The Nature of Political Theory

186 The Nature of Political Theory

with the previous hermeneutic argument. We need toreadmorality and politics
correctly. MacIntyre looks to a modernized Aristotelianism to understand our mod-
ern sickness. Our sickness is that we have lost any sense of community, defined via
common purposes. Virtue has become empty role playing. Morality is just feud-
ing. Although there is no neutral non-perspectival view of morality or rationality,
and many moral schemes are literally untranslatable, nonetheless, Aristotelian-
ism can enable us (in an intelligent setting) to engage in a constrained dialogue.
Second, neo-Aristotelianism provides a workable particularist alternative. We need
local communal particularities to function. This is MacIntyre’s contextualism and
communitarianism—although it also has resonances with Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
and Rorty. This is the only alternative to Nietzscheanism. Third, it is not simply
any community that MacIntyre avers to. Political community is also something that
‘grounds civility’ as well as moral and intellectual life. Precisely what this means
remains ambivalent and exactly how it gels with the second particularist argument
remains unclear. However, the precise moral contentstillremains particularist. Our
‘future’ moral content in Western societies waits upon another St Benedict.
MacIntyre nonetheless departs from Aristotle in three respects. First, he totally
rejects the metaphysical biology—although this is not uncommon in contemporary
neo-Aristotelians. Aristotle’s basic teleology is seen to presuppose this biology. For
MacIntyre, humans are far more than their biology. Consequently, in rejecting the
metaphysical biology, he also discards the teleology, which presupposes identifiable
needs and a universal good.^11 Thus, Nussbaum’s idea of ‘grounding experiences’ does
not fare well here. Second, he sees a lack of clear historical awareness in Aristotle.
Despite his realism and acceptance of communal difference, he still seemed to think
that Greeks, slaves and barbarians had fixed natures. This is false to MacIntyre. Third,
he disagrees with Aristotle’s idea of the unity of the virtues. For MacIntyre, Aristotle
believes in ‘a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmo-
nious scheme of human life. Truth, in the moral sphere, consists in the conformity
of moral judgment to the order of this scheme’ (MacIntyre 1981: 133). MacIntyre,
although denying that he is a relativist, still drifts inexorably via his communitarian
particularism into a pluralism and relativism of the virtues. Consequent upon this
particularism and relativism, the self becomes unanchored. MacIntyre’s account of
the self moves away from Aristotle. Humans, in MacIntyre, are story-telling anim-
als. Selfhood becomes a narrative construct. However, each narrative is part of an
interlocking series of narratives within a community. Human beings thus define
themselves by the stories they tell. The self is therefore never settled in MacIntyre, it
remains little more than a continuous quest. Despite these differences, MacIntyre still
offers us the neo-Aristotelian perspective as the only path for sorting out the disorder
of contemporary morality and politics. We still have fragments of the Aristotelian
tradition, which can be picked up and utilized. Without it we inevitably collapse into
the Nietzschean nihilism.
The ambivalence of the neo-Aristotelian position hangs on the equivocal issue
of the conventional particular and universal relation. The stress laid on the real-
ism and recognition of imperfection and contingency implies that there areno