The Nature of Political Theory

184 The Nature of Political Theory

Thus, for Salkever, and others, the neo-Aristotelian perspective is not a premodern
alternative to liberalism, but is rather ‘a source of education’ for liberals about our
current way of life or ethos, within modernity. It is not offering us any comprehensive
foundationalism. Human affairs (or theethos) are usually resistant to theory. At most,
theory can offer a kind of practical wisdom concerning deliberation about the ethos.
Practical wisdom is though uncodifiable. Politics is concerned with the conditions
for the flourishing of humans. It is not the ‘end’ of human aspiration for Aristotle.
There is little precision and no absolutes in politics. How to act reasonably tends to
vary from political and moral context to context. There are no natural laws. Theory
can explain complexity and provide rules of thumb, but it cannot provide infallible
imperatives. Neo-Aristotelian political theory can therefore improve the quality of
analysis and debate, but it does not offer resolutions.
The second negative reading affirms Aristotle’s realism. It is also suspicious of any
teleology. Yet, it retains, contrary to the hermeneutical view, the idea of a rich ‘ideal
good’. However, contrary to Nussbaum’s view, this good is highly particularist. In
this context, neo-Aristotelianism becomes closely identified with communitarianism.
This is the view of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism position is
part of a more general post-Wittgensteinian critique of extralinguistic thin or thick
foundations. The argument is rooted in a commitment to the concrete, particular,
and conventional over the abstract and universal.^10
MacIntyre’s main ‘disquieting suggestion’ (which is rooted in a neo-Aristotelian
judgement) is that morality subsists within traditions or particular conventions and
that we—in modernity—have lost the context for meaningful moral choices. We
are literally ‘after virtue’, we are no longer sure which rationality, or which justice,
to choose and we have no secure standard for adjudication between rival traditions.
What we do possess though are a series of fragments of moral and conceptual schemes
from past traditions, which all lack context. We have, what MacIntyre calls, ‘simulacra
of morals’ (MacIntyre 1981: 2). Moral argument in the twentieth century is there-
fore subject to continuous conceptual incommensurability and interminable debate.
There is a heterogeneity of philosophical mentors and a whole body of spurious
rationalist moral yardsticks, including neo-Kantianism and utilitarianism. MacIntyre
sees this whole twentieth century dilemma summed up in emotivism, namely, the
belief that morality can be seen as the expression of individual emotion. The emotivist
self, for MacIntyre, is not though just an abstract philosophical device. Conversely,
it belongs to a particular type of social order in crisis. It is a modern pathology.
Emotivism is the result of the breakdown of a culture.
For MacIntyre, the prior culture, identified with classical Aristotelianism and
Christianity, had a more unified, personal, and coherent dimension to it. As Stephen
Holmes mischieviously puts it, MacIntyre ‘continues to use the Greek polis as a large
paddle for spanking modern man’ (Holmes 1993: 112). Morality, in the classical
Aristotelian sense, provides a rich good, but it is always tied to the local and par-
ticular. A more accurate way of putting this is that it invokes ‘rich goods’. There is
no way to act with virtue, except as part of the tradition of shared understanding,
which we inherit and inhabit. Practising virtue in the Aristotelian format is a process