Where a poet or painter comes from usually matters a lot. It’s hard to imagine Canaletto without Venice, or Wordsworth without the Lake District. When it comes to philosophers, however, place seems less important, philosophy being too abstract a pursuit to have a home anywhere in particular. Thomas Hobbes was born in the pleasant Wiltshire town of Malmesbury, but would no doubt still have considered human life nasty, brutish and short had he been a native of Liverpool. Bertrand Russell was born in Monmouthshire, but it doesn’t seem to have played much part in his attempt to derive the whole of mathematics from logic.
There are, however, some notable exceptions. Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month at the age of 96, was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent, learnt how to read Irish as a child, and could still do so well into middle age. His father was one of the first generation of his family who spoke English as his first language. His hero was Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England. Though he taught at a range of universities, from Brandeis to Boston, Duke to Notre Dame, he kept Oxbridge for the most part at disdainful arm’s length, uneasy with its high-toned English culture. High Table and croquet in the quad weren’t his style. When he delivered a public lecture in Dublin some years ago, and was afterwards guest of honour at a banquet, he fled from the festivities and was found eating a sandwich alone in the bar.
Despite his suspicion of sociability, MacIntyre was a compulsive joiner, and in this sense true to his belief in the corporate rather than the individual. In the Fifties and Sixties, he moved from Presbyterianism to Christian Marxism, then to Marxism proper, joining the Communist Party only to leave it for various Trotskyist grouplets. He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Two decades later, he came (almost) full circle by converting to Roman Catholicism. Aristotle, Marx, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas competed for his intellectual loyalty, most of them distinctly out of favour in orthodox philosophical circles. In fact, MacIntyre was throughout his life a ferocious critic of that orthodoxy — a scourge of liberal individualism, abstract human rights, the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth and the whole moral temper of Western modernity. (A belief in universal rights, he once wrote, was equivalent to a belief in witches and unicorns). His disillusion with Marxism first set in when he was dean of students in the late Sixties, at the politically turbulent University of Essex, then in the grip of student insurrection. One suspects that some kind of personal trauma was involved in this confrontation between a Marxist dean and his unruly flock. Not long after, MacIntyre published a blistering critique of the revolutionary students’ guru, Herbert Marcuse.
In the wake of this disenchantment, he moved to the United States, renounced all political engagement, and began to speak in mildly nostalgic terms of small, self-governing cooperatives, communities of frugal fishermen, craftsmen and the like. It was this — the self-help America of the early puritans, not the later human jungle of Wall Street or Hollywood — which helped to tempt him, rather improbably, across the Atlantic. At the point when the capitalist system was becoming increasingly global in reach, MacIntyre was singing the praises of the local. Advanced capitalism was here to stay, but more humane forms of life could be practised on its fringes. The operatives of capitalism were citizens of the world, and thus what the ancient Greeks knew as barbarians, meaning those who belonged to no city. But mini-cities could be constructed in the system’s shadow.
Despite his international celebrity, achieved through such masterpieces as After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture. He was keenly aware how the liberalism it took for granted was itself a specific, contestable tradition. Those who stand at an angle to conventional society can unmask what it takes as natural and universal as arbitrary and contingent. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the luminaries of the so-called New Left of the late Sixties and Seventies were exiles and émigrés of one kind or another. Perry Anderson, for many decades the leading Marxist intellectual in Britain, is an Anglo-Irishman from County Waterford; Alexander Cockburn was an Anglo-Irishman from Country Cork; Raymond Williams hailed from the Welsh borderlands, Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. Tom Nairn came from Scotland, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall from Jamaica and the philosopher Charles Taylor from Quebec.
“MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture.”
As a Scot of Irish descent, MacIntyre was heir to a history which for all its violence and deprivation was more attuned to the communal than the individualist. It could therefore provide the basis for a powerful critique of a liberalism for which men and women weren’t fundamentally social animals, reason was abstract and instrumental and the most precious value of all — freedom — would tell you little or nothing about what the good life is or how to attain it. Instead, it leaves such matters to one’s subjective choices in the moral marketplace. In MacIntyre’s view, this way of seeing overlooks the fact that individual reasoning participates in a more collective reasoning, one which is always historically specific. Liberty is in the end the liberty to seek truth, another concept increasingly redundant in the modern age. Ethics become little more than an expression of personal preference in a world which has lost almost all sense of the common good. The moral universe is privatised. We still use terms like “goodness” and “happiness”, but the concrete contexts in which they were once embedded have disappeared with the onset of modernity, leaving moral concepts hanging uselessly in the air.
For MacIntyre, by contrast, the good must be more than just what I happen to desire. It’s always embedded in a particular set of collective cultural practices. If we have forgotten this, it’s largely because the 18th century Enlightenment stripped the self of its concrete social identity, so that each of us becomes an isolated, autonomous self in a world of abstract universal principles. Anxious to avoid moral relativism, MacIntyre acknowledges that there are certain standards which different cultures share. But to live well is less to conform to principles common to everyone from 13th century Padua to 20th century Pasadena, as some Enlightenment thinkers would hold, than to flourish in a way appropriate to one’s role in a concrete form of life. A good merchant is someone who behaves as a good merchant should, according to the standards set by his particular culture and tradition. Whether this is also true of a good blackmailer is rather less obvious.
Since social roles are in some sense objective, moral values become so as well. A lot of modern moral thought makes a sharp distinction between facts and values. You can describe a situation as scrupulously as possible, but doing so won’t lead you to a moral judgement or obligation. In the era of modern science, facts are just blank, inert stuff, and values must consequently be imported from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re simply subjective, or the arbitrary decrees of a capricious God. MacIntyre rejects this dualism: for him, describing a social role already implies certain values, in the sense of the need to act in certain ways. It’s because the self has been shorn of this social dimension in modern times that the problem arises. At the same time, it has been deprived of what MacIntyre sees as its status as a form of narrative. In his view, we live in narrative, but can no longer recount coherent stories of ourselves.
All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the scepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the centre of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.
MacIntyre celebrated rootedness, yet as an academic was continually on the move. He was a critic of capitalism who rejected multiculturalism and looked askance at the struggle for recognition of women, gays and others. His dislike of the autonomous self could lead him to overvalue the corporate and collective, as well as to bowing the knee to an authoritarian Church. Yet in an age when Anglophone philosophy had been reduced to a trivial game for those in the know, complete with its in-jokes, ritual gestures and stereotypical turns of phrase, he never ceased to raise the most profound of questions.
