WHOSE JUSTICE? WHICH RATIONALITY?
Alasdair MacIntyre
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988
432 pp., $22.95
Anomie, as Durkheim characterized it, was a form of deprivation, of a loss of membership in those social institutions and modes in which norms, including the norms of tradition-constituted rationality, are embodied. What Durkheim did not foresee was a time when the same condition of anomie would be assigned the status of an achievement by and a reward for a self which had, by separating itself from the social relationships of traditions, succeeded, so it believed, in emancipating itself.
--Alasdair MacIntyre
In the modern would, philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, is for the most part in a bad way. The term philosophy originally meant a "love of wisdom," but anyone seeking wisdom today would not be likely to turn to current philosophy to find it. Philosophy has become a largely academic discipline that, like the academic study of literature, history, and politics, threatens to drain off the vitality of its own subject matter in interminable professional disputes. The disarray of philosophy has joined with the solvents of modern societies to reinforce the assumption that systems of ethics are based on mere personal preference, with no possible appeal to rational authority.
Alasdair MacIntyre is one professional philosopher who has striven successfully against this predicament. His 1981 book, After Virtue, despite its formidable philosophical erudition, received widespread attention outside the profession--homage rarely accorded serious philosophical work. It also provoked a serious reaction from those who seem to find it necessary to believe that any criticism of modern liberalism must be based on an uncritical adherence to some premodern authoritarianism. MacIntyre's published sequel to that volume, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, also seeks to address both specialist and amateur: "There is indeed in philosophy a large and legitimate place for technicality, but only insofar as it serves the ends of a type of enquiry in which what is at stake is of crucial importance to everyone and not only to academic philosophers. The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect on our culture."
MacIntyre is thus engaged in an ancient, noble, and currently little practiced endeavor, and his mode of procedure is as instructive as the weight of his arguments. His use of past philosophers, for example, is striking.
MacIntyre's emphases were once typical of a university department of philosophy. He was once a Marxist who wrote lively essays out of a profound knowledge of Marx, Hegel, and the entire Germanic tradition. His articles on Kierkegaard and the existentialists remain useful. The book he wrote on Herbert Marcuse in 1970, at the height of Marcuse's hegemony over U.S. campuses, is a model of what a philosophical refutation should be: lucid and fair in description, but devastating. (By the end of the book, you know that Marcuse does not even understand his guiding lights, Marx and Freud.)
In his recent work, however, his
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