On MacIntyre's Anti-Liberalism

• Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict.—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Very careful readers know that I am an admirer of Catholicism and Democracy (2012) by the late Émile Perreau-Saussine (1972-2010). There is also a lovely memorial by Chris Brooke, here, which quite nicely inscribes the significance of Perreau-Saussine’s work into Cambridge historiography. I overlapped with Émile at Chicago, but while we had some very close mutual friends we kept our mutual distance.

It turns out that in 2005 Perreau-Saussine also published an intellectual biography of Alasdair MacIntyre that won a prize in France. It has been translated very fluently as Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography in 2022 by Nathan J. Pinkoski and, fittingly, appeared with Notre Dame Press. This biography is a bit of an oddity not just because Perreau-Saussine attempted to take the measure of someone still living back then, but because MacIntyre is still with us and has published work since the intellectual biography first appeared. Non-trivially, MacIntyre rather serious biographical engagement with Edith Stein appeared after Perreau-Saussine seems to have finished his research for the intellectual biography.

There is also a further oddity in that while Perreau-Saussine repeatedly and explicitly recognizes the significance of the turn to analytic philosophy to MacIntyre, Perreu-Saussine is less interested in arguments and more interested in describing positions. I don’t object to that as such — regular readers know that I find understanding positions more interesting than nailing down arguments —, but something gets lost if we miss some of MacIntyre’s distinctive arguments.

Be that as it may, there is a further oddity in that it is not entirely obvious whether Perreau-Saussine actually admires MacIntyre. We are repeatedly reminded by Perreau-Saussine that MacIntyre retreats from politics and overlooks the theological-political problem (pp. 119-123 & 159), and most significantly that both of these movements in his thought are due to the fact that while MacIntyre remaine a polemical antiliberal he also often quietly presupposes the endurance of liberalism in his position.

That is to say, Perreau-Saussine turns MacIntyre into a symbol for a certain kind of lack of thoroughness even profundity in contemporary political philosophy. Obviously if you find MacIntyre very congenial this is all quite infuriating (as can be witnessed by a rather intemperate review by Rev. John Schneider in (ahh) Vogellin Review here.)

However, Perreau-Saussine repeatedly ascribes to MacIntyre the thought that liberalism is parasitic in character: “Liberalism only subsists thanks to the traditions that it destroys.” (p. 54) For MacIntyre, “Liberalism is not a self-sufficient doctrine. “Modernity” depends on “premodernity,” and modernity destroys the social bond that it presupposes. It has a parasitic character. If making autonomy absolute implies the dissolution of practical reason, it is because we are first and foremost social animals.” (p. 88; emphasis in Perreau-Saussine.) In his concluding paragraph, Perreau-Saussine repeats the claim in his own voice:

MacIntyre remains faithful to his antiliberal premises even though he has no constitutional or political alternative to counter liberal democracy. This tension between de facto political liberalism and philosophical, theological, or moral antiliberalism manifests a tension in the very substance of our lives. Liberalism presupposes a social order that it does not produce and that it even tends to destroy. By absolutizing individual consent, by reducing truth to mere opinion without granting importance to otherwise recognized authorities, liberalism nourishes a relativism that subverts the mores and habits it needs. The moral is that liberalism does not stand to win if its program is completely realized. Liberalism only lasts if we periodically counter it with our objections. Without this it collapses in on itself. The tension between liberalism and these criticisms, between freedom and truth, does not weaken the West. On the contrary, this tension constitutes one of the secrets of its vitality. (p. 160; “epilogue” [emphasis added].)

That is, Perreau-Saussine subsumes MacIntyre’s project to his own understanding of the dialectical, even providential role that antiliberals play within liberal hegemony: to replenish the (ahh) ‘social’ capital that liberalism has depleted, to pull liberalism toward contemplating the good, and, thereby, to help stabilize liberalism as a Nth best project.

Perreau-Saussine’s analysis of liberalism is Straussian in character.* I say that not to ridicule his position. Rather like Strauss (and Thomas Pink), he treats liberalism as watered down Hobbesianism (‘absolutizing individual consent, by reducing truth to mere opinion without granting importance to otherwise recognized authorities’) that embraces security and thereby “flees from evil; it does not propose to look for the good.” (p. 137; see also p. 3 & p. 5.) And he sees MacIntyre as a fellow-traveler in this analysis.

Before I get to the substance of these matters, first a meta-historical point. On Perreau-Saussine’s view twentieth century liberalism is understood by its critics and friends (recall this post on Aron) as a kind of historical winner by default in the social and intellectual competition between the Enlightenment party of justice (Communism) and reactionary pull toward nobility (Fascism). There is nothing intrinsic about liberalism that merits this victory, it just turns out that in the judgment of history it is (to echo Churchill’s famous quip) the least bad of the options.

It’s in that context that we have to understand the anachronistic backward projection of the ‘somewhat incoherent’ Locke as the ‘Father of liberalism’ in which the toleration promoted by liberalism is presented as the effect of the historical experience of the wars of religion. And as we know Locke is a watered-down version of Hobbes.

Regular readers know that I reject all the commitments implied in the last two paragraphs. (In fact, I treat Locke as a war-mongering mercantilist and liberalism as a rejection against this!) But it is worth noting that in Chapter 17 of After Virtue, MacIntyre himself also set Lockean arguments aside because they are historically irrelevant:

The property-owners of the modern world are not the legitimate heirs of Lockean individuals who performed quasi-Lockean (‘quasi’ to allow for Nozick’s emendations of Locke) acts of original acquisition; they are the inheritors of those who, for example, stole, and used violence to steal the common lands of England from the common people, vast tracts of North America from the American Indian, much of Ireland from the Irish, and Prussia from the original non-German Prussians.

For MacIntyre much of contemporary property is the result of theft not Lockean appropriation. And so the focus on Lockean arguments a kind of intellectual play masking irrelevance. In his (1995) polemical review of Stephen Holmes, MacIntyre made the same point,

“But in the social and political order at large the ugly realities of money and power are increasingly badly masked by the games played with the concepts of utility, rights and contract. The spectre haunting contemporary liberal theorists is not communitarianism, but their own irrelevance.” (Radical Philosophy, Vol. 70, p. 35)

This aspect of the mature MacIntyre goes completely missing in Perreau-Saussine (who is aware of the review [note 113, p. 173]), and so he turns MacIntyre more reactionary than he ever became. In addition, and not unsurprisingly, MacIntyre did not treat liberalism as intrinsically Lockean in character: “liberalism has in its time associated itself with and derived its warrant from many very different and indeed mutually incompatible theories.”  (from the relatively early, “Political and philosophical epilogue: a view of The Poverty of Liberalism by Robert Paul Wolff,” in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, p. 281.) In particular, against Perreau-Saussine, MacIntyre himself notes that “Liberalism was often, but certainly not always or necessarily, individualist in its values.” (ibid; in this essay MacIntyre continues to treat liberalism as an ideology, p. 282.)

However, I do think Perreau-Saussine is right to attribute to MacIntyre a variant of the social capital depletion thesis. I quote:

The vice of liberalism derives from the continuous refusal of liberals to recognize the negative and incomplete character of their liberalism. The precepts of liberalism enjoin upon us certain constraints on our political activities; but they set before us no ends to pursue, no ideal or vision to confer significance upon our political action. They never tell us what to do. Hence no institution, no social practice can be inspired solely or even mainly by liberalism; and every institution or social practice that claims to be so inspired-such as the "liberal" university or the "liberal" state-is always a fraud. (p. 283)

This is not the claim that liberalism runs down social capital and thereby becomes self-undermining. Rather, it is the two-fold claim that liberals, first, take existing institutions and, second, given ends for granted! Liberalism is, thus, always hybrid in character and unable to provide itself with foundations and a particular telos.

It is odd that Perreau-Saussine misses this in MacIntyre because he frequently cites the collection and explicitly quotes this essay (see p. 99) and he criticizes MacIntyre for doing (taking the liberal state for granted) what MacIntyre himself suggests is a vice of liberalism.

Let me wrap up. When I started this post, I did so with the aim of criticizing ‘the liberalism as parasitic on social capital of non-liberal ways of life’ thesis. But when I traced out the references that Perreau-Saussine supplied, I increasingly wondered whether MacIntyre really is committed to this view. I leave that as an open question, and so will ignore the thesis. For, I have also come to doubt that Perreau-Saussine is right to suggest MacIntyre is anti-political. I do so in light of one more criticism of liberals by MacIntyre:

There is [in liberalism] a consequent view of politics as the offering of alternatives to rational individuals who then make choices for which they are morally responsible. Right politics is offering the right values to individuals and if they reject them, then we are entitled to condemn them unless they were disabled by invincible ignorance. So the liberal view of politics is indeed precisely ideological in that it conceals from view all those social facts which have to do with ideology. It turns out to be no accident that liberals should turn to something like the end-of-ideology thesis. (““Political and philosophical epilogue,” p. 284)

Lurking here is the thought that liberalism disguises the intrinsic conflictual nature of political life. In my view, this view of liberal politics persists in After Virtue (chapter 17). But MacIntyre stops treating it explicitly as ideology, but rather starts treating liberalism’ moralism as themselves “a series of fragmented survivals from an older past.” But it doesn’t mean that in modern times conflict disappears: “Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.” Somewhat oddly, then, where Perreau-Saussine treats MacIntyre as insufficiently attentive to political conflict, as almost a species of escapism, MacIntyre himself diagnoses the state of nature in liberal political life.

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*See, especially, p. 32, for the Straussian historical framework: “the first wave of modernity (Lockean, if we wish) does not reveal its true nature until it is completed and transformed by the second wave (Rousseauian or post-Rousseauian).”