virtues "need initially to be defined and explained with reference to the notion of a practice," this in no way entails
[22] See chapter 2, section I.
[23] MacIntyre does not deny that external goods are goods; on the contrary, he notes such pursuit of goods can dominate an entire culture, as in Hobbes's war of All against All or in Colin Turnbull's account of the Ik in The Mountain People (MacIntyre 1984: 196). It is precisely where the tradition of the virtues is eroded that this becomes a possibility. Presumably the culture of bureaucratic individualism institutionalizes, even reifies, the pursuit of external goods on MacIntyre's diagnosis.
[24] Regulative and substantive are my terms in this context, not MacIntyre's.
"approval of all practices in all circumstances." That the virtues "are defined not in terms of good or right practices, but [merely] of practices, does not entail or imply that practices as actually carried through at particular times and places do not stand in need of moral criticism." They have to be evaluated in terms of the virtues that flow from the "larger moral context" of the integrated, unified life with its overarching purpose. It is therefore not the existence of practices that is critical but the overriding unity of purpose that gives them their point and in terms of which they are evaluated. "The unity of a virtue in someone's life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole." It is this conception that is unavailable to the emotivist self, with its differentiated roles and its lack of an idea, even, of what a unified purpose could be. The institutions of contemporary politics seek to manage rather than resolve conflict but this is no more than "civil war carried on by other means" (ibid.: 200, 201, 204, 205, 253).
What is the overarching purpose that could in principle supply to our lives integrity as unified wholes but that is denied to us by all modern politics? In the Aristotelian view it is the attainment of our potential. Because for MacIntyre what is distinctively human is that we understand our reality and ourselves in essentially narrative form, to achieve our potential we must be able to make our lives into good stories. They must have purposes and morals, their various subplots and ancillary themes must be integrated into our broader goals, and above all there must be those broader goals. The better the story we are enabled to make of our lives, the more we will approach that excellence that is characteristically human, but this is systematically frustrated by existing social and political arrangements. Our institutions are dominated by instrumental and manipulative modes of rationality; the ethos of bureaucratic individualism has long since lost sight of the very idea of broader purposes and goals.
Oppositional politics fares little better. Marx's theoretical account is inadequate in its own terms because "he wishes to present the narrative of human social life in a way that will be compatible with a view of the [sic ] life as law-governed and predictable." But for MacIntyre it is essential to the idea of dramatic narrative, of a distinctively human life, that it be unpredictable (ibid.: 215). Although liberal conceptions of freedom of choice are artificial in their failure to recognize that we choose within the context of our particular practices and the possibilities they present, that "we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives," we are and must aspire to be those coauthors. Marx made the mistake of first supposing that history is law governed and that the nature of those laws could be definitively understood and then reifying the belief in their existence into a short-sighted and mechanistic science of revolution.
From this perspective it is small wonder that as Marxists approach power they invariably tend to become Weberians, replicating the alienating institutional structures of bureaucratic individualism that they allegedly seek to overthrow (ibid.: 213, 215–16, 261–62).
For MacIntyre the possibility of creating a world in which the virtues reign has not been foreclosed decisively. Although the present and future look grim, things are not predetermined and we have no choice but to try to recreate the moral life. But creating a society in which the practice of the virtues can flourish is no easy matter, as witness the failure of eighteenth-century republicanism to recreate anything remotely approaching a genuine classical politics. Part of the reason for this was that the eighteenth-century republicans inherited their idiom from Roman rather than Greek sources as transmitted through the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, where a Machiavellian gloss prevailed. But at the institutional level it was at best a partial restoration of the republican tradition because, as the Jacobins learned to their cost, "you cannot hope to re-invent morality on the scale of a whole nation when the very idiom of the morality which you seek to re-invent is alien" to the population (ibid.: 238). In these circumstances we have to begin more modestly:
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. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. (Ibid.: 263)
II. MacIntyre's View: Three Difficulties
Serious difficulties attend MacIntyre's discussion of traditions, his diagnostic account of our circumstances, and his prescriptions. Before what is useful in his account can be endorsed and built on, these must be exposed and his bad arguments repudiated.
(i) The Analysis of Traditions
The most serious difficulty confronting MacIntyre's discussion of the Aristotelian tradition is that if the tradition is characterized as broadly as it is by MacIntyre, it cannot begin to do the theoretical work he requires of
it. This tradition is broadly characterized in at least three different senses: it differs in important particulars from the tradition both as Aristotle conceived it and from Aristotle's own writings, it explicitly includes conflict and disagreement about its key defining elements, and it encompasses a variety of religious and secular traditions that have been at war with one another for centuries and that are in intense mutual foundational conflict today. The notion that Judaism and Islam are part of the same tradition can certainly be defended at some level, and of course historically they have the same Semitic roots even though it is stretching things for MacIntyre to characterize them as Aristotelian. Yet if a tradition includes conflicting ideologies that have been involved in massive wars with one another throughout most of recorded history and that battle intractably with one another in the Middle East and elsewhere today, how can mere appeal to this same tradition be expected to resolve the kinds of disputes whose lack of resolution so troubles MacIntyre? Disputes about the legitimacy of abortion, the proper funding of medical care, the justifiability of nuclear deterrence, and the desirability of quotas to achieve social change (ibid.: 6–7, 253)—and our inability to resolve them—motivated his inquiry in After Virtue to begin with. Yet a tradition defined this broadly cannot seriously be counted on to resolve these questions, and it is hardly surprising therefore that MacIntyre does not even try to show how, on his account, any of them might be settled even in principle.
The same difficulty permeates the analysis in Whose Justice ? MacIntyre begins with a series of specific questions: "Does justice permit gross inequality of income and ownership? Does justice require compensatory action to remedy inequalities that are the result of past injustice, even if those who pay the costs of such compensation had no part in that injustice? Does justice permit or require the imposition of the death penalty and, if so, for what offences? Is it just to permit legalized abortion? When is it just to go to war?" He then repeats his claim that we cannot resolve such questions because what we are educated into "is not a coherent way of thinking and judging, but one constructed out of an amalgam of social and cultural fragments inherited both from different traditions from which our culture was originally derived (Puritan, Catholic, Jewish) and from different stages in and aspects of the development of modernity" (MacIntyre 1988: 1, 2). Yet nowhere in his analysis does MacIntyre give the slightest indication of how any of the philosophical traditions he discusses would resolve these questions. The focus of his attention is on how different traditions cope with conflict, and his answer in the end to this question is that one simply has to accept one's own tradition. This will depend "on who you are and how you understand yourself." MacIntyre's
considered judgment is that it is impossible to answer any first-order questions concerning justice and rationality without embracing a tradition (possibly as a result of a conversion rather than any reasoned process), that "we have to begin speaking as protagonists of one contending party or fall silent." He then implies that an individual will be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas by testing "dialectically the thesis proposed to him or her by each competing tradition." Yet as we have seen, MacIntyre continues to characterize his own traditionalist commitments in the broadest conceptual strokes, and because he has defined traditions as involving conflicting answers to moral and political questions, mere appeal to any tradition is necessarily insufficient to answer the questions with which he begins (ibid.: 396, 393, 399, 401, 398). As with After Virtue , it is possible to work through all of Whose Justice ? and still not have the slightest idea of how MacIntyre thinks we should answer the specific questions about distributive justice (or any others) he raises at the outset, let alone how he would go about arguing for his views within the Aristotelian tradition even if we knew what they were. He concludes that "only by either the circumvention or the subversion of liberal modes of debate can the rationality specific to traditions of enquiry reestablish itself sufficiently to challenge the cultural and political hegemony of liberalism effectively" (ibid.: 401), but he gives no indication what these traditions would tell us to do. Indeed the thrust of his historical analysis suggests that there is always enough disagreement within traditions to ensure that we would not definitively resolve the specific moral dilemmas with which he begins.[25] His analysis not only directs attention away from first-order moral questions to the traditions of discourse in terms of which they are presented, but it undercuts his critique of modernity that revolves around the fact of interminable moral argument.
A second major difficulty concerns MacIntyre's characterization of the tradition he is trying to recover as Aristotelian at the same time as he explicitly rejects so many of Aristotle's arguments. MacIntyre considers his relationship with Aristotle's writings to be one of dialogue and argument, but his disagreements with Aristotle are so major that it is hard to know how to evaluate this claim. His rejection of Aristotle's assumptions about harmony (discussed further below) is but one of many. He acknowledges, without comment, that "to treat Aristotle as part of a tradition, even as its greatest reprentative, is a very un-Aristotelian thing to do." He notes that Aristotle's dismissal of non-Greeks as incapable of political relationship should "affront us." He rebukes Aristotle for his lack of attention
[25] See, for one excellent illustration, MacIntyre (1988: 175–78).
to political conflict, he claims that medieval "uses of, extensions of and amendments to" Aristotle marked" a genuine advance in the tradition of moral theory" but that the "medieval stage" was nonotheless in "a strong sense Aristotelian," and he repeatedly rejects Aristotle's metaphysical biology (MacIntyre 1984: 146, 159, 163-64, 180, 196-97). In additional may of Aristotle's other substantive commitments are unattractive to MacIntyre, such as his views on the natures and social functions of women and slaves.[26]
Now there is nothing wrong with endorsing some of Aristotle's arguments and rejecting others as a matter of moral or political theory; in chapter 8 I advocate just such a course. But unlike MacIntyre, I have no particular stake in calling myself an Aristotelian or in establishing that Aristotle could in principle be brought to accept my modifications of his views (I doubt that he could). Nor do I think there is anything in the nature of a tradition's being characterized a Aristotelian that matters from the standpoint of analyzing contemporary politics or defending a political or moral theory. Because MacIntyre's critical diagnostic case rests so heavily on the claim that we must recover a lost Aristotelian tradition before the problems of modern politics can even be understood, his subsequent willingness to reject so many of Aristotle's core arguments, when push comes to shove, undermines his initial diagnosis. Indeed, it is difficult to pin down just what makes a view Aristotelian for MacIntyre. Much of his analysis seems to point to the claim that what distinguishes Aristotelian from Stoic and all post-Enlightenment moralities derives from Aristotle's commitment to a teleological view of ethics, yet even here MacIntyre is on shaky ground at best.
It is false to assume, as MacIntyre does, that all influential post-Enlightenment moralities are antiteleological. Utilitarianism in its classical variants was a teleological doctrine and was rejected by many for just that reason. It may be true that utilitarianism in most of its twentieth-century mutations has shed the third element of MacIntyre's scheme ("man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos ") by relying on ordinal rather than cardinal utilities and thereby denying the possibility of paternalistic and interpersonal judgments of utility. But this was not true of classical utilitarianism (its principal defect in the eyes of deontologists like Rawls),[27] and even the neoclassical variants of utilitarianism can be shown implicitly to be teleological. Indeed, the whole dichotomy between deontological
[26] See MacIntyre (1988: 104, 105, 121). On Aristotle's treatment of women generally, see Elshtain (1981: 19–54), Okin (1979: 73–96), and Saxonhouse (1986: 403–18).
[27] See, for instance, Rawls (1971: 22–27).
and teleological moral argument is artificial and misleading; the real argument is never over whether or not telos but over which.[28] It may be true that utilitarian conceptions of the human telos are unsatisfying to MacIntyre and liberalism's other communitarian critics and that "utilitarianism gave the good a bad name," as Sandel (1982: 174) puts it, but to say this is to acknowledge both that in its major historical variants utilitarianism was a teleological doctrine and that to hold that teleological argument is inescapable in arguments of right and justice is to hold very little.
If the appeal to Aristotle is to advance MacIntyre's purposes, then, there must be more to it than simply endorsing Aristotle's account of the teleological character of moral argument. Here the difficulties become more serious because MacIntyre's account of what has to be rejected from the Aristotelian tradition undermines his account of what he thinks should be retrieved. This is because Aristotle's account of human practices, and the realization of unified human lives through them, requires the assumptions about natural harmony that MacIntyre claims to reject. If Marx's one enduring insight was that conflict is endemic to human social organization, as MacIntyre believes,[29] the whole account of the realization of the virtues through practices becomes vulnerable because the existence of the practices and their relationships to one another will be causally linked to the conflicts and relations of power that prevail in a given society. In this light the modeling of social practices on a game like chess is misleadingly benign, and, as with Rorty's account of communities, many basic political questions are never addressed.[30] There is no discussion of how and why people enter some practices rather than others, no mention of people who may be excluded from various practices against their wishes. Indeed, MacIntyre concedes that the Aristotelian view is inherently indifferent to outsiders and other noncitizens such as women and slaves and that it was criticized historically for just that reason.[31] There is an unwarranted and unstated "invisible hand" assumption that, within a given practice, all participants can excel by learning the rules and adhering to them, whereas once we jettison Aristotle's natural harmony assumptions, it is surely more reasonable to assume, as Pigou did,[32] that individual
[28] For extended defense of this claim, see Shapiro (1986: 4, 19, 213, 251, 286–87) and Shapiro (1989a: 51–76).
[29] MacIntyre (1984: 252–3).
[30] See chapter 2, sections II(ii) and (iii).
[31] See MacIntyre (1988: 107, 121, 146, 147). This issue is taken up at greater length in relation to the civic republican tradition in chapter 6, section II(iii).
[32] Pigou (1960: 317). See also Furniss (1978: 399–410) and Blaug (1978: 409–10) for related discussions.
actions typically involve externalities—unintended consequences for others that may or may not frustrate their attainment of their own goals within a given practice or related ones.
These omissions mean that a great deal is loaded onto MacIntyre's account of the general context of a unified human life as a mechanism for resolving the conflicting demands of individual practices and for deciding whether some practices are inherently evil. "The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life … but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context." Even when we have to make "tragic choices" among conflicting goods, MacIntyre wants to stress that these choices are different from the dilemmas facing the modern adherents of rival and "incommensurable moral premises" in two respects. Genuinely tragic choices in his sense are distinctive, first, in that "both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognized as leading to some authentic and substantial good" (MacIntyre 1984: 223–24). Second, the tradition of the virtues tells us how best to confront such choices: courageously and honestly, not as cowards and cheats. Yet this schematic notion of the unity of life does not do the theoretical work MacIntyre requires of it.
Ultimately, of course, the idea of a unified life must drive MacIntyre's entire ethics because it provides the archimedean point for the evaluation of the individual practices in terms of which the virtues are intelligible. But once MacIntyre concedes that conflict is endemic to human existence, this notion becomes inadequate. For one thing, it undercuts his critique of modernity as being somehow distinctive in preventing the living of integrated lives. Second, MacIntyre's account deals only with circumstances in which an individual must make a choice among competing goods; it says nothing about the circumstances in which there is serious disagreement over what the purpose of a particular practice is or in which achieving that purpose for one individual means frustrating it for another. Third, the general injunctions deriving from MacIntyre's conception of a unified life tell us little that can be expected to resolve actual moral dilemmas. Consider the actions of Adolf Eichmann as portrayed in Hannah Arendt's (1963) account of his trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was a willing participant in a series of practices for the deportation and ultimate extermination of European Jews and operated according to the rules created by others who were his superiors in the prevailing legal and political order. He carried out his duties with imagination and creativity and tried to excel
at the practice as it was defined. Are we to say, in terms of MacIntyre's scheme, that he was courageous for attempting to excel at this practice or that he was cowardly for not attempting not to? Would it not have been more desirable for him to cheat and be dishonest in these circumstances rather than to try to advance the policies constituting the practice as best he could? For MacIntyre to deny that this activity was a practice is, of course, to beg the question. We need to know why not, for if every activity that is harmful to third parties is not a practice, this rules out a great deal, arguably everything. There are massive difficulties generated here concerning who participates in a practice, who is a third party, what claims, if any, third parties might have over the conduct of practices that affect them, and so on.
The difficulties are not restricted to the extreme and grisly case of Nazi war crimes (which, no doubt, are problematical for almost any political theory); many of the debates about immigration in the advanced industrial countries turn on hotly contested accounts of who is affected by the actions of a government and of powerful groups as, in a different way, do arguments about the rightful entitlements of the unemployed and the legitimate claims of marginal countries on the management of the world economy. There is scarcely an area of political argument in which the issues of who is affected, who has the right to be included, who has a right to alter the rules or affect their alteration, or which practices are legitimate are not objects of core dispute. Yet MacIntyre's account speaks to none of these issues, although in fairness it should be acknowledged that this is a difficulty he shares with Aristotle. In Book Two of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers his account of the virtues and of the doctrine of the mean, in terms of which we are always to avoid excess and deficiency in the pursuit of particular goods. Yet he never supplies an account of why he has chosen that particular list of virtues, and he has thus often been criticized for reifying the dominant values in Athenian culture as the virtues, for the elitism inherent in his treatment of women and slaves and in his view that the highest (contemplative) form of life is available only to the few, and for his failure to include among the virtues such qualities as benevolence and philanthropy.[33] In addition, Aristotle departs from the doctrine of the mean with the claim that there are some actions where it
[33] See, for instance, Russell (1963: 185–95). MacIntyre himself offered a version of this critique in A Short History of Ethics, noting that Aristotle's audience was a "small leisured minority," so that in his account of the virtues we are not faced "with a telos for human life as such, but with a telos for one kind of life…. All Aristotle's conceptual brilliance in the course of the argument declines at the end to an apology for this extraordinarily parochial form of human existence" (MacIntyre 1966: 83).
does not apply "because they have names that directly connote depravity, such as malice, shamelessness and envy, and among actions adultery, theft and murder." These "and more like them" he regards as "evil in themselves" (Aristotle 1977: 100, 102). This argument is intended to deal with exactly the kind of difficulty raised by my earlier discussion of Eichmann, but just as MacIntyre omits to tell us what makes an activity a practice, so Aristotle fails to explain what rules out certain actions as "evil in themselves." The debatable moral status of at least some of those actions makes Aristotle, like MacIntyre, vulnerable to the charge that they are at best an arbitrary list.
Later I argue that although MacIntyre is right to appeal to a generalized version of Aristotle's understanding of practices, we need to take both less and more from Aristotle's view than MacIntyre advocates. We need to take less in the sense that all that is worth holding onto is the structure of Aristotle's account of human psychology, not his (or any) particular class-and culture-specific list of virtues and vices. This means that practices we might find repugnant will have to be accepted as fitting the definition and that we even have to face up to and live with the possibility MacIntyre evades: that of entire lives that are as integrated as any other yet still morally deplorable.[34] As I argue in chapter 9, however, we can take more from the Aristotelian view than MacIntyre realizes just because we have to live with this possibility. Once we abandon the notion that unified lives in the Aristotelian sense are, have been, or could be possible and take seriously the likelihood that every possible social ordering of practices works to the disadvantage of some, the Aristotelian defense of hierarchy that MacIntyre endorses also breaks down. No rational ordering of practices is possible, and under conditions of relative ignorance about the future and much else, we have good reason to resist every entrenched ordering of social practices. MacIntyre fails to see that his rejection of Aristotle's theory of natural harmony also renders the account of unified lives vulnerable. As a result he interprets the existence of fragmented lives as a parochial product of modernity and sets up the mutually reinforcing but misleading dichotomies of ancient/modern and unified/fragmented lives. Yet once we see that unified lives in Aristotle's sense are not a possibility even in principle, we are bound to resist such dichotomous thinking: whether and to what extent lives can be more rather than less integrated in different circumstances becomes a matter of degree—a subject for investigation and argument, not for armchair speculation. In chapter 8 I also make the case that although Aristotle and MacIntyre are right to insist
[34] See chapter 8, section II(ii).
that in our basic psychologies we are teleological creatures, we turn out to be teleological creatures who are endemically ambivalent about our purposes. Thus there are psychological reasons, as well as reasons that have to do with the logic of social interaction, for being skeptical of the claim that unified lives in Aristotle's sense are possible even in principle.
(ii) Diagnosis
MacIntyre's diagnosis of our current ills and his causal account of how they came to be such must be considered together because of his methodological idealism. Put simply, the claim in After Virtue is that the Aristotelian tradition (defined to include all religious and secular teleological moral systems since Aristotle) began to disintegrate with the ascendancy of the Enlightenment. In Whose Justice?, MacIntyre modifies this claim, at times distinguishing among several premodern traditions. Yet he continues to insist that they have all become unavailable in the politics of the modern world, so that it is only through the "circumvention or the subversion of liberal modes of debate" that the "cultural and political hegemony of liberalism" can be challenged and the "rationality specific to traditions of enquiry [can] reestablish itself" (MacIntyre 1988: 401).
A tradition, for MacIntyre, "may cease to progress or may degenerate…. When a tradition is in good order, when progress is taking place, there is always a certain cumulative element" to it (MacIntyre 1984: 146). This is lacking in the modern world, but it is difficult to see why this should be the case, what causes traditions to be in good or bad order, how judgments about the disintegration of traditions are to be made at all, or what the exact role of philosophical narrative in this process is supposed to have been. MacIntyre's argument is replete with such assertions as "eighteen or nineteen hundred years after Aristotle the modern world came systematically to repudiate the classical view of human nature"; the medieval vision of the moral life" was "historical in a way that Aristotle's could not be"; the core components of the lost conception of the virtues "derive from different stages in the development of the tradition"; the modern world is contrasted with "the particular ancient and medieval view [of] … political community"; and in "the traditional Aristotelian view" egoistic behavior does not exist so the perceived but unattainable need for altruism does not arise (ibid.: 165, 176, 186, 195, 229). But how can "the modern world" repudiate? What is "the classical view" of human nature, "the medieval vision" of moral life, or "the particular ancient and medieval" view of political community? How can MacIntyre speak of "the traditional Aristotelian view" of human nature when the tradition has been so expansively defined over time and space and explicitly been portrayed
as evolving over time?[35] If the tradition is reified in this way and construed as an entity that developed and progressed until a certain point in history when it allegedly began to fall to pieces, we are bound to ask questions about the nature of the causal processes involved. What was it about the narratives that the Enlightenment philosophers related that could have had this devastating result? MacIntyre's response—their definitive rejection of teleology—fails to convince even within its own terms, given his admission that the Stoics and many other influential philosophical movements have likewise rejected teleological arguments in circumstances that did not result in the moral annihilation of entire cultures (ibid.: 168–70).
There are more serious methodological difficulties. MacIntyre's extreme philosophical idealism leads him literally to identify developments in the history of philosophy with changes in the social and political world. "The key episodes," he tells us, "in the social history which transformed, fragmented and … largely displaced morality—and so created the possibility of the emotivist self with its characteristic form of relationship and modes of utterance—were episodes in the history of philosophy" (ibid.: 36). Earlier he says more fully:
This transformation of the self and its relationship to its roles from more traditional modes of existence into contemporary
[35] It should be noted that despite MacIntyre's distinguishing, in Whose Justice? , of traditions that were conflated in After Virtue , he continues to characterize his traditionalist commitments in the broadest conceptual strokes. He refers to himself as an Aristotelian, as an "Augustinian Christian," and he concludes with an approving reference to a description of this tradition in which "Aristotle's scheme of thought was developed by Aquinas in a way which enabled him to accommodate Augustinian claims and insights alongside Aristotelian theorizing in a single dialectally constructed enterprise." This results in an Aristotelian tradition that exhibits "resources for its own enlargement, correction, and defense" (ibid.: 396, 10, 401, 402). At many points this tradition is characterized as broadly as in After Virtue , to include Islam, which has made a "large contribution to the Aristotelian tradition" as a "sequence of thought which begins from Homer" and provides a "framework on the basis of which and by means of which later thinkers can extend and continue Aristotle's enquiries in ways which are both unpredictably innovative and genuinely Aristotelian." MacIntyre depicts the tradition dialectically, as always remaining open to the possibility of further development that "renders possible the work of a tradition elaborating upon, revising, emending, and even rejecting parts of Aristotle's own work, while still remaining fundamentally Aristotelian." He speaks of Aristotelianism flourishing "within medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian communities." Aquinas "writes out of a tradition, or rather out of at least two traditions [?], extending each as part of his task of integrating them into a single systematic mode of thought." His account of the virtues is a synthesis of "Pauline and Augustinian with Aristotelian elements." The rejection of teleology continues to be common to "ancient and medieval views of the matter" (ibid.: 11, 99–100, 101, 164, 182, 210).
emotivist forms could not have occurred of course if the forms of moral discourse, the language of morality, had not also been transformed at the same time. Indeed, it is wrong to separate the history of the self and its roles from the history of the language which the self specifies and through which the roles are given expression. What we discover is a single history and not two parallel ones . (Ibid.: 35, italics added)
If this is taken at face value, it is not surprising that there are almost no explicit causal assertions in MacIntyre's historical account. If the history of political, social, and economic change is nothing but the history of changes in "the language of morality" and that history is nothing but the history of academic philosophy, then mere description of the evolution of this history is all that we legitimately should expect.[36] This extreme hermeneutic claim is central to MacIntyre's historical account as well as to his prescriptions (as we will see), for it generates the implication that all we need to do to change our current circumstances is rethink our philosophical commitments in light of his account of our philosophical decline. He thus assumes a view of the history of ideas long fashionable in literary circles, and recently popularized in the history of political theory by Quentin Skinner and his followers, according to which the historian of ideas should see the text "not in causal and positivist terms as a precipitate of its context, but rather in circular and hermeneutic terms as a meaningful item within a wider context of conventions and assumptions" (Skinner 1975: 215–16). But MacIntyre's view is more heavily idealist than even
[36] In Whose Justice?, MacIntyre sums up his view in a somewhat less radically idealistic fashion: "On the view which has emerged here from the discussion of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiry such thought and enquiry have a history neither distinct from, nor intelligible apart from, the history of certain forms of social and practical life, nor are mere dependent variables. Philosophical theories give organized expression to concepts and theories already embodied in forms of practice and types of community. As such they make available for rational criticism and for further rational development those socially embodied theories and concepts of which they provide an understanding. Forms of social institution, organization, and practice are always to a greater or lesser degree socially embodied theories…. The reductionism which appears recurrently in the sociology of knowledge rests upon the mistake of supposing that preconceptual interests, needs, and the like can operate in sustained forms of social life in independence of theory-informed presuppositions about the place of such interests and needs in human life" (ibid.: 390). MacIntyre does not discuss the implications of this milder version of his causal claim for the argument of After Virtue . Yet clearly the claim that philosophical theories give "organized expression" to concepts and theories that are "already embodied in forms of practice and types of community" implies that some causal account of those forms of practice and types of community should be forthcoming that is not read off from the philosophical theories.
Skinner's.[37] Where Skinner argues that the intentions of authors must be decoded from the prevailing social and linguistic context—that to understand what Hobbes meant we must find out what his contemporaries understood him to mean—MacIntyre's view is that the broader context of social relationships and transformations must be assumed not merely to have been determined by the writings of philosophers and political theorists (a powerfully idealist claim in itself) but in some (unspecified) sense actually to be those writings.
Now it would be one thing to argue that developments in the history of ideas supply poignant metaphors for developments in the broader social world or that analysis of the arguments of political theorists that have been canonized in a culture, and are held in great esteem in its established institutions, can supply useful insights into the dominant ideology[38] and quite another to make this double identification between changes in social reality and in prevailing linguistic norms and between changes in those linguistic norms and in the writings of philosophers and political theorists. Only Hegel's less than overwhelmingly plausible architectonic of the Absolute Idea working itself out through history (via successively transcendent processes of determinate negation) could conceivably justify such a view. Yet this is surely unavailable to MacIntyre, given his outright rejection of all forms of deterministic historical argument (MacIntyre 1984: 88–108).
Both the conjunctions implied in MacIntyre's massive causal conflation are problematical. First, the uncritical identification of prevailing concepts and categories with social reality rests on the same internal and transparent view of language discussed in connection with Rorty in chapter 2.[39] The defects exposed there—deriving from the opacity of language, the relative autonomy and manipulability of uttered speech and written texts, and the significance of extralinguistic factors in shaping linguistic categories—are likewise applicable here. But where Rorty's view of language was argued to presuppose a version of the realist pragmatism he claimed to reject, MacIntyre's unequivocally Winchean view appears to be that the structure and evolution of language are internally driven and that social reality literally is language. The second conflation—that these concepts and categories are the writings of philosophers and political theorists—completes the idealist hermeneutic that enables MacIntyre to think he can
[37] For a discussion of the idealist implications of Skinner's view, see Shapiro (1982: 535–78).
[38] This latter is the view I defend in Shapiro (1986: 3–11) and more fully in Shapiro (1982: 535–78).
[39] See chapter 2, section II(ii).
read off social reality from the writings of these few intellectuals. His praxis seems to be that theory is practice, and even within these terms MacIntyre is less than consistent. The classical Greek texts and especially the writings of Aristotle are taken to mirror a reality that we have lost and should strive to regain, even if difficulties are acknowledged (deriving from the fact that we no longer live in "the context" of the ancient polis). But the qualification itself assumes a good deal. That MacIntyre's is a naive picture of that context (ancient Greece) is undeniable in the face of much historical scholarship, as many of his critics have been quick to point out.[40] His discussion of the ancient and medieval worlds betrays not the slightest interest in the deviations of reality from theory, the ideological uses of philosophical theories, or the impact of social and political conflict on their formulation, which is astonishing for someone with MacIntyre's intellectual history.[41] Uncritical nostalgia for a classical reality, either read off from the works of the ancients or conjured up from an unspecified model of the "communitarian" principles by which undefined "traditional societies" allegedly operated, permeate his diagnosis of our "moral decline." Emotivism's "predecessor cultures" displayed "unity and coherence"; they were cultures in which "philosophy did constitute a central form of social activity, in which its role and function was very unlike that which it has with us." In heroic societies "morality and social structure are in fact one and the same thing." Adkins is cited approvingly for the proposition that, in contrast to Homeric societies that are competitive, despite the presence of conflict in Athenian democracy, it is basically cooperative. In modern societies patriotism can no longer be a virtue "in the way that it once was," for we no longer have a society where government expresses or represents "the moral community of the citizens." No evidence (other than references to classical texts) is ever offered for any of these assertions, but once they are made, MacIntyre thinks himself justified in explaining changes in the social structure by reference to developments in philosophy and political theory. It was the "failure of philosophy" to provide what religion could no longer furnish after the Reformation that "was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject." Post-Enlightenment
[40] See, for instance, Wallach (1983: 233–40). Seminal works on this subject are G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (1981) and Finley (1973). For recent discussion, see the double issue of History of Political Thought 6, nos. 1–2 (Summer 1985) devoted to issues raised by de Ste. Croix's work, especially the papers by F. D. Harvey, George Huxley, Roger Just, and Christopher Tuplin.
[41] In Whose Justice?, MacIntyre modifies his claims about ancient Greece, but the form this modification takes creates as many difficulties as it resolves. See below.
thinkers inherited "incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action " (ibid.: 33, 18, 37, 36, 123, 133–34, 254, 50, 55, italics added). The fact/value distinction is "an inescapable truth for philosophers whose culture possesses only the impoverished moral vocabulary which results from the episodes [in the history of philosophy] I have recounted" (ibid.: 59, italics added).
At times MacIntyre seems aware of the massive conflations behind these causal assertions, as when he notes that there is controversy over how reliable the Homeric poems or the sagas are as evidence concerning the societies they portrayed. Yet he refuses to confront the implications of these concessions for his argument:
Happily I need not involve myself with the detail of those arguments [about the reliability of texts as descriptive of their societies]. What matters for my own argument is a relatively indisputable historical fact, namely that such narratives did provide the historical memory, adequate or inadequate, of the societies in which they were finally written down. More than that they provided a moral background to contemporary debate in classical societies, an account of a now transcended or partly-transcended moral order whose beliefs and concepts were still partially influential, but which also provided an illuminating contrast to the present. (Ibid.: 121)
This begs every question it raises. What is "the historical memory" of a "society"? How can a "moral order" have "beliefs" and "concepts"? How does MacIntyre know what the influence of texts was on largely illiterate populations in ancient and medieval Europe and Asia? How can it be thought of as an "indisputable fact"—without any reference to any evidence—that the classical texts shaped actual moral debate in classical societies? How can MacIntyre ask us to believe that the premodern world was so fundamentally communitarian that "protest" and "indignation" are "distinctive modern emotions" (ibid.: 71)?
Here we begin to see that MacIntyre's method is not applied consistently. Once he reaches the Enlightenment, texts are no longer taken at face value as descriptive of their societies but are mediated through a theory of ideology. When he reaches "modernity" reference is made to the ideological functions of moral and political argument. Then we discover that "despite the theoretical incoherence" of the mismatch between the "individualism of modernity" and the last vestiges of traditional moral argument, it was not without "ideological usefulness." With the Enlightenment morality becomes "available in a quite new way" for ideological
manipulation (ibid.: 222, 110). Such assertions raise questions about the interests served by this ideological manipulation, all of which are sidestepped:
If moral utterance is put to uses at the service of arbitrary will, it is someone's arbitrary will; and the question of whose will it is is obviously of both moral and political importance. But to answer that question is not my task here. What I need to show … is only how morality has become available for a certain type of use and that it is so used. (Ibid.: 110)
But how can one enterprise be conducted without some at least rudimentary account of the other?[42] Even if we pass over this issue and accept his description of his task, we are left with the problem of his different treatments of ideology in the ancient and modern worlds. Whatever one's theory of ideology turns out to be, it is scarcely credible that the dynamics of it would change so radically that at some point in human history the language of moral argument would suddenly become available for ideological manipulation. What reason could we have for supposing that the nature of social structures and their reproduction would undergo such an inexplicable change? Why is it that the ancient philosophers accurately depicted social reality but that although virtually no philosopher defends emotivism today, MacIntyre's independent analysis leads him to discover it at every turn, structuring all moral and political debate?
To the extent that we find MacIntyre's account of the manipulative uses of moral discourse in the contemporary world plausible, this is provisional and contestable evidence that the language of morality is always used in these ways, at least where relations of political power are to be found. In After Virtue it is MacIntyre's unstated but ever-present assumption that there were no power relationships in the premodern world that can make this methodological disjunction seem credible, but of course the assumption only has to be stated for its absurdity to be plain. In Whose Justice? he takes a somewhat more credible view: he acknowledges in general terms the presence of conflict in the ancient polis (MacIntyre 1988: 10, 11) and explains such conflict by causal reference to the power structures that prevailed there.[43] In his criticism of Aristotle's treatment of women
[42] For a good discussion of the weakness of MacIntyre's implied theory of power, see Wallach (1983: 233–40).
[43] Thus he notes that it is always possible "to subordinate goods of the one kind [excellence] to those of the other [effectiveness], and the fundamental conflicts of standpoint in much Greek and especially Athenian life were provided by those who did so. In the actual social orders of city-states not only was recognition accorded to both sets of goods, but it was often enough accorded in a way that left it indeterminate where the fundamental allegiance of those who inhabited that social order lay" (MacIntyre 1988: 35).
and slaves, he argues that Aristotle's "error" may have arisen "from a kind of fallacious reasoning typical of ideologies of irrational domination" and the failure "to understand how domination of a certain kind is in fact the cause of those characteristics of the dominated that are then invoked to justify unjustified domination." Yet the implications of this have not begun to work their way through the rest of MacIntyre's argument. Although rejecting the view that the polis should involve "irrational domination," he continues to agree with Aristotle that it should be hierarchically structured. Yet MacIntyre conspicuously fails to explain how it is possible to have hierarchy without domination, telling us only that "hierarchy of the best kind of polis is one of teaching and of learning" (ibid.: 105, 106). More seriously, once MacIntyre has conceded that the actual world of ancient Greece was characterized by power relations of "irrational domination" and that it was at least part of Aristotle's task to legitimate those relations,[44] then it is not clear what moral force the appeal to the polis or to Aristotle's account should have for us. Yet MacIntyre appears blind to these difficulties, continuing to romanticize both in Whose Justice? Thus we are told that "since it is only the institutionalized forms of the polis which, not only on Aristotle's view but on that common to educated Greeks, provided such an integrated form of life, Aristotle's account of the good and the best cannot but be an account of the good and the best as it is embodied in a polis ." Or in his discussion of Aristotle on desert we are told that this concept only has application where there is "some common enterprise to the achievement of whose goals those who are taken to be more deserving have contributed more than those who are taken to be less deserving; and there must be a shared view both of how such contributions are to be measured and of how rewards are to be ranked." Both these conditions, we are told, "are satisfied in the life of the polis " (ibid.: 90, 106–7). MacIntyre also continues to romanticize a more loosely specified premodern past as being qualitatively different from "modernity." Thus in the course of his discussion of the sixteenth-century revival of Aristotelianism,[45] he remarks that what led the European educated classes to reject Aristotelianism was "the gradual discovery during
[44] See, for example (ibid.: 89–90)
[45] This discussion is introduced with the remark that the "revival of Aristotelian studies, let alone of Aristotelian modes of thought and action, in the sixteenth-century has so far been the subject of only preliminary historical enquiry" (MacIntyre 1988: 209) that readers of the literature on civic republicanism since the 1960s will find astonishing. See chapter 6.
and after the savage and persistent conflicts of the ages, that no appeal to any agreed conception of the good for human beings, either at the level of practice or theory, was now possible." Although "it is no doubt true that for a very long time" such appeals were illusory, it was still possible for Leibniz to "envisage this practical outcome [promotion of the general good] as one of the realistic goals not only of political negotiation but also of a rational theology which should embody a cogent shared conception of the good." When we compare the twentieth-century debates about justice and rationality with their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, we find that we have moved from a world in which "the exercise of practical rationality presupposes some kind of social setting" into one in which "the exercise of practical rationality, if it is to occur at all, has to be embodied in social contexts of fundamental disagreement and conflict." Thus MacIntyre continues to maintain that modernity is a new, alienated state in which the "procedures of the public realm" and the "psychology of the liberal individual" reinforce one another in cutting loose our teleological moorings[46] (ibid.: 209–10, 325, 339). Yet as in After Virtue , no account is supplied of what the causal mechanisms that brought this about are supposed to have been other than the implied argument throughout that it was changes in the philosophical theories themselves.
If MacIntyre's causal account, once brought to the surface, is less than plausible, his generalized description of our current malaise is likewise vulnerable. Notice that despite his repeated insistence on the importance of understanding our malaise historically, his own account of that malaise is strikingly unhistorical in two important senses. There is, first, the problem generated by his extreme methodological idealism just discussed: that it is not at all clear how any of the alleged developments actually occurred historically. How, for instance, did the actions of a small group of fringe intellectuals like the Bloomsbury group, in appropriating parts of G. E. Moore's intuitionism (assuming that they did), in any sense cause or even contribute to the existence of "bureaucratic individualism" in the contemporary world? Supposing MacIntyre could somehow rescue this thesis, there is a second problem of ahistoricity deriving from the breadth of his characterizations of "bureaucratic individualism" and "emotivist culture." In MacIntyre's view these infect establishment institutions and opposition movements throughout the modern world, communist and capitalist.
[46] "In Aristotelian practical reasoning it is the individual qua citizen who reasons; in Thomistic practical reasoning it is the individual qua enquirer into his or her good and the good of his or her community; in Humean practical reasoning it is the individual qua propertied or unpropertied participant in a society of a particular kind of mutuality and reciprocity; but in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons" (ibid.: 339).
Even if MacIntyre's account, suitably qualified, is part of the explanation of why instrumentalist modes of thinking prevail in England (or in something called "Anglo-American culture" or even "the West"), by itself how can it credibly be advanced as an historical account of the institutional structure and political culture of the entire non-Western industrial world? How can it even be part of such an account? To explain the bureaucratic structures that prevail in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe historically, we would need to trace their political, economic, and cultural histories, come to terms with the conditions under which they were formed and the domestic and international geopolitical environments in which they have since evolved. Only if we built the most crass version imaginable of modernization theory atop a bastardized Hegelian historical teleology and thereby assumed that all of reality was tending to become like MacIntyre's conception of contemporary Anglo-American culture could this be thought to be an historical explanation, leaving aside questions of its credibility. Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Soviet and East European politics should tell us that although bureaucracies play decisive roles in daily political life, they are very different from bureaucracies elsewhere and, specifically, are not characterized by what MacIntyre refers to as "bureaucratic individualism." The notion of the manager, concerned only with means, instrumental efficiency, and conflict management, may illuminate something about our own culture, but communist bureaucracies are obviously teleological in MacIntyre's sense, even if they typically fail to realize their purposes or if MacIntyre does not like those purposes.
Even within what we might understand one another to mean by Western culture, MacIntyre's account is so sweeping and undiscriminating that analogous problems are raised. His depiction of such distinctive characters of modernity as the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist (MacIntyre 1984: 30–35) invites two sorts of response. One wonders, on the one hand, how distinctively these characters represent modernity—both in the sense that there have always been aesthetes and managers in the world, as well as priests and others who have played the roles of contemporary therapists, and in the sense that there are many other characters in today's world who are not instrumentalist in MacIntyre's sense. There are teachers, ministers, public interest organizations of various sorts, political movements, some trade unions, charities, and parents, none of which can be reduced to mere instrumentalist roles and certainly not in the absence of all argument.[47] On the other hand, even if his characters
[47] At the end of Whose Justice? , MacIntyre concedes that the estranged selves of modernity may be "portrayed in modern literary and philosophical texts more frequently than they are to be met with in everyday life," but he in no way sees this as requiring him to alter the diagnosis of modernity or any of the other arguments of After Virtue (ibid.: 397, x, 343, 395–403).
are definitive of modern culture in ways other than those just alluded to, it is not obvious that this says anything about emotivist culture and instrumental modes of behavior. How accurate is it to say, for instance, that the contemporary therapist "treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with … technique, with effectiveness in transforming neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones" (ibid.: 30)? MacIntyre explains this no further, and as with many of his diagnostic observations, one immediately senses that although it contains a kernel of illumination it is wildly overstated. There is certainly a good deal of "fix-it" therapy, indifferent toward ends in MacIntyre's sense, practiced in contemporary America. One popular school of psychotherapy, the so-called logotherapy of Victor Frankel and his followers, is built explicitly on agnosticism toward patients' substantive sources of meaning, seeking only to restore faith in goals that supply life with meaning without independently evaluating the goals themselves.[48] But such claims about agnosticism of ends by therapists do not withstand much scrutiny; the nature of the therapeutic relationship is such that the analyst's evaluation of which sources of meaning are healthy, which neurotic, invariably shapes the therapy.[49] Of course, it has long been a standard critique of Freudian and other traditional schools of psychoanalysis that their implicit pictures of the healthy or normal human mind are in various ways biased by contextual Puritan values and are sexist.[50] The notion that therapists are indifferent toward ends, especially those therapists who believe that they are, is just too simple; it involves uncritically accepting and internalizing the liberal faith in procedurally neutral principles to one more realm of human experience, when in the practice of therapy, as in economics and politics generally, the pursuit of neutrality among ends is not itself neutral.[51] It is a normative stance that supplies de facto endorsement of the values prevailing in a culture. MacIntyre's tendency to tie himself to the claim that purposive values have vanished in contemporary culture (rather than argue that he does not like
[48] See Frankl (1959: 119–57) and (1978).
[49] Even Frankl has more recently made this explicit by arguing that there is a "spiritual unconscious" and an irreducible religious component to the will for meaning in everyone (Frankl 1975: 60–74).
[50] See, for example, Horney (1937: 1, 13–29, 168–82; 1967: 24–26, 62–63) and Chesler (1972: 19, 58–62, 67–113).
[51] MacIntyre himself argues repeatedly that neutrality is impossible to achieve (MacIntyre 1988: 3–4, 144, 166, 395).
the purposive values that predominate), together with his lack of a theory of power and ideology (which would force critical attention to the nature of and purposes served by prevailing values), generates this misleadingly simple view. Analogous responses are invited by his treatments of the Manager and the Rich Aesthete. The latter clearly has commitments and evaluative purposes, however distasteful and morally flippant they may be argued to be, whereas the former's pursuit of efficient outcomes replicates some values and power structures and inhibits the formation of others. MacIntyre's analysis of modern instrumentalism would, perhaps, have penetrated more deeply and illuminated more had he begun by treating it as an ideology and tried to discern its function.
(iii) Prescriptions
The two most serious difficulties with MacIntyre's prescriptions are that his own view of ethics suggests that they are unwise and unworkable and that they do not address the malady he has diagnosed. MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian view of ethics was grounded in the concept of a practice, a complex cooperative human activity governed by rules that change over time but that, from the point of view of any given individual, existed before her arrival and will typically survive her. This view, we saw, has considerable explanatory force, but if it is taken seriously how can it be consistent with a politics of withdrawal, with a refusal to participate in any of the practices that, by MacIntyre's own analysis, make the modern world what it is? To this question there can be two types of response consistent with MacIntyre's premises, but both are problematical. First, he could deny that the activities that make up the modern world are practices in his sense and claim that the point of his prescriptions is to begin the no doubt difficult task of recreating them. Practices are defined in terms of the pursuit of internal goods—those things necessary to excel within the telos of a given practice—but the instrumentalism characteristic of emotivist culture means that we are all constantly preoccupied with the pursuit of external goods, that we are not really engaging in practices at all.[52] One difficulty with this is that it is logical nonsense to say that all goods are external to all practices in a culture, for to be a good something must be internal to some practice by definition. In its most extreme formulation such an assertion must be rejected.[53]
[52] See MacIntyre (1984: 190–203).
[53] In this regard, although there are serious difficulties about line drawing and definition of goods within Walzer's spheres of justice (see chapter 3, sections II(i) and II(ii)), his recognition that most basic political arguments will be about the line drawing and the definitions is an advance on MacIntyre's analysis here.
MacIntyre should be bound by his argument that the practices in which he finds himself, and the tradition they embody, must to some extent be accepted as given, so that he can "confirm or disconfirm over time this initial view of his or her relationship to this particular tradition of enquiry by engaging, to whatever degree is appropriate, both in the ongoing arguments within that tradition and in the argumentative debates and conflicts of that tradition of enquiry with one or more of its rivals" (MacIntyre 1988: 93, 394). A politics of wholesale dismissal, withdrawal from reality, and the appeal to the creation of an imaginary future that will recreate an ill-specified past may well reflect MacIntyre's understandable anguish and frustration at the difficulties of achieving meaningful political change in the contemporary world. Yet it is not enough to point to one contending tradition with its particular conceptions of justice and rationality; some attempt must be made to show how that tradition would be applied to the moral disagreements that evidently drive his entire project and to how conflicting interpretations of those traditional commitments, as applied, would be resolved. Were MacIntyre to take his own account of the rootedness of morality in social practices seriously, he would be bound to see that his prescriptions are as unwise and unworkable as they are utopian. Ironically, his prescriptions imply a commitment to a kind of voluntarist ethics according to which we just invent the values we want to hold if we dislike those around us that is central to the emotivism that he so detests.
MacIntyre's alternate response would be to argue that the practices of contemporary politics must be eschewed because they are inimical to the overarching Aristotelian telos of a unified human life, that our lives cannot become coherent narratives, good stories, through them. This raises large questions about what it makes sense to expect from politics and political theory and about how we distinguish problems endemic to the human condition from those that are the contingent results of alterable social practices, matters that concern me in the final chapters of this book. Note for now that there are at least two serious difficulties with this claim in MacIntyre's formulation. First, his characterization of what is necessary for unified human lives is so rudimentary, general, and schematic that it is not clear what characteristics a practice should have to promote this end or precisely what is lacking in the practices of contemporary politics from his point of view.[54] Why are "civility and the intellectual and moral life" key to the existence of practices? Why, if they are, are these denied by all
[54] For discussion of the weaknesses in MacIntyre's conception of the unity of human lives, see section II(i) of this chapter.
participation in and opposition to contemporary politics, and why would they, in any case, be better preserved by "local forms of community" (MacIntyre 1984: 263)? Second, MacIntyre offers no evidence that in the ancient and medieval worlds people's lives were unified narrative wholes in a sense that contemporary lives are not, which must be the premise behind the claim that we should try to recreate what we imagine those premodern communities to have been. The mind boggles at what would be involved in trying to establish it. Then, as now, one suspects that some lived comparatively integrated lives while others did not, that some had the capacities and resources to integrate their activities while others did not, and that some integrated their lives at the expense of others' fragmented ones.
III. Conclusion
The strengths of MacIntyre's analysis derive from the structure of his neo-Aristotelian account of morality, aspects of his discussion of human social practices, and his discussion of Marxism. Because his helpful discussion of these subjects is embedded in a great deal that we have found it necessary to reject, I will end by summarizing those strengths.
MacIntyre's most powerfully defended theoretical claim is that the structure of moral reasoning is irreducibly teleological, and although I argued that the appeal to Aristotle is not necessary to establish it, it is nonetheless useful for at least one reason. Aristotle's case for the unavoidability of teleological moral reasoning, grounded in his purposive theory of human existence, is one of the most compelling versions that has ever been formulated; in reviving it and injecting it into contemporary moral debate, MacIntyre is confronting those who would reject teleological views with a serious protagonist. This is particularly helpful when a generation of political theorists, following Rawls, has tended to regard classical utilitarianism as a paradigm-case teleological argument, easily trashed, and thus revealing the alleged superiority of deontological forms of moral reasoning. The belief in a fundamental conceptual divide between deontological and teleological moral arguments is one of the most enduring myths in the academy today. Whenever one believes that it has been decisively laid to rest, it emerges in a subtly different guise.[55] A great merit of
[55] Thus we now have Ronald Dworkin (1985) distinguishing questions of principle from those of policy, holding that the former have to do with rights and the latter with consequences and that judges should think exclusively in terms of the former while the latter belong more properly to the legislative and executive branches. His particular version of this distinction has already drawn heavy critical fire. See, for instance, the reviews by Brian Barry in the Times Literary Supplement , October 25, 1985, and Bernard Williams in the London Review of Books , April 17, 1986, pp. 7–8. Just as it should be obvious to Dworkin that there is something conceptually amiss when the value of rights is demonstrated by appealing to the allegedly awful consequences of utilitarianism (Dworkin 1985: 81–89)—making evident nonsense of the claim that rights are not concerned with consequences—it should be plain that the more general distinction obscures more than it reveals. All normative claims about politics involve reference to considerations of both principle and consequence, however deeply implicit some of these might be. For an extended discussion of this question, see Shapiro (1989: 51–76).
MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian view is that it has no place for this misleading opposition with its concomitant tendency to direct moral argument away from first-order questions about which people genuinely disagree and toward ever more abstract wild-goose chasing after theories of "the right" that do not presuppose theories of "the good." Although much of his discussion of how the teleological element in moral theory came to be rejected may turn out on close inspection to be misleadingly simplistic, MacIntyre is surely right that this truncated and incoherent view holds considerable sway among contemporary moral and political theorists.
My examination of MacIntyre's argument has also shown how little this establishes. To show that morality is irreducibly teleological is not to establish the desirability or viability in today's world of any particular conception of the human telos ; it does not even show that there is such a conception to be discovered. There is no a priori reason for preferring Aristotle's substantive conception, and there are large components of it that most of us would want to reject. We have no assurance that any particular telos can be realized for all members of a community at the same time or for communities that overlap one with another, as all communities invariably do. The neo-Aristotelian view of the structure of moral reasoning helps set the terms of moral debate but no more. Although MacIntyre recognizes that conceptions of both right and good are indispensable to all moral and political argument, his almost exclusive focus on the good in his substantive discussion, as well as his claim that we have lost the concept of virtue (rather than arguing that our implicit notions of the good have changed), makes him vulnerable to the charge of Gill (1985: 10) and others that he is not taking sufficient account of the implications of his own claim.[56]
MacIntyre's discussion of the rootedness of normative political argument in what he calls practices is also illuminatingly useful. We saw that there are some parallels between his practices and Walzer's spheres and between his distinction between internal and external goods and Walzer's
[56] See also Gutmann (1985: 308–22).
"art of separation." Although Walzer's view is superior in that it seriously engages in first-order debate about the nature and distribution of the goods germane to different spheres, about the difficulties of line-drawing, and embeds these issues in a theory of power and ideology (however rudimentary and problematical), there is one respect in which MacIntyre's view is an advance: he offers the beginnings of a systematic account of why we should, to a degree, accept the rules that govern a particular practice. It has been a standard critique of Walzer that he offers no account of this sort, and we saw in chapter 3 that once we move from what I referred to as the tactical to the normative interpretation of his claim, serious difficulties arise concerning why prevailing conceptions of value are to be endorsed. MacIntyre adduces two arguments, one structural and one psychological. The structural argument is that the nature of practices gives us no choice. Because the rules that govern practices typically exist before we enter them and long survive our departure, we accept them willy-nilly, to a degree, and all moral argument is necessarily immanent at some level. Again, it is worth noting that to say this is not to say a great deal: all the questions that arose in our discussion of Rorty's communities and Walzer's spheres concerning which the relevant practices are, how conflicting characterizations of them by participants are to be resolved, how membership and exclusion are to be dealt with, how to cope with the complexities of overlapping and cross-cutting practices, and how to define and regulate even internal goods so that they do not benefit different participants differently and some at the expense of others—all these difficulties are untouched by MacIntyre's discussion. These are among the most obvious difficulties that any communitarian view must confront, and we have yet to discover satisfactory answers to them.
A second aspect of MacIntyre's discussion of practices that is an advance on Walzer's spheres derives from his neo-Aristotelian account of human psychology. Again, it is not obvious that the appeal to Aristotle is essential here, and indeed it leaves MacIntyre with the problem of either being lumped with a lot of metaphysical baggage or seeming arbitrarily to appropriate bits and pieces of Aristotle's view, a serious difficulty given that he wants to cash so many philosophical chips with the claim that there is something in this tradition that our cultural history has rendered us all but incapable of grasping. Yet MacIntyre's account does offer an enduring contribution. We saw in our discussion of Walzer that questions of psychology must become central to any political theory that is based on feelings of community membership. But this was deeply implicit in Walzer's discussion of connected criticism, and he did not come to terms with its implications. MacIntyre, by contrast, makes this both explicit and central.
His antiutilitarian theory of value makes explicit why our conceptions of success and well-being are irreducibly dependent on the judgments of others; that we seek not only to get our way and influence others to our advantage but to be thought well of by those whom we seek to influence. In chapter 8 I build on this account, arguing that it is superior to an alternative orthodoxy that dominates much contemporary political theory, and in chapter 9 I discuss its implications for politics and political theory.
It should be noted in conclusion that for all the weaknesses we have discerned in MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, the main dilemma that led him to turn to it is real and remains unresolved: the problematical character of Marxist humanism. For those who find the exploitative and dehumanizing aspects of liberal capitalism morally unacceptable, who are unimpressed by its utilitarian and libertarian justifying philosophies, but who are also deeply disillusioned with Marxism—both as a predictive science of a better world shortly to usher itself into existence and as a justifying ideology for totalitarian governments that call themselves socialist—the dilemma remains a major problem of politics. If MacIntyre's turn to the Aristotelian tradition has not resolved this dilemma, the mere fact of his intellectual biography is eloquent testimony to its centrality and importance.
6—
History as a Source of Republican Alternatives
A different historical departure from Enlightenment modes of political argument has been to search for alternatives not in the tradition of which we might self-consciously understand ourselves to be either students or products but for alternatives that are part of our actual history and practices. In this view it is the tyranny of the liberal tradition that is often conceived of as the problem. The stranglehold that Daniel Bell's end-of-ideology thesis and Louis Hartz's all-encompassing reading of The Liberal Tradition in America have had over the human sciences in recent decades is said to obscure rich alternative traditions of political thought and action, rooted in our past and potentially still available to us. "There is a conventional wisdom," J. G. A. Pocock tells us, "to the effect that political theory became 'liberal'—whatever that means, and whether or not for more or less Marxist reasons—about the time of Hobbes and Locke, and has in America remained so ever since" (Pocock 1981b: 364).[1] Recent attempts to displace this orthodoxy have led to the discovery, or rediscovery of alternative pragmatist and socialist traditions in the American past.[2] But the most sustained and influential one has centered on the rediscovery of republicanism in the Anglo-American political heritage.
The revival of interest in republicanism has had a remarkable impact on several academic disciplines since the 1960s. For political theorists its central point of reference is The Machiavellian Moment . In this book and a series of subsequent essays Pocock has traced a civic humanist paradigm of political thought and action from the Renaissance revival of Aristotelianism
[1] See also Pocock (1981a: 57; 1981b: 354; 1985: 60).
[2] On pragmatism, see Kloppenberg (1986), Kaufman-Osborn (1984: 1142–65; 1985: 827–49), and Damico (1978; 1981: 654–66). On America's socialist past, see Weinstein (1984).
through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England to the American revolutionary period and beyond.
Most students of civic republicanism, including Pocock, have reacted not against neo-Kantian political theory but rather against the Hartzian vision of American political thought and the readings of early modern European thought made popular by Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson. Yet the revival of interest in republicanism spawned by their work has increasingly been picked up on by theorists and social commentators as an alternative to neo-Kantian liberalism.[3] One reason for this is that people perceive a connection between the individualist logic and agnosticism about theories of the good at the core of the Hartzian arguments and the similar individualism and agnosticism that, perhaps mistakenly, they identify as integral to the neo-Kantian approach to political theory.[4] This "my enemy's enemy is my friend" impetus is reinforced by the civic republican paradigm being taken by many to be one of the most powerful and politically effective communitarian visions available in our actual political culture. Because anti-Kantian theorists are typically hostile to tabula rasa theorizing for methodological reasons, it is not surprising that they gravitate toward this tradition in search of conceptual and political resources. It seems to hold out the possibility of a communitarian vision that is not vulnerable to the charges of utopian unrealism afflicting MacIntyre's account.
I. Pocock's View: Exposition
The sheer breadth and comprehensiveness of Pocock's argument has made it an inevitable center of attention in the new historiographical debate. His critical project is to overturn the "individualist paradigm" wherein all significant developments in the history of ideas after about the time of Machiavelli are read as somehow contributing to the growth of modern liberalism. In its terms, the "paradox of liberty and authority" is the central problem of politics, and the individual is seen as "a private being,
[3] See especially Sandel (1984a: 81–96; 1984b: 1–11). See also Bellah (1985: 75–80), Michelman (1986: 4–77), Lasch (1990), and the symposium on the civic republican tradition that appeared in The Yale Law Journal 97, no. 8 (July 1988), particularly the contributions by Michelman, Sunstein, Brest, Epstein, Kerber, Macey, and Powell.
[4] As we saw in chapter 1, many have argued that none of the claims concerning agnosticism or neutrality about conflicting conceptions of the good advanced by the neo-Kantians can be sustained. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, every such argument privileges some conceptions of the good and disprivileges others.
pursuing goals and safeguarding freedoms which are his own and looking to government mainly to preserve and protect his individual activity." It is thus identified by writers from a wide array of ideological camps, from followers of Macpherson, Wolin, McWilliams, and Lowi on the one hand to the "classical conservative" followers of Strauss, Arendt, and Oakeshott on the other (Pocock 1985: 59–60). As an alternative to this view, Pocock's constructive project is to describe the civic humanist view of politics, centered on fundamentally different problems, that is best traced to the early Italian Renaissance.
(i) The Renaissance Revival of Greek and Roman Conceptions of Morality and Politics
The defining problem of republican theory, on Pocock's telling, has always been the instability of political institutions. Polybius, a Greek exile in the second century B.C. , developed what during the Renaissance came to be seen as a classic of republican theory in the course of trying to explain the unusual internal stability of imperial Rome. His analysis of stability and instability in cities was a modification of Aristotle's sixfold classification of regimes (monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy), transposed into a developmental sequence. Every regime, he declared, must pass through each of the Aristotelian forms (in the order just stated) "and from anarchy must return to monarchy and begin the cycle again." The cycle was a "physis, natural cycle of birth, growth, and death through which republics were bound to pass." A special case of the rotation of Fortune's wheel, this cycle could be escaped only in a regime resembling Aristotle's polity, made up of mutually counterbalancing elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (Pocock 1975a: 77–78).
In its Roman usage, fortuna had meant luck, and luck was highly unstable because circumstances could be neither predicted nor controlled. Virtus and fortuna, virtue and fortune, had commonly been paired as opposites, "and the heroic fortitude that withstood ill fortune passed into the active capacity that remolded circumstances to the actor's advantage and thence into the charismatic felicitas that mysteriously commanded good fortune." Yet when the Italian humanists revived these ideas in the fifteenth century, it was in the intellectual context created by an historical awareness of secular time. Central to the Florentine conception of republican government was the tension between universal aspiration and the inescapable particularity of historical self-consciousness; in the battle to achieve permanency in the face of the degenerative effects of the passage of time, the idea of virtue inevitably became politicized. For the republic was now conceived of in the particular, a human and artificial construct
"composed of interacting persons rather than of universal norms and traditional institutions." The vivere civile , "a way of life given over to civic concerns and the (ultimately political) activity of citizenship," displaced the vita contemplative as the ultimate philosophical ideal (ibid.: 37, 75–76).
(ii) The Humanist Debate on Stability: Prudence and the Theory of Internal Balance
Italian humanists incorporated Aristotle's theory of internal balance via the myth that Venice had exemplified the Aristotelian-Polybian mixture. Before the collapse of Medicean rule in Florence and the advent of the 1494 constitution, most Florentines had thought of Venice as a conventional aristocracy. Now history was rewritten: Venice was heralded as a "uniquely stable blend of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy," and the Florentine constitution was legitimated by comparison (ibid.: 102, 103).
Although strongly elitist in many respects, from the beginning Italian humanism contained the seeds of a populist component. Thus although a writer like Guicciardini had an explicit bias in favor of a political elite, this bias never amounted to support for a formally closed oligarchy. The ottimati , the inner circle of powerful Florentine families who thought of themselves as the few in the Aristotelian scheme, saw their characteristic virtue as leadership. This could not be developed or exercised without the presence of "a participant non-elite or many for them to lead," which gave the masses an indispensable—if limited—role in the maintenance of an Aristotelian balance (ibid.: 118–19, 127).
Survival in a dangerous and hostile environment required a prudent realism based on an understanding of the art of governing. Florence could never exert dominant military strength and so must exist "by diplomatic subtlety in a world of princes and condottieri " (ibid.: 240).[5] In Guicciardini's world, "the city is disarmed and requires the rule of prudent men." Indeed, "the conduct of external relations in a world not determined by Florentine power is the most important single activity of government" (ibid.: 219, see also 225, 238).
The central problem of constitutional design in these circumstances is how to give full rein to the political expertise of the few, explains Bernardo del Nero, the protagonist who argues Guicciardini's view in his Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze . It is essential to take "important decisions away from those incompetent to make them" while being careful not to
[5] By comparison, Guicciardini argued that if the Romans had employed mercenaries and "had had to live 'as unarmed cities do,' by means of wit rather than arms, their form of government would have ruined them" quickly (ibid.: 240).
"alter the substance of popular government, which is liberty"; one has to take care "that in curing the stomach one does not injure the head."[6] In his attempt to resolve this problem, Guicciardini articulates the two core terms of modern ideas of mixed government. The first results from detaching the idea of virtù from that of a citizen militia and historicizing it. Florentine reality exhibits an "acquired second nature," and the physician of politics is limited by it in his prescription for medicines. This second nature consists of the "tissue of accidents built up through experience, use and tradition," knowledge of which is essential to prudent government—though it can only be acquired empirically. Bernardo thus consents to "erect a scheme of government based on civic virtù because it is prudent to acknowledge the facts of Florentine nature," of which virtù is one. The other predominant values are equalità, libertô , and onore . As values they are "less intrinsic than given," "which Florentines cannot afford (being what they are) not to acknowledge." This has implications for the few and the many. The ottimati must accept that "ambizione and the thirst for onore are part of their temporal natures, that they require to be satisfied but at the same time to be kept in check." Yet the exercise of prudence, which "may be the highest form of the display of virtù ," entails a governmental scheme in which the pursuit of onore is limited by the power of others. This was argued to imply a competitive meritocracy within the elite, to make prudence identical with the free pursuit of excellence, "which is the essence of libertà and virtù ." But it was also seen to imply a popular element, for the few "exist only in the many's sight" (ibid.: 251, 252, 253).
This conclusion dovetailed neatly, Pocock argues, with Bernardo's second argument that the dangers of libertà in the many justify a complex polity of "mixed government," a clearly recognizable grandparent of our conception of representative government. For Bernardo, one must balance libertà against prudence, the stomach against the head. The nature of libertà makes it essential that "the popular assembly be prevented from trying to exercise itself those virtues and functions whose exercise it oversees and guarantees in the few," just as the few must be prevented "from setting up an oligarchy, that is from monopolizing those virtues and functions within a rigidly closed governo stretto ." The many are "not themselves capable of magistracy" but "can recognize this capacity in others; though not themselves capable of framing or even debating a law, they are competent judges of the draft proposals of others" (ibid.: 253, 129, 254–55, 128–35).
[6] Translated in Pocock (1975a: 252).
(iii) The Humanist Debate on Stability: Revival of the Civic Militia Tradition
Machiavelli's approach to the problem of instability is at once more radical, more audacious, and more idealistic, placing him at the other pole of civic humanist debate from Guicciardini. For Machiavelli, the key to survival is not prudent negotiation in hostile waters but imaginative innovation to control and subdue them. Where Guicciardini's elevation of prudence as a practical ideal rests on a forerunner of modern doctrines of negative liberty, Machiavelli's conception is decidedly positive. Faced with the choice between audacity and prudence, he opts for an armed popular state, redefining virtù as "the dynamic spirit of the armed many" (ibid.: 232). Machiavelli departs from conventional humanist interpretations of Polybian theory by taking Rome instead of Greece as his model. Rome impressed Machiavelli because stability was achieved there as nearly as possible in the world of imperfect constitutions "by the disorderly and chancegoverned actions of particular men in the dimension of contingency and fortune." Thus Machiavelli rejected the conventional argument that Rome was inherently disorderly, managing to survive for so long only by good fortune and extraordinary military power. He equated civic virtue with disciplined military action and went so far as to suggest that stability is not the only value because a republic may pursue military expansion and empire (in opting for this populist route) at the price of its own longevity (ibid.: 190, 195, 197). The real dilemma is generated by external threat:
All cities have enemies and live in the domain of fortune, and it must be considered whether a defensive posture does not expose one more to unexpected change than a bold attempt to control it; the antithesis between prudence and audacity is at work again. But the crucial association is that between external policy and the distribution of internal power. Sparta and Venice, for as long as they were able to avoid the pursuit of empire and to adopt the posture of the prudent man who waits upon events, did not need to arm the people or to concede them political authority; consequently they were able to enjoy stability and internal peace. Rome resolved upon empire, upon a daring attempt to dominate the environment, and consequently upon innovation and upon a virtù which would enable her to control the disorder which her own actions had helped to cause. (Ibid.: 198, footnotes omitted)
Only a republic that was both perfect in its internal balance and completely insulated from its neighbors might "limit her arms and live in aristocratic stability for ever." But this is impossible; even Sparta and Venice could not escape trying—albeit in the end unsuccessfully—to defend their independence from the external encroachments of fortune. In these circumstances to reject expansion is "to expose oneself to fortune without seeking to dominate her" (ibid.: 198, 199).
Given the inevitable reliance on the military, Machiavelli's core concern becomes the relationship between military discipline and civic virtue. Because the characteristic virtue of the citizen as soldier is his capacity to preserve libertà , the military has to be organized so that this virtue will not become corrupted. Mercenaries and professional soldiers are too dangerous, and both are incompatible with Machiavelli's Aristotelian conception of citizenship. Just as a man who devotes all his energy to the arte della lana and none to participation in public affairs is "less than a citizen and a source of weakness to his fellows," so the full-time practitioner of the arte della guerra is likewise deficient, though vastly more dangerous. Consequently this arte must be a public monopoly; "only citizens may practice it, only magistrates may lead in it, and only under public authority and at the public command may it be exercised at all." The militarization of citizenship makes the Discorsi more "morally subversive" than Il Principe . For the prince existed "in a vivere so disordered that only if he aimed as high as Moses or Lycurgus did he undertake any commitment to maintaining civic virtue in others." Yet the republic can be virtuous "only if it is lion and fox, man and beast, in its relation with other peoples" (ibid.: 200, 213). Although Machiavelli had independent reasons for being mistrustful of Christianity (it taught men to value ends other than the republic's health),[7] the militarization of virtue made the clash between Christian and civic virtues inevitable, for "humility and the forgiveness of injuries could have no place in the relations between republics, where a prime imperative was to defend one's city and beat down her enemies." Civic virtue flourishes best where there is no mercy to enemies whose defeat means death or enslavement (ibid.: 213, 214, 216).
In Pocock's view, the Florentine debate transformed the civic republican tradition fundamentally. The core idea of a vivere civile had implications that were "pagan, secular, and time-bound." The dimension of grace was lost, and the republic and its virtue became finite. In historical time and space "there were many republics and the virtue of each abutted upon the virtue of others" (ibid.: 214, 215).
[7] See (ibid.: 202).
(iv) Anglicization of the Problem
How could the language of civic virtue apply to England's hierarchical feudal structure of rights and obligations, rooted in its island past since at least the time of the Norman Conquest? Pocock rejects conventional explanations of the rise of English humanism as relying on stereotypically misleading conceptions of traditional society that blind their exponents to the dynamic side of English traditionalism.[8] Just as custom supplied the basis for Guicciardini's account of the Florentine "acquired second nature," so the English conception of an "historical and immemorial sovereignty over themselves" dovetailed with an historical understanding of their unique political circumstances (ibid.: 341). The parallel did not end there; in the emerging ideologies of the parliamentary gentry, the House of Commons held a special place in the preservation of liberty—now understood as rooted in immemorial custom and traceable to an ancient constitution, lost in the mists of time.[9] "All English law was common law, common law was custom, custom rested on the presumption of immemoriality; property, social structure, and government existed as defined by the law and were therefore presumed to be immemorial" (ibid.: 340–41, footnote omitted).
The legal humanists invoked some of the vocabulary of civic humanism but kept it within the hierarchical context of a feudal political structure. "This is not wholly incompatible with a classical vision of citizenship," Pocock argues, for "it is possible within limits to say that the Few and the Many are estates which must stay in their due places and practice their proper virtues, and to that extent the republic and hierarchy are one." Yet, as Pocock concedes, there is a fundamental difference between ranked elements "in a descending chain and elements balanced against one another." The former lacks the "kinetic" quality whereby the balance is maintained "by the counterpressures, the countervailing activities, of the elements" that "must practice a relationship among themselves as well as each remaining fixed to its prescribed nature" (ibid.: 349).
Ironically it was the Royalists who took the first step in declaring England to be a mixed government. In June 1642, two months before the civil war, Viscount Falkland and Sir John Colepeper persuaded Charles I to issue His Majesty's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament . Its immediate aim was to secure the support of the Lords against the Commons, but to do so it rejected the theory of condescending monarchy for the modern idea of mixed government. To the dismay of his
[8] See (ibid.: 335–36).
[9] For a full account, see Pocock (1957: chapters 2–3).
supporters and the surprised pleasure of his adversaries, the king was presented "as a part of his own realm, one of three 'estates' between which there must be balance and (it followed) proportionate equality" (ibid.: 361–62). This political dynamite was immediately latched onto by anti-Royalists of various stripes. For once political authority was no longer depicted as a "direct emanation of divinely or rationally enjoined authority," it became "a contrivance of human prudence, blending together three modes of government." The basic political problem was no longer "one of adjusting descending to ascending authority, but one of sharing specifiable powers" (ibid.: 362). Still cast in the language of monarchy and order, the ideas of mixed government and constitutional balance quickly gained currency in English political argument and were read back into England's past.[10]
Neither the rhetoric nor the content of republican theory had won over the competing idioms of politics (most notably the Hobbesian argument that power is absolute and indivisible), but its seeds had been sown in English thinking about the political order. It was via the other wing of humanist theory, participation of the many, that republican rhetoric was indelibly stamped into English political argument. Harrington's Oceana , written to justify the military republic in England as a popolo armato , was the vehicle.
The terms of Pocock's analysis of Harrington are set by his critique of Macpherson's "possessive individualist" model, which was utilized to advance the thesis that from the mid-seventeenth century on a bourgeois ideology—characterized by the primacy of economic over political man and a favorable attitude toward unlimited accumulation of wealth—took increasing hold of English political thinking.[11] Pocock argues, by contrast, that there are at least two major traditions of argument about property and legitimacy, both with ancient and with modern manifestations and both involving theories of the relationship between economics and politics. It is in the confrontations between them in the late seventeenth century that the origins of modern conceptions of property are to be sought.
First there is the jurisprudential tradition, which goes back to the Roman civilians, is present in the language of Aquinas to some extent, and is carried on by a succession of natural law theorists into the late seventeenth century. In its terms property is that "to which you have a right" rather than that "which makes you what you are." In this tradition property, that
[10] See Pocock (1975a: 366, 375–76, 381–83).
[11] For Macpherson's account of his possessive market model, see Macpherson (1962: 53–61), and for his analysis of Harrington by reference to it (ibid.: 160–93).
which one owns, and propriety, that which is proper for a person or situation, become synonymous. Property relations thus consist of
a system of legally defined relations between persons and things, or between persons through things. Since the law defined justice in terms of suum cuique , it was possible to define the good life in terms of property relations, or of human relations as the notion of property served to define them…. Because jurisprudence and the jurist's conception of justice were concerned with men and things, they were less concerned with the immediate relations between men as political actors or with the individual's consciousness of himself as living the good life. (Pocock 1985: 104)
Then there is Pocock's Aristotelian tradition "in which property appears as a moral and political phenomenon." It is a prerequisite for the good life, which is "essentially civic."
In the form of the Greek oikos , a household productive unit inhabited by women, minors and slaves, it provided the individual with power, leisure and independence, and the opportunity to lead a life in which he … could become what he ought to be. Property was both an extension and a prerequisite of personality…. The citizen possessed property in order to be autonomous and autonomy was necessary for him to develop virtue or goodness as an actor within the political, social and natural realm or order. He did not possess it in order to engage in trade, exchange or profit; indeed, these activities were hardly compatible with the activity of citizenship. (Ibid.: 103)
We tend to associate the critique of market relations with Marxism, but Pocock is keen to establish that this tradition "displays an astonishing unity and solidarity in the uneasiness and mistrust it evinces towards money as the medium of exchange." In every one of its major phases, "there is a conception of virtue—Aristotelian, Thomist, neo-Machiavellian or Marxian—to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat." Because so many components of life can be had for money, "we are under a constant temptation to mistake money for the summum bonum , and an individual drawn wholly into the life of monetarised exchange relationships would be living in a commodified parody of the natural or divine order" (ibid.: 103–4).
Pocock argues against Macpherson that Harrington falls squarely into the second tradition. He took over the Machiavellian argument that possession
of arms is essential to political personality, but whereas Machiavelli had simply stressed that if a man bore arms for others rather than himself he would be incapable of citizenship, Harrington developed this reasoning into an extended critique of feudalism. The key conceptual move (which he believed Machiavelli had missed) was that in a system of feudal tenures the bearing of arms was critically dependent on the possession of property.
The crucial distinction was that between vassalage and freehold; it determined whether a man's sword was his lord's or his own and the commonwealth's; and the function of free proprietorship became the liberation of arms, and consequently of the personality, for free public action and civic virtue. The politicization of the human person had now attained full expression in the language of English political thought; God's Englishman was now z
on politikon in virtue of his sword and his freehold. (Pocock 1975a: 386)
For Harrington as for Machiavelli, then, "the bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being; but the possession of land in nondependent tenure is now the material basis for the bearing of arms." Harrington insisted that transmissible and hereditary property in land was essential to the independence necessary for participation in the commonwealth. Although servants were no part of this scheme, what Pocock sums up as the "economic autonomy of citizenship" did extend to wage laborers as long as they inhabited cottages of their own (ibid.: 390).
Pocock rejects conventional accounts of Harrington's economics as emergently bourgeois, arguing that they were backward looking and based on the Greek view of the relations between oikos and polis . Although Harrington saw his arguments as applying to mobile property, the key to his conception was freehold land. "When land was acquired, it was in order to bequeath it: to found families or oikoi based on a security of inheritance, which set the sons free to bear arms and cast ballots in the muster of the commonwealth. As with Aristotle, the end of land is not profit, but leisure: the opportunity to act in the public realm or assembly, to display virtue." It was in these terms that the later seventeenth-century gentry and freeholders who composed the Country party could see themselves as a classical populus , "a community of virtue," which consisted in their freeholds because "freedom and independence consisted in property" (ibid.: 390, 408, footnotes omitted).
Harrington's arguments for freehold property had been attacked by Sir William Temple and others in the generation following the civil war. But Harrington's arguments were revived in the 1670s when the ideal of propertied independence was invoked against the crown's restored power of parliamentary patronage, which latter was increasingly identified with corruption in Country ideology. Neo-Harringtonian political argument came into its own in opposition to the new monied interests, to which the crown seemed increasingly hostage, and which were effectively institutionalized by the mid-1690s through the system of public credit and the creation of the Bank of England. The debate between landed and monied interests generated a confrontation between "two modes of individualism," out of which modern commercial consciousness was born (Pocock 1985: 107, 109). Opponents of the "monied interest" like Bolingbroke and Swift argued that, with the creation of a system of public credit, the new class of speculators and creditors had created a different kind of property that fundamentally altered the relationship between property and political power. They built on Harrington's argument that although in principle the function of ensuring arms and leisure could be discharged by mobile as well as real property, merchants and craftsmen would find it more difficult to leave their activities to engage in self-defense (Pocock 1975a: 427–32; see also 1985: 68–69, 109–10).
It was the speculative, rather than the calculating, side of commercial capitalism that the landed gentry found most threatening, "the hysteria, not the cold rationality, of economic man that dismayed the moralists." It was "not the market, but the stock-market, which precipitated an English awareness, about 1700, that political relations were on the verge of becoming capitalist relations; and this awareness could never have developed as it did without the unspecialized agrarian ideal of the patriot to serve as antithesis." Political relations were increasingly becoming relations between debtors and creditors, "and this was seen as leading not merely to corruption, but to the despotism of speculative fantasy." The Country view was that the specialization that resulted from the division of labor under commercial capitalism was incompatible with the "unity of the moral personality which can only be found in the practice of civic virtue" (Pocock 1985: 113–14, 69, 110, 112–13).
The manner in which opponents of the Country view like Wren, Addison, and Defoe answered those arguments revealed that both sides now shared the intellectual common ground of the Machiavellian problem of stability. The counterargument was that society "could defend itself better against its own professional soldiers by controlling the money that paid them than by sending its citizens to serve in their place." This was partly
because the reconstitution and maintenance of a stable system of political authority had inevitably to be a problem for seventeenth-century Englishmen—indeed it was the defining problem of politics. But it was also because their common ground extended to the theory of property itself; both sides in the debate shared "an image of social personality" in which "the political individual needed a material anchor in the form of property no less than he needed a rational soul." The argument, which continued through the Scottish Enlightenment, was over which kinds of property best guaranteed independence and with it stability. The "Machiavellian Moment" of the eighteenth century, "like that of the sixteenth, confronted civic virtue with corruption, and saw the latter in terms of a chaos of appetites, productive of dependence and loss of personal autonomy, flourishing in a world of rapid and irrational change" (ibid.: 111, 53–61; 1975a: 486).
(v) The "Americanization" of Virtue
Pocock's narrative culminates in an account of the role of civic humanist ideas in American political thought. With Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and other "ideological" theorists of the American Revolution and against older orthodoxy, Pocock argues that classical republican ideology was central—and essential—to the entire revolutionary project. But unlike Wood, for whom the Revolution was the last gasp of a classical politics, Pocock believes that although republican ideology was transformed as it became Americanized, its core organizing antithesis of virtue and corruption has persisted into our own political culture. Americans inherited "rhetorical and conceptual structures" in which "venality in public officials, the growth of a military-industrial complex in government, other-directedness and one-dimensionality in individuals" could all be conceived of "in terms continuous with those used in the classical analysis of corruption." Having made the commitment to the "renovation of virtue," Americans have remained "obsessively concerned by the threat of corruption—with, it must be added, good and increasing reason." Their political drama continues,
in ways both crude and subtle, to endorse the judgment of Polybius, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu in identifying corruption as the disease peculiar to republics: one not to be cured by virtue alone. In the melodrama of 1973, the venality of an Agnew makes this point in one way; an Ehrlichman's more complex and disinterested misunderstanding of the relation between the reality and the morality of power makes it in another. (Pocock 1975a: 548)
Americans retained a focus on corruption as the central threat to the stability of republican regimes, but their views of the roles of institutional structure and popular participation in forestalling corruption differed substantially from those of their antecedents across the Atlantic. The doctrine of the king in parliament had occupied a middle ground between classical republican theory and English feudalism, but Americans had no use at all for the classical conception of government based on a mixture of social orders. Even before the Revolution the volatility of colonial American politics had been explained by some observers as resulting from the absence of an equivalent to the House of Lords, which, in the British constitution, had been argued to play the role of the classical few. As long as America was thought of as a colony, this lack presented no problem for republican theory, which had always held that colonies and provinces were not fully incorporated and should be ruled by a dependent oligarchy. Once the colony began to be conceived of as an autonomous republic, however, such an oligarchy must inevitably be corrupting. Yet an independent hereditary aristocracy could not be created under colonial conditions, and an appointed second chamber would inevitably be an oligarchy dependent on whoever appointed it. The conceptual impasse thus created could only be escaped by repudiating the idea of hereditary aristocracy as inherently corrupting. This radical move involved a return to the Harringtonian notion of a natural aristocracy, and in most American colonies a patrician elite stood ready to step into this role. It began to be argued on meritocratic grounds that a true elite would always be recognized by the many. "It was assumed that a supply of such persons was guaranteed by nature, and … [that] democracy could discover the aristocracy by using its own modes of discernment, and there was no need to legislate its choice in advance" (ibid.: 513–14, 515).
The American people were clearly an undifferentiated mass rather than the combination of estates of conventional republican theory, but Pocock disputes Wood's contention that this meant an end to classical republican politics. He points out that the people's function of evaluating and electing their governors from the reservoir of talent that the natural aristocracy theory implied was by no means trivial. Pocock's burden of argument becomes heavier here, however, because it soon became widely agreed that a natural aristocracy had not yet emerged and could not realistically be expected to do so. As he concedes, in revolutionary America "the tide had been running strongly in favor of the view that elected representatives were highly corruptible delegates, who must be subject to instruction and recall" (ibid.: 519); the difficulty with the Madisonian claim that they should be chosen from the patrician elites was that not only could they no longer be argued to be the few of classical republican theory but they were
obviously a far cry from a natural aristocracy. Yet Pocock notes that the dilemma thus created could be and was dealt with as a problem for republican theory. For the Federalists, the failure of a natural aristocracy to emerge indicated that the people could not be virtuous; that they were already corrupt, so that government became "a Guicciardinian affair of guiding a people who were not virtuous, or helping them guide themselves, along paths as satisfactory as could be hoped for in these circumstances." Thus the prudent management of self-interest took its central place in modern republican theory. If men "no longer enjoyed the conditions thought necessary to make them capable of perceiving the common good, all that each man was capable of perceiving was his own particular interest," so that "interest and faction are the modes in which the decreasingly virtuous people discern and pursue their activities in politics." For Madison, the checks and balances of the separation of powers to be built into the federal structure ensure that interest does not corrupt "so that the full rhetoric of balance and stability can still be invoked in praise of an edifice no longer founded in virtue, and the very fact that it is no longer so founded can easily be masked and forgotten." The federal constitution could absorb a potentially limitless number of conflicting interests and thus stave off—perhaps indefinitely—the instability that attends all republican institutions, through perpetual growth and change. Thus despite important differences between Federalist theory and the court ideology of late-eighteenth-century England,[12] the Revolution did not see the "end of classical politics"; rather they were transposed into a new key (ibid.: 520, 522–23, footnote omitted).
Pocock parts company, second, with Wood's analysis as it deals with the social dimensions of popular participation. The tension between landed and commercial interests that infused the English debate was reconciled in the American debate via the argument that in a continuously expanding economy self-interest could actually displace virtue without becoming corruptive.[13] lf the federal structure no longer had to preserve an harmonious balance among estates but could absorb innumerable factional interests and remain stable, the traditional ambivalence toward imperialism in republican theory was dissipated and the expanding western frontier could be a source of republican stability. The new federation could be "both republic and empire, continental in its initial dimensions and capable of further
[12] The court thesis located sovereignty in parliament, not the people; it rested on a version of history in which there were pragmatic adjustments rather than fundamental principles; and it was traumatically influenced by the new monied interest in ways that did not concern Americans in the 1780s (Pocock 1975a: 525).
[13] See (ibid.: 533–34).
expansion by means of simple extensions of the federative principle, greatly surpassing the semimilitary complex of colonies and provinces which had extended the Roman hegemony." Thus could William Vans Murray argue that the virtue of the individual was no longer a prerequisite for free government. Subjecting private to public good had been required in a "rude and precommercial society," but now that the true secret of republican liberty—continuous expansion—was known, this was no longer so (ibid.: 524, 526).
The specialization that had been thought the very enemy of virtue in the English confrontation between landed and commercial property could now be embraced unambiguously. Thus Hamilton—who maintained, against Madison, that if virtue is the principle of classical republics, interest is that of empires—defended a view of America as an expanding mercantile and manufacturing economy, competing with the other powerful trading nations of the world. In Hamilton's mind, then, the passage from virtue to commerce was no
serene withdrawal into liberal complacency, into a world where separate interests balanced one another. He was opting for dominion and expansion, not for free trade, and emphatically rejected any argument that the interests of trading nations were peacefully complementary. There would be war, and there must be strong government. (Ibid.: 531, see also 530)
Hamilton's extremist language and his almost open identification of the republic with strong internal government and imperialism abroad caused many to reject his views as corrupting, but the essential thesis was embraced by those followers of Jefferson who wanted to reconcile Jefferson's commitment to agrarian life as the essential basis for virtue with his acceptance that men are transformed by scientific progress so that the republic could not be based on individual virtue simpliciter . Jefferson argued that "commerce—the progress of the arts—corrupts the virtue of agrarian man," but he also agreed with Webster's argument that an agrarian society can absorb commerce and that an expanding agrarian society can absorb expanding commerce.
America is the world's garden; there is an all but infinite reservoir of free land, and expansion to fill it is the all but infinite expansion of virtue. The rhetoric of Smith's Virgin Land, filling the century after Jefferson and Webster, is the rhetoric of this expansion of arms-bearing and liberty-loving husbandmen…. The justification of
frontier expansion is thus Machiavellian, and in the myth of Jackson it is seen to entail a Machiavellian virtù which will extend virtue without corrupting it—a process possible in the fee simple empire…. The synthesis of virtue and virtù, achieved by Polybius and Machiavelli in their more sanguine moments, is recreated in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition at a far higher level of sociological complexity and hence of optimism. (Ibid.: 538–39)
Now "frontier and industry, land and commerce, are both expansive forces, [and] they can both be described in terms of passion and dynamism: the patriotic virtù of the warrior yeoman for the former, the passionate and restless pursuit of interest for the latter." Yet Pocock concludes that a degree of ambivalence was built into utopian variants of American republicanism. Because the land is finite, the end of utopia must eventually be reached; the land will run out, the expansion of virtue will no longer keep pace with commerce, and the process of corruption will resume so that "even in America, the republic faces the problem of its own ultimate finitude, and that of its virtue, in space and time" (ibid.: 540–41).
II. Pocock's View: Three Difficulties
There is no denying the richness of Pocock's portrayal of the unfolding of civic humanism. But how are we to evaluate it as political theorists? The burden of the remainder of this chapter is to discuss the implications of three difficulties attending Pocock's account that must inform any analysis of its normative political significance. First, although Pocock's analysis reveals important dimensions of our cultural landscape of which insufficient account is typically taken by both liberal political theorists and their critics, Pocock is hoodwinked by a straw conception of liberalism in setting up his alternative paradigms thesis. This creates a misleading opposition of gross concepts, directing attention away from the first-order questions we should be arguing about and toward second-order debates that by their nature cannot be resolved. Second, the claim that attention to civic republicanism opens up a way of thinking about property and power relations that is not dominated by the issues surrounding the rise of bourgeois modes of thought is found wanting; to a great extent these issues are inescapably ours. Third, I argue that insofar as a distinctive politics can be identified as flowing from civic humanism, in its contemporary manifestations it is neither justifiable nor attractive mainly because of its implausibly
benign assumptions about the relationship between private property and independence and its almost exclusive preoccupation with instrumental questions concerning the stability of political institutions. In fairness to Pocock I should note at the outset that he is an expositor rather than an advocate of the tradition he describes. Although I maintain that he describes the civic humanist paradigm in unduly favorable terms, it is primarily to those who appeal to the tradition of civic republicanism for contemporary normative purposes that I direct this last part of my argument.
(i) Misleading Anachronism of the Alternative Paradigm Thesis
Pocock wants first and foremost to establish that republican writers use distinctive terms of political argument.[14] To bring these to the surface. he employs two strategies—one linguistic, one analytical. The linguistic strategy consists in describing his paradigms by example: Pocock points to key terms, clusters of terms or preoccupations that are held to be distinctively liberal or republican. Yet on close inspection every such appeal encounters difficulties.
To begin with, the term republican exhibits a great many competing meanings. Even if we restrict ourselves to the uses Pocock explicitly embraces, we find a remarkable diversity of referents ranging from the Greek city-states of the ancient world to modern territorial ones and over polities as different in their socioeconomic systems as slave-based ancient societies and feudal, agrarian, commercial, and modern capitalist ones. At times when Pocock speaks of the republican tradition, he lumps together as its "major phases" ideologies as disparate as Aristotelianism, Thomism (which in other contexts is held to be paradigmatically antirepublican),[15] "neo-Machiavellism," and Marxism and claims they display "an astonishing unity and solidarity" in their mistrust of money as a medium of exchange (Pocock 1985: 103–4). Questions inevitably arise, therefore, of how anachronistic it might be to try to describe these different uses with
[14] Pocock's view of the relation between liberal and republican ideas is complex, and he has modified it over time but continues to discuss them as constituting analytically distinct paradigms, not translatable or reducible to one another. Pocock now acknowledges that liberalism's "law-centered paradigm" is "the principal theme of the history of early modern political thought" and concedes that there was a period in the eighteenth century when republican and liberal outlooks were fused by the legal humanists (Pocock 1981b: 361, 366–67). Yet even when he identifies his enterprise as "trying to get … [the liberal] paradigm into perspective," he continues to maintain that "readers of Kuhn will know that a covert attack on the paradigm may be entailed" (Pocock 1985: 61).
[15] See (ibid.: 104).
the same Arendtian political vocabulary[16] and of what consistent meaning over time the term republican can have if it is to apply to them all.[17]
Liberalism is notoriously no less problematical. It, too, denotes a host of quite different political ideologies. Pocock seems to think of it in Hartzian terms as representing a view of the world in which asocial individuals are prevented from destroying one another by legal constraints but otherwise pursue their self-interested goals. Yet liberalism has seldom been like this historically. Today it generally denotes a quasi-statist ideology geared to the promotion of public welfare and the protection, even privileging, of historically disadvantaged groups within the constraints of advanced capitalism. Perhaps the libertarianism of Nozick, with its eschewal of patterned theories of the good and insistence on "rights-as-side-constraints," and the Rawlsian insistence that all teleological commitments ride roughshod over the rights of individuals fit the Pocockian stereotype.[18] But these have no more in common with the major historical variants of liberalism than do they with contemporary political liberalism.[19]
Within the alleged paradigms, Pocock's characterizations of key terms
[16] Arendt's influence on the architecture of Pocock's civic republican model becomes explicit in Pocock (1975a: 550).
[17] If we think about the term republic and its cognates more generally than Pocock, the problem of characterization (let alone definition) becomes even more serious. In the history of ideas we can distinguish Plato's conception in The Republic from Machiavelli's neo-Aristotelian formulations from the uses of it made by the French revolutionaries of 1789 and the English Chartists of the 1840s and fail to discern obvious common characteristics. At times it is a generic term, almost synonymous with regime, so that even a monarchy can be a kind of republic (as indeed it was in the thought of some of Pocock's [1975a: 401–221 English neo-Harringtonian Machiavellians), yet it also exhibits an explicitly antimonarchical connotation—as it did in France in 1789, 1830, and 1848 and as has always been implied in its American usages (though here an anticolonial element enters as well). The many social formations that have historically been labeled republican are comparably diverse. The Greek city-states were republics (though they differed greatly in internal structure and organization); there was republican Rome, the English republic during the seventeenth century, and the various short-lived European republics of the nineteenth. The geography of the contemporary world tells a story of perhaps unparalleled diversity subsumed under the term. The United States is a republic, but we also have the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People's Republic of China, the Fifth Republic in France, the Republic of the Philippines, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and the Republic of South Africa, to name but a few. Of the 170 countries listed in The Countries of the World and Their Leaders, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Gale Research Company, 1987), pp. 150–62, 113 contain the term republic or one of its cognates in their formal names.
[18] Even Nozick's libertarian view rests on conceptions of both human and public good. See Shapiro (1986: 165–78, 289–92).
[19] For useful discussions of liberalism that establish this case, see Galston (1983:621–29), Smith (1985), and Kloppenberg (1987).
and preoccupations run into analogous difficulties. He counterposes the emphasis on rights in liberalism's "law-centered paradigm" with the claim that the civic humanist paradigm revolves around the idea of virtue—that "homo is naturally a citizen and most fully himself when living in a vivere civile ." Because the civic humanist and liberal vocabularies are "discontinuous with one another," and they "premise different values, encounter different problems, and employ different strategies of speech and argument," republicanism's virtue "cannot be satisfactorily reduced to the status of right or assimilated to the vocabulary of jurisprudence." The discontinuity remains even when both vocabularies are used "in the same context and to congruent purposes," as when both republican and juristic modes of argument were simultaneously invoked to vindicate republican independence in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Pocock 1981b: 365, 355–56, 357, 356).
Yet the entire historiographical debate spawned by Pocock's casting of republicanism as an alternative virtue-based paradigm (even if he equivocates about the periods in which it is held to have been distinct) has shed more noise than light on our understanding of early modern thought.[20] Many commentators have pointed out on the one hand that liberalism has always employed conceptions of virtue and on the other that such writers as Harrington, whom Pocock deemed paradigmatically republican, employed much of the liberal vocabulary of law, right, and value.[21] As with all historiographical fads, the endless contortions engaged in by Pocock's followers to save the thesis dilute its explanatory power. An increasingly diverse collection of theorists is deemed somehow to have been republican, including writers like Adam Smith who explicitly rejected core republican arguments, openly embracing standing armies and the division of labor.[22] Even Locke, who Pocock originally argued had been given too much prominence at the expense of civic humanist writers, now teeters on the verge of incorporation into the new civic humanist rewriting of early modern thought.[23] This is ironic, in light of Pocock's original motivation, his dissatisfaction
[20] For a recent statement of his view, see Pocock ( 1985: 37–50). In this and the next several paragraphs I draw on arguments in Shapiro (1989a: 62–65).
[21] On liberal treatments of virtue and the good, see Galston (1983: 621–29), Smith (1985: 13–59), and Kloppenberg (1987). On liberal assumptions in the English and Scottish republican traditions, see Isaac (1988) and Burtt (1986), and for a critical assessment of republicanism as an alternative paradigm in America, see Greenstone (1986: 1–49).
[22] See Winch (1980). For a good critical analysis, see Harpham (1984: 764–74).
[23] Thus although Grant (1985: 15) does not argue that Locke was a civic humanist and is not herself a Pocockian, she does argue that Locke's political doctrine "is perfectly compatible with community in many forms and with strong communal institutions."
satisfaction with what he saw as the tendency of Marxists and Straussians alike to give too much attention to Lockean liberalism and to discover everywhere they looked after about the time of Machiavelli either the rise of bourgeois modes of thought or the decline of Western civilization.[24] My point is not that a more scrupulous depiction of the paradigm would resolve these difficulties but rather that just as liberalism has always entailed notions of the good and of virtue, so republican writers have been concerned with law and legitimacy—even if sometimes implicitly—because any theory of politics has to be concerned with both.[25]
No more successful is Pocock's attempt to distinguish his paradigms by reference to liberalism's typical preoccupation with instrumental questions of distribution in the face of republicanism's teleological commitments. As he is forced to concede, there have always been ideas of legitimate distribution in the republican tradition. "If the citizens were to practice a common good, they must distribute its components among themselves, and must even distribute the various modes of participating in its distribution." Indeed, Aristotelian, Polybian, and Ciceronian analysis had shown "that these modes were highly various and capable of being combined in a diversity of complex patterns; political science in the sense of politeia took this as its subject matter." Pocock nonetheless continues to maintain that because the virtues that it was the business of these different distributions of means to realize could not be reduced to those means, "the republican or political conception of virtue exceeded the limits of jurisprudence and therefore of justice as a jurist conceived it" (ibid.: 358). Even this formulation should suggest to Pocock that his dichotomous classification is misleading; it is only because he operates with the assumption that the liberal view reduces politics to an account of law and right that he can entertain the notion of an alternative and discontinuous republican vocabulary that reduces it to an account of the good.
Pocock's analytical strategy is to underpin the dichotomy between republican and liberal paradigms with the dichotomy between negative and positive liberty. Although the value liberty is central to both traditions, in the liberal tradition liberty is typically a negative constraint on the power
[24] For an illustration of his ringing denunciations of "the paradigm of liberalism," see Pocock (1985: 59–62).
[25] In this connection note that Riesenberg (1969: 237–54) criticized an earlier version of the civic humanist alternative paradigm view, as formulated by Baron (1966), by arguing that citizenship in the Italian republics was mainly defined in jurisprudential terms, not those arising from the humanist vocabulary of vita activa and vivere civile, so that law, right, and obligation were central to the classical republican view of citizenship. Although Pocock (1975a: 83; 1981: 355) has acknowledged the existence of this critique, he has never responded to it.
of others (principally if not exclusively the state) over the individual. The negative liberty view tends to "lower the level of participation and deny the premise that man is by nature political" and to be narrowly preoccupied "with that which can be distributed, with things and rights." By contrast, classical republican positive liberty elevates participation through the Aristotelian affirmation that we are naturally political animals.[26] The laws of the republic, "the lois obeyed by Montesquieu's vertu politique —were therefore far less regulae juris or modes of conflict resolution than they were ordini or 'orders'; they were the formal structure within which political nature developed to its inherent end" (ibid.: 359).
Pocock's confrontation between republican and liberal paradigms and the negative/positive dichotomy with which he underpins it are instances of what I have elsewhere described as mutual oppositions of gross concepts. When protagonists argue in terms of gross concepts, they engage in a double reduction. First, they reduce what are actually complex relational ideas to one or another of the terms in the relation over which they range, dealing with the other terms implicitly while seeming not to deal with them at all. Second, they reduce what are often substantive disagreements about one or another of the terms in a relational argument to disagreements about the meanings of the terms themselves, making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the "essential contestability" thesis, which posits exactly the kind of discontinuous vocabularies whereby protagonists allegedly speak past one another that Pocock is seeking to establishes.[27] As MacCallum (1972: 174–93) showed long ago in relation to the negative/ positive liberty debate, any assertion about freedom or liberty minimally involves reference to agents, restraining (or enabling) conditions, and actions. It always makes sense to ask of any use of the term, who is free from what restraint (or because of what enabling condition) to perform which action? Negative libertarians tend explicitly to argue by reference to the first two terms in this triad; positive libertarians, the second and third. Negative libertarians usually discuss the second term in the language of constraints, whereas positive libertarians employ that of enabling
[26] "The republic or politeia solved the problem of authority and liberty by making quisque [everyone] participant in the authority by which he was ruled; this entailed relations of equality which made in fact extremely stern demands upon him, but by premising that he was kata ph
[27] Essential contestability is the term first popularized by Bernard Gallie (1955: 167–98).
conditions. MacCallum's argument was, first, that constraints and enabling conditions can invariably be redescribed as one another (so that there is no politically interesting difference between saying that the prisoner is unfree because of the presence of locked chains, not the lack of a key) and second, that all three terms in the relation must be integral to any credible account of freedom. He showed that it does not take much digging to bring an author's assumptions about each of the three terms to light and that once this is done we can see that negative and positive libertarians do not have different understandings of the meanings of the terms freedom and liberty at all. Rather, they disagree about the content of the substantive terms in his triad, though this is seldom obvious to protagonists just because their disagreement appears to them to be about the meanings of the terms freedom and liberty . But just as the arguments of negative and positive libertarians can easily be rearticulated in one another's terms, so it can be shown that theories of the right and the good mutually require one another and are therefore not basic or paradigmatic terms of political argument. Pocock's analytic attempt to distinguish liberal from republican paradigms fails as a result.[28]
Certainly some writers have believed themselves to be embracing a republican ideal as an alternative to some other, but we make a serious error if we take them at their word. The very fact that civic humanist writers employ so many different and conflicting concepts of virtue,[29] that the idea of liberty is central to both alleged paradigms, and that those paradigm-case republicans, the American revolutionaries, were obsessed with questions of law and legitimacy should make us suspicious of this dichotomous classification. There is no exclusive language of the virtues (or of law). There are many (often conflicting) assumptions about virtue and about legitimacy embodied in both jurisprudential and civic republican traditions, some conservative, some radical, and some liberal, as we have seen on Pocock's own account.[30] The interesting questions are which of these assumptions merit our endorsement and which our rejection, but they are obscured by the mindless opposition of gross concepts, liberal versus republican. Perhaps Pocock can make a case that his interest is that we recover the terms of debate as the protagonists understood them. Granting this for now (though I dispute part of it in section II(ii) below), my analysis here reveals the limits of such methods from the standpoint of anyone interested in analytic clarity or normative argument. If a set of assumptions
[28] I defend a more general version of this claim in Shapiro (1989a: 51–76).
[29] Three have been distinguished in a useful paper by Burtt (1986).
[30] Even the neo-Kantian political theories of John Rawls and his followers, which express explicit agnosticism about intersubjective purposes, implicitly make these assumptions. See Shapiro (1986: 169, 214–18, 260–62, 285–87).
about purposes, or about law, is implicit in an argument—perhaps not even evident to its author—this may be one of the most interesting things about it, and exclusive preoccupation with authorial intention will lead us to miss it.
Whether or not a historian like Pocock can formulate a description of his enterprise that makes these issues exogenous, contemporary communitarians like Sandel, who want to invoke the revival of interest in republicanism as part of the normative basis for an allegedly alternate theory of politics, cannot legitimately avoid it.[31] For the debates on "whether-or-not republic" and "whether-or-not virtue" do not begin to get at the questions of what sorts; it is, consequently, small wonder that appeal to the republican conceptual vocabulary has seemed compatible with every political ideology from far left to far right and with every kind of polity from the pastoral village to the nation-state (and many kinds of the latter, at that).
Thus we should not allow the question to be who is right, liberals or republicans? because both are right about one another. Liberalisms that reduce politics to questions of right will always be vulnerable to republican critiques either because they appear to lack conceptions of the good or because their implicit conceptions of the good are not adequately defended. Conversely, republican alternatives that direct attention to the language of virtue while ignoring questions about its substance, about how it might be implemented, about the distributive consequences and external effects of treating one conception of the public good as authoritative rather than another will rightly seem vulnerable to liberals. Arguing by reference to alternative paradigms perpetuates the process of gross opposition because it directs critical attention to the terminologies in which arguments are expressed, rather than the arguments themselves.
(ii) Failure of the Argument Against Bourgeois Orthodoxy
A powerful motivation behind The Machiavellian Moment is Pocock's conviction that understanding the republican tradition will free us of the illusion that the history of the last four hundred years has been the story of the inevitable if gradual triumph of bourgeois modes of thought. Whether a self-congratulatory affirmation of Lockean liberalism or a searing indictment (from the left of more or less self-conscious rationalizations for capitalism, from the right of the passing of traditional society), defenders and critics alike allow the paradigm of bourgeois liberalism to
[31] This linking of communitarianism to republicanism is implicit in the argument of Sandel (1982) and later becomes explicit (Sandel, 1984a: 91–93; 1984b: 7). For additional examples see note 3 of this chapter.
set the terms of their understanding of our past, and this weakness limits their understanding of our present and its possibilities. Yet how convincing is Pocock's case against Macpherson? How powerful is Pocock's claim that the political argument that emerged from the civic republican tradition offers an alternative set of self-understandings to the bourgeois thought of liberal modernity?
No one doubts that Harrington used the vocabulary of classical republicanism in his attack on English feudalism; the debated question is to what extent this signified commitment to classical conceptions of property rather than innovative argument. Pocock's claim is questionable on its face because Harrington's target was the feudal structure of land ownership and the dependencies he believed it fostered; it must therefore be conceded that he was concerned with problems fundamentally different from Aristotle's or the scholastic Aristotelians'. What, then, are we to make of his reliance on republican rhetoric? One thing to note, as Jeffry Isaac has pointed out in a balanced and judicious assessment, is that Harrington's rhetoric was many-sided and that his republican commitments coexisted with the open embracing of values we characteristically think of as liberal. Thus although Harrington argued in the idiom of harmony and stability, emphasized the centrality of public virtue to politics, and conceived of the state as "the repository of political virtue and patriotism, of a collective elan," this is only a part of the rhetorical story (Isaac 1988: 22–36). There is also a heavy emphasis on the centrality of the rule of law. Thus although the soul of a nation or city must be virtue, "for as much as the soul of a city or nation is the sovereign power, her virtue must be law." Harrington's ultimate goal is to prevent the privatization of political power characteristic of monarchy, so that popular government uniquely "reacheth the perfection of government." Only under popular government can the rule of law remain supreme (Harrington 1977: 179; Isaac 1988: 23–26).
As well as this populist affirmation of the rule of law, there is a view of private property and appropriation underlying it that is fundamentally bourgeois. As Isaac notes, although Harrington did not develop an analysis of property of the sort that can be found in the fifth chapter of Locke's Second Treatise , he did express "an individualist view of appropriation quite parallel to that of liberal rights theory" (Isaac 1988: 32). Thus he wrote in the opening chapter of The Art of Lawgiving that
the donation of the earth by God unto man cometh unto a kind of selling it for industry, a treasure which seemeth to purchase of God; from the different kinds of successes of this industry, whether in arms or in other exercises of mind or body, deriveth the natural equity of dominion of property; and from the legal establishment or distribution
of this property (be it more or less approaching towards the natural equity of the same) deriveth all government. (Harrington 1977: 604)
For Isaac this passage embodies a petty-bourgeois morality, as do Harrington's accompanying appeals for a distribution of property that promotes industry. Harrington opposes those inequalities he considers to be unproductive, but he is quite prepared to tolerate those that conduce to greater productivity. Indeed, as Macpherson (1962: 186) long ago pointed out, as it relates to unequal distributions of wealth, Harrington's view is one of equality of opportunity not equality of result and he favored inheritance as well as transmissibility of property. Harrington states explicitly (if not entirely coherently) that substantial inequalities of wealth may be perfectly consistent with an "equal agrarian" and popular state; he argues against only those inequalities that would be so great as to destroy the agrarian state (Harrington 1977: 424–25).[32]
Attention to the intellectual context in which these arguments were developed enables us to endorse Macpherson's and Isaac's claims. Harrington's assumptions about industry and productiveness—both in his critique of the feudal distribution of wealth as unproductive and in his elaboration of his own account of industriousness—fall into the mainstream of much seventeenth-century economic thinking on the nature and origins of wealth. Taking the second of these first, Joyce Appleby's seminal study of seventeenth-century economic ideology has made it clear that one innovative change of this period was the redefinition of wealth as the capacity to produce for exchange. The idea of wealth as inhering in a productive capacity is at the core of the labor theories of value embraced by Petty, Hobbes, Locke, Cary, and many others that reflected the growing belief that human work could produce more than nature (Appleby 1978: 156, 135–41).[33] Harrington did not even try to develop a political economy in the way that Petty or Locke did, but he clearly fell into the mainstream of the new seventeenth-century identification of labor and industry with wealth. This is reflected not merely in the continual references to industry as the basis of liberty throughout his writings but also in the very terms of his attack on feudal wealth.[34]
Yet Harrington's criticism is not simply that the nobility is corrupted by its wealth but more important that it is unproductive. "The aristocracy is ravenous," he tells us in many different ways, "not the people" (ibid.:
[32] For additional textual evidence, see Harrington (1977: 197, 232, 292–93).
[33] For further discussion of the labor theories of Petty, Hobbes, and Locke, see Shapiro (1986: 35–38, 92–96, 303). For more general discussion, see Coleman (1956: 280–95), Wiles (1968: 113–26), and Appleby (1978: 129–57).
[34] See Harrington (1977: 202, see also 292, 188–98, 239, and 292–94).
292–94). Here again attention to the broader intellectual context reinforces the claim Isaac wishes to advance, for many seventeenth-century economic writers singled out these "unproductive" classes for criticism. As early as 1662 William Petty was forcefully arguing that landlords were parasites on their productive tenants and defending redistributive taxation from the landed to the productive classes. At about the same time William Shepherd defended an excise tax because it taxed extravagance. These writers were embracing the view, later to be articulated by Defoe, that taxation could redistribute from the unproductive to those whose spending would "terminate in the hands of industry and trade." By the later part of the century, Sir Dalby Thomas was arguing that the unproductive included "Gentry, Clergy, Lawyers, Servingmen and Beggars," even though he had no objection to, even embraced, accumulations of wealth and luxury consumption because they promoted productiveness. By this time, Appleby tells us, "the idea that only laboring people could increase wealth had become a truism" embraced by Slingsby Bethel and many others in arguments over taxation policy, immigration, and demography.[35]
Although Appleby does not discuss Harrington, his antipathy for the nobility and its parasitism fits squarely into the tradition she describes. "Your highwaymen are not such as have trades or have been brought up unto industry, but such as whose education hath pretended unto that of gentleman" he tells us in Oceana . Lysander, in "bringing in the golden spoils of Athens, irrecoverably ruined that commonwealth," which is a warning that "in giving encouragement unto industry, we also remember that covetousness is the root of all evil." Always there is the example of the Romans, "who through a negligence committed in their agrarian laws, let in the sink of luxury, and forfeited the inestimable treasure of liberty for themselves and posterity" (Harrington 1977: 292, 239, 188).
Harrington never gave an account of the difference between productive and unproductive labor, yet his assumptions about productiveness fell into the mainstream of much seventeenth-century political economy from Petty to Locke in conceiving of it in decidedly bourgeois terms. He embraced inequalities he believed productive and succored industry while rejecting concentrations of wealth among the feudal nobility as corrupt, all in the name of the public good. For, like many of his contemporaries, Harrington did not object to inequality or even to wealth as such but rather to their unproductive and corrupting feudal forms. One cannot help but be reminded of Locke's defense of enclosure, despite his theory of property as
[35] For further discussion of these sources, which I draw on here, and a discussion of additional sources, see Appleby (1978: 132–34, 171, 181, and 211).
use rights to the common, through simultaneous appeal to the labor theory of value and a theory of productivity that was essentially a trickle-down theory of wealth.[36] Of course none of this is to say that Harrington was a defender of capitalism (any more than it is to say that Locke was) or that he could have had the slightest idea of what capitalism would be like or even that if he had had any idea of what capitalism would be like that he would have defended it. It is to say, however, that he took for granted the core tenets of the new political economy in his defenses of industriousness and social mobility and in his attacks on the feudal social structure and the absolutist political institutions he thought it had spawned.
Pocock's reading of the neo-Harringtonians confronts analogous difficulties, as Jesse Goodale (1980: 240–57) has shown. By exaggerating the neo-Harringtonians' idealization of the past. Pocock misidentifies a circumscribed and qualified critique of the monied interest as a fundamental rejection of it. Trenchard (the author of Cato's Letters ), for example, was primarily concerned with political corruption, his central preoccupation with the national debt and the monied interest it benefited and empowered. But he had no particular objection to the emerging property relations; like Harrington he equated the growth of freehold property with the expansion of liberty, yet he did not favor equality in its distribution, only a sufficiently wide distribution to prevent the tyranny of a small, wealthy elite. Although he favored the redistribution of feudal wealth that resulted from the shift in landed property to the gentry and favored the rise of commerce as having expanded liberty. England's political institutions were thought not to have adapted to the changes. and it was to this imbalance that reform had to be addressed.[37]
A brief examination of the terms of Trenchard's diagnosis will reveal his open embrace of commercial institutions. As with Bolingbroke, the primary objection was to stock market speculators and accumulators of the national debt for undermining "honesty and industry" with their "mean and contemptible hands" (Trenchard 1969: 1, 6).[38] They have mortgaged the nation's assets, for
national credit can never be supported by lending money without security, or drawing in other people to do so; by raising stocks and commodities by artifice and fraud, to unnatural and imaginary values; and consequently delivering
[36] On Locke's labor theory of value, see Locke (1963: 330, 331, 337, 338, 341), on his theory of productivity (ibid.: 336).
[37] For further discussion, see Goodale (1980: 257), on whom I draw here.
[38] In this and subsequent quotations from Cato's Letters , the English has been modernized.
up helpless women and orphans, with the ignorant and unwary, but industrious subject, to be devoured by pick-pockets and stock-jobbers; a sort of vermin that are bred and nourished in the corruption of the state. (Ibid. : I, 17)
Expanding the national debt "instead of preserving public credit, destroys all Property; turns the stock and wealth of a nation out of its proper Channels." Far from nourishing the body politic, it "produces only ulcers, eruptions, and often epidemical plague-sores: It starves the poor, destroys manufactures, ruins our navigation, and raises insurrections Etc" (ibid.: I, 17). Monopolies or "conspiracies and combinations" of "artful and wealthy merchants" are objected to on the grounds that they are "against general trade" and must eventually "destroy the trade itself." For
the success and improvements of trade depend wholly upon supplying the commodities cheap at market; and whoever can afford those of equal goodness at but half per cent. cheaper than his neighbors, will command the sale. (Ibid.: III, 202)
Not the commercial system or even credit but rather their unproductive abuse for personal gain is at the root of the problem.[39] Corrupt men, who exploit public office for personal gain, are the central source of Cato's fury:
What can be more invidious, than for a nation, staggering under the weight and oppression of its debts, eaten up with usury, and exhausted with payments, to have the additional mortification, to see private and worthless men … grow rich while they grow poor; to see the town every day glittering with new and pompous equipages, whilst they are mortgaging and selling their estates, without having spent them. (Ibid.: III, 274)
None of this invective reveals hostility to the emerging commercial system. Compare it with the stock Democratic criticisms of the Reagan administration for corruption and selfish pursuit of the interests of its wealthy constituencies to the detriment of the public good. "Instead of
[39] Thus, "[a] merchant, or tradesman, is said to be in good credit, when his visible gains appear to be greater than his expenses; when he is industrious, and takes care of his affairs; when he makes punctual payments, and the wares which he sells may be depended upon as to their goodness and value; and when those who deal with him can have a reasonable assurance that he will make a profit by his care from the commodities that they entrust him with…. But if a merchant be observed to live in riot and profusion, to leave his estate to the direction of servants, who cheat him, or neglect his business … no fair dealer will have anything to do with them" (Trenchard 1969: IV, 13–14).
investing to rebuild America's power as a competitor in a swelling global marketplace," it was complained in the Democratic Fact Book for 1984 , "the Reagan Republicans are driving the nation—and our international customers—into paralyzing debt. They are wasting financial resources to buy superfluous or gold-plated weapons when what we really need are tools that build. And they are wasting human resources—whose minds and skills must be trained to master the needs of tomorrow."[40] Like much other campaign literature, it was filled with allegations of cronyism and corruption regarding the use of insider information for personal benefit in corporate takeovers, the giving of defense and other contracts to personal friends and business associates without competitive bidding, the cynical refusal to enforce such public interest legislation as antitrust and environmental protection laws, the reduced enforcement of tax compliance, and the staffing of public interest agencies with manifestly incompetent personnel.[41] Yet just as nothing in these Democratic attacks on the Reagan administration's corrupt use of political power should incline us to the view that its authors are rejecting bourgeois values, let alone that they are employing a premodern political language, so it is with the neo-Harringtonians. This is evident not only from the fact that in both cases the problem is diagnosed as an abuse of political power but also because in both cases it is the undermining of market mechanisms rather than their existence that is held to be at fault.
A similar argument can be made against the idea that republicanism presents an alternative to bourgeois modes of thought in early American political argument. Although the ideological theorists of the Revolution never argued that it did, this literature is notable for the paucity of its treatments of matters economic and, most surprising, even of the economic presuppositions of republican ideology; books like Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic and Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, tremendously rich in other respects, are virtually silent on the subject of republican political economy because there was no distinctive republican political economy.[42] Beyond
[40] The Democratic Fact Book 1984 (Washington, D.C., 1984), p. 446.
[41] See, for examples, The Democratic Fact Book 1984 (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 423–41, and The Democratic Fact Book 1986: Democrats for the 1980s (Washington, D. C., 1986), pp. 98–115.
[42] Bailyn (1967) and Wood (1969) de-emphasized capitalism by omission more than by argument, largely as a by-product of their preoccupation with the internal structure of revolutionary republican ideology. Pocock (1975a: 462–552), Banning (1974: 168–77; 1978; 1986: 3–18), McCoy (1974: 633–46; 1980), and others went further, pointing to tensions between republicanism and commercial capitalism and emphasizing, in varying degrees, the pastoral and explicitly antimodern model of agrarian self-sufficiency that infused much eighteenth-century republican argument. This interpretation has in turn been subject to trenchant criticism from Appleby (1982a: 833–49; 1982b: 287–309; 1984a; 1986: 20–34), who has emphasized the commercial aspirations and success of American agrarian capitalism and the emergence of a new vision from it that was "both democratic and capitalistic, agrarian and commercial" (Appleby 1982a: 844). This debate is further complicated by geographical considerations, with Shalhope (1976: 532–33) and Foshee (1985: 523–50), among others, arguing that the South retained an antimodern agrarian and pastoral republicanism even into the twentieth century but that in the North republican ideals were being reconceptualized in ways compatible with commercial capitalism by Jefferson's time. Others, like Marmor (1967: 377–406), have argued that the story of southern antiindustrialism and anticommercialism is more ambiguous, and Appleby (1982a: 833–49; 1984a; 1984b: 275–83; 1986: 20–33) continues, in the main persuasively, to resist it entirely. For criticism of her view, see Ashworth (1984: 425–35) and Winch (1985: 287–97).
the assertion that great extremes of inequality can be politically dangerous, nothing in republican assumptions about economic relations need be anticapitalist. On the contrary there was often what with hindsight we might call a naive embrace of market institutions, particularly private property, as guarantors of autonomy. This was an understandable result of the historical preoccupation of many republicans with the rejection of feudal institutions and aristocratic ways.[43] Central to their naïveté was an overestimation of the importance of land and its differences from movable property, a failure to see that it was the form rather than that object of ownership that would shape the social and political relations of the future. That the land held to guarantee the independence necessary for republican virtue would be freehold would be far more significant that its being land, just as the difference between agrarian and commercial capitalism would turn out to be far less significant that eighteenth-century protagonists believed.
The ideal of independence as requiring freehold property (which Pocock locates in the republican tradition long before it reaches America),[44] the work ethic, and the emphasis on productive expansion as essential for stability (and thus for preventing corruption) all became central to the capitalist world view. The pastoral ideal of the yeoman farmer may not be that of a nascent capitalist, but from the standpoint of the logic of property law, they have more in common that does either with a feudal serf or lord.[45]
[43] It would be illuminating in this regard to reconstruct the argument of a text like Democracy in America to see where it would lead in the absence of Tocqueville's benign republican assumptions about private property.
[44] See Pocock (1975a: 375, 386–88, 390, 408, 440–41) and the discussion in section I(iv) of this chapter.
[45] Even in such strongholds of old world sentiment as the antebellum South Carolina depicted by Wier (1969: 473–501) and Greenberg (1977: 723–43) and among the genteel aristocratic Brahmins of early Gilded Age Massachusetts described by Thomson (1982: 163–86), republican commitments were identified with politically antimodern and antidemocratic instincts that were often aristocratic in tone, but the case has yet to be made that these sentiments translated into hostility toward capitalism as a socioeconomic system.
This is not to deny that some republicans wanted seriously to limit economic inequality or that some saw urban capitalism and its ethic of self-interest as potentially corruptive of the pastoral ideal required by republican theory in its eighteenth-century American variants.[46] Nor is it to say that there are not deep and enduring tensions between the ethic of self-interest fostered by a private property regime and a market society and the dictates of public-spiritedness in politics required by some variants of the republican ethos. This tension is a good deal older than the American nation; it has been shown decisively by Kramnick (1982: 629–64), Burtt (1986), and others to have generated substantial modifications in the republican conception of virtue—to accommodate self-interest and even in some cases to be defined by reference to it—in eighteenth-century England and Scotland.
However the interpretive debates on the changing meaning of virtue are finally resolved, if they are, it is by now clear that republican conceptual vocabulary was not inherently unfriendly to capitalism by the time it reached America, even if a primitive and romantic agrarian capitalism was often the implicit model. Pocock (1975b: 75–76) all but concedes this in a discussion of the Augustan debate when he notes that both sides in the eighteenth-century dispute on commerce shared "the same underlying value-system, in which the only material foundation for civic virtue and moral personality is taken to be independence and real property,"[47] as well as in his discussion of the evolution of American republican thinking (as we have seen).[48] Yet this surely undermines the claim that for too long our view of early modern thought has been driven by the preoccupation with the rise of bourgeois social relations. Indeed, the effectiveness with which republican rhetoric was co-opted—on Pocock's own account—by forces friendly to capitalism is prima facie evidence of their causal significance.
[46] We are beginning to see a body of scholarship on this subject by historians of political economy, although most of it is focused on the nineteenth century. See, for example, Sabel and Zeitlin (1985: 133–76).
[47] Earlier he says more fully, "all Augustan analysts of political economy accept the interdependence of land, trade and credit; and furthermore … all agree that land is an important foundation of virtue, stockjobbing a pernicious means to corruption, and money and trade vital components of national wealth and power. The apologists for land make much of the importance of trade, and claim that stockjobbing is ruinous to the value of both; the apologists for war and credit stress that trade is necessary to the value of land, and deny that stockjobbing alters this relationship; and there are, on the face of it, no apologists for stockjobbing at all" (Pocock 1975b: 75).
[48] See section I(v) of this chapter.
(iii) Political Unattractiveness of the Civic Republican Argument
As Pocock explains it, once the republican ideal was extracted from ancient (cyclical) conceptions of time (where decay would inevitably be followed by rebirth) and located in secular time, the problem of preventing entropy and decline became the central organizing question of civic republican theory. This preoccupation resulted in an instrumentalist preoccupation that had been absent from the classical Greek conception.[49]
For a political theorist there are two central difficulties deriving from this instrumentalism. The first has to do with a host of related issues concerning membership, the treatment of outsiders, and external relations generally in republican theory. If the republic is thought of as comparatively weak, coping with the idiosyncrasies of fortune in a hostile and uncontrollable world, the republican prudence of Guicciardini might seem the only sensible option. But this view, if generalized, fails to account for major differences among the powers and kinds of republics or the fact that many people will effectively be excluded from all republics. Any moral claims or dilemmas generated by these facts remain conveniently off the agenda from the standpoint of this inward-looking political theory. It is inherent in taking the political community as given and treating its stability as the core problem of politics to be indifferent toward outsiders (or at most instrumentally interested in them), whether these be individuals or other communities. As MacIntyre notes in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , the Aristotelian tradition has been criticized for just this reason for centuries.[50] In Pocock's civic republican tradition, even when outsiders cease to be declared explicitly to be barbarians, they continue to be treated purely instrumentally, relevant only to the extent that they affect the stability of the republic. In this light it can scarcely be surprising that there are powerful links between republicanism and nationalism in the contemporary world, for although republican and communitarian arguments are typically defended by appeal to the benefits of membership for the included, they are equally mechanisms of exclusion. Indeed the mere existence of republics as valued communities requires the existence of outsiders who are devalued. Despite the heroic attempts of Anderson (1983: 129–40) and others to distinguish patriotic from racist nationalisms on the grounds that the former need not dehumanize outsiders, a
[49] See Pocock (1975a: 53–54, 75, 76–78, 84, 112–13, 136, 208–9, 333, 395–96).
[50] MacIntyre's view is that republican theory could only be brought to bear on the moral dimensions of external relations through the addition of an independent theological component. See MacIntyre (1988: 121, 146–47).
persuasive case has yet to be made for this view. Certainly the civic republicans never took it. Like Bloom and Rorty, they saw civic commitment as necessarily involving parochial prejudice, but—as Pocock points out—they were much less squeamish about acknowledging its implications, often openly maintaining that war was a normal condition among republics.
Republican prudence might arguably be defensible as a way to deal with the vicissitudes of fortune if we believed ourselves to be playing a game with the gods that we cannot control and are bound eventually to lose. But we have no reason to believe this in our dealings with other political communities. It is, further, scarcely defensible to legitimate the external actions of the world's most powerful nation-state in Guicciardinian terms because the pragmatic justification (there is no other way to survive in a world of hostile and more powerful states) is unavailable.
This leaves the Machiavellian argument that all potentially hostile threats should simply be dominated, which issued, we saw, in Machiavelli's defense of imperial expansion. If we accept Pocock's account of how this argument was eventually modified in America into the notion of a fee simple empire, it becomes instrumentally more effective than even Machiavelli believed it to be. Although stability may still be being bought at the price of longevity of the republic, the day of eventual reckoning is pushed into the distant future, perhaps never to arrive. Moreover, continuous expansion is no longer threatening to the internal social structure of the republic because this latter is no longer believed to be dependent on balancing various estates for its survival.[51] Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the neo-Machiavellian argument is causally true, it is morally unattractive for the same reasons that the Guicciardinian argument is, only more so. Domination of outsiders, rather than mere indifference to them, is assumed to be justified on purely instrumentalist grounds, leaving all questions about political membership and the moral claims of outsiders unasked if not unaskable.
Republican theory may not always have been so morally vulnerable. For the Greek city-states or the republics of Renaissance Europe, the world was an enormous place, its limits unexplored by Europeans and even unknown to them. In such circumstances antipathy toward outsiders must have appeared quite different than in the postcolonial world we live in, with its unprecedented economic and geopolitical interdependence and destructive technological capacities. In our circumstances, where the public policies and economic practices in any major nation have massive effects
[51] On Machiavelli's account, see section I(iii) of this chapter, and on its Americanization, section I(v).
on outsiders. a political theory that by its terms denies these latter any moral claim—or even a moral identity—seems intuitively less than fully satisfactory. Why this is so is taken up in chapter 9.
The second morally unattractive aspect of republican instrumentalism concerns its inevitable abandoning of its classical roots once people tried to put it into practice in the modern world. Eighteenth-century republicans had to cope with the centralizing and nationalizing tendencies of the modern state; they had to ask themselves how a model of participatory politics derived from the small self-governing Greek polis (itself something of a romantic idealization) could apply in this quite different social and political context.[52] The federalist-antifederalist debate on how to order institutions to prevent corruption and decay in the new mass republic revolved partly around this question. Yet it was never resolved; it was left hanging as classical republican politics went into decline in the late eighteenth century.[53] By then many of the staunchest republicans had conceded that it was not possible to foster and preserve republican virtue in political life, that the management and control of self-centered factions and interest groups was the most that institutional designers could reasonably try to achieve. These problems came to seem increasingly intractable as the factional model of interest group politics became dominant in the mid-1780s, but they predated this development; they were built into the logic of the new national republic.[54] Even if we grant Pocock's contention that these conclusions were sometimes arrived at in a republican idiom, this was dearly achieved at the price of abandoning the central commitments of Aristotelian republicanism.
That nothing approaching the classical republican ideal was implemented in eighteenth-century America implies that when contemporary American political theorists, activists, and politicians appeal to the republican tradition, they are being doubly romantic. They are not appealing to a pure classical past that existed at some point in American history that has been corrupted or lost and needs to be recreated. To the extent that they are appealing to anything in American culture and history, they are appealing to an appeal to a classical politics, to an unfulfilled eighteenth-century agenda in which the tensions between Greek and Roman variants of republican theory had never been resolved.[55] Given that part of what
[52] See Ketcham (1984: 69–85, 167–87).
[53] This decline is usefully described by Wood (1969: 471–615).
[54] See Wood (1969: 606–7, 393–564) and Ketcham (1984: 167–87) on the debate.
[55] As Wood usefully puts it: "The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution. From this goal flowed all of the Americans' exhortatory literature and all that made their ideology truly revolutionary. This republican ideology both presumed and helped shape the Americans' conception of the way their society and politics should be structured and operated—a vision so divorced from the realities of American society so contrary to the previous century of American experience that it alone was enough to make the Revolution one of the great utopian movements of American history. By 1776 the Revolution came to represent a final attempt, perhaps—given the nature of American society—even a desperate attempt, by many Americans to realize the traditional Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government" (Wood 1969: 53–54, see also 57–58, 59–65, 606–15).
makes civic republicanism attractive to those disillusioned with the artificiality of neo-Kantian ideal theory is the proposition that it has an actual basis in American history, this is a serious defect. Pocock may be persuasive that the myths surrounding the American republican vision are "not inherently more absurd than those entertained in other cultures" (Pocock 1975a: 543), but this is notably less than an argument for their acceptance or even plausibility. Like all romantic doctrines, their emotional appeal is likely to be exploited for ulterior purposes behind the smoke screens of their unattainable goals.
III. Conclusion
In a different context, John Dunn (1979: 26) has argued that modern democratic theory oscillates between two variants, "one dismally ideological and the other fairly blatantly utopian." The oscillations he had in mind were between the Schumpeterian identification of democracy with the prevailing practices of advanced capitalism and the Rousseauist vision of a self-governing community. The logic of Dunn's observation may be borrowed and broadened for our purposes because republican ideology exhibits an analogous, almost schizoid, form. Given their common origins in Aristotle, there is remarkably little common ground between MacIntyre's rendition of the Greek version of republican theory and what it became when overlaid with neo-Roman preoccupations by the Italian humanists. Not only do MacIntyre and Pocock appear entirely unaware of—or at least uninterested in—one another's arguments, but the Aristotelian ideal of a teleological human nature realized through the living of integrated lives is almost nowhere to be found in the civic humanists' science of political stability. In the tradition Pocock describes, an instrumentalist preoccupation is built into the conception of politics as staving off decay and decline, but it has two more parochial sources as well. First, many of the humanist writings were advice books for princes, and this preoccupation gave the
maintenance of political stability central importance. The other historically parochial source is Harrington's materialism: the argument—picked up and adapted by his successors—that to endure, political institutions must reflect and embody the distribution of wealth, particularly that of property. Whether in neo-Machiavellian or neo-Harringtonian form, the preoccupation with stability generates a conservative relativism whereby the political system preserves itself by adapting to socioeconomic conditions, and even virtue—that core term of the classical republican scheme—is eventually redefined to that end.
That such a politics could seem benign to republican theorists since Harrington, I argued, turned partly on their lack of a plausible political economy. In marked contrast to their advanced understanding of the dynamics of organized institutions, they greatly underestimated the consequences of linking liberty to freehold property, and this wedded many of them—some consciously, others not—to a recognizably bourgeois ethos. To be sure, Jefferson and others were uncomfortable with many of the political implications of this ethos, but they lacked an alternative political economy to the emerging market system, and republican ideology did not begin to dictate that they find one. Like their English predecessors, American republicans generally assumed that, in the main, market relations were compatible with republican political institutions, indeed often that they required them.
To sum up, although Pocock and the republican revisionists have enriched our understanding of the dynamics of bourgeois culture and its internal tensions, they have not delivered on the promise to provide an alternative. Indeed, we saw that the opposition to liberalism of a republican paradigm is conceptually and historically misleading: it can appear plausible only when the contrast is to a reductionist version of liberalism, incoherent in its own terms, that equates it with a libertarian ideology of right. Preoccupation with these second-order issues has served to divert attention from the moral dimensions of the civic republican political commitment, and when these are laid bare they are revealed to be unattractive. The methodological commitment to understanding human values within the changing limits of the possible is a great contribution of the civic humanist tradition, but this tradition has failed to supply us with defensible substantive values—or indeed even with critical standards for making substantive choices—within the limits of what is possible.
We saw in chapter 5 that MacIntyre paints a picture of an in many ways attractive classical republican ideal, but neither he nor its other advocates grapple with the problems of implementing it in the actual world. Pocock, by contrast, describes the evolution of civic republicanism as a political
ideology, geared increasingly—with time—to questions revolving around the maintenance of political stability. As such it is emptied of virtually everything, that made the Aristotelian ideal attractive to begin with and shot through with morally unattractive forms of political instrumentalism. So we can usefully conclude by paraphrasing Dunn's point: the analysis of this chapter and the last has revealed that at least two major competing views of politics have grown out of the Aristotelian tradition, one hopelessly utopian and the other dismally instrumental. In the final two chapters of this book I take up the challenge of describing and defending a third view—also traceable to Aristotle—that is both credible and attractive as political theory. But let us first take stock of where we stand.