This is the second essay in a symposium on the common good. You can read the first essay by John Grove here. The final essay by Michael Pakaluk will be published tomorrow.

　　Alasdair MacIntyre was a political animal, or so one naturally assumes. He was at any rate an Aristotelian, and since Aristotle declared man to be the zoon politikon (“political animal”), it seems safe to say that MacIntyre thought of himself as one such. Nevertheless, for much of his life he was deeply reluctant to enter into political discourse.

　　In youth, he was (in)famously a Marxist. Eventually he broke with the socialists and made his way to Aristotelian Thomism. He spent decades writing on the incoherence of modern moral theory, giving considerable attention along the way to action theory, the virtues, and the history of philosophy. But he largely eschewed political discourse, to the frustration of political theorists who hoped to enlist him as an ally.

　　Pierre Manent, for instance, took him to task in a 2005 essay, complaining that MacIntyre was unwilling to engage questions that followed very naturally from his work, leaving his readers with a “mutilated” Aristotle unwilling to raise his eyes beyond the narrow confines of the worker’s guild or the monastery. Though MacIntyre was happy to toss the occasional barb at the modern nation-state, Manent noted, “the political framework in which European man organized his life for many centuries surely merits more than some brisk expressions of contempt.”

　　Perhaps the criticism stung. Of course, Aristotle’s zoon politikon does not really need to be “political” in the most obvious sense of throwing himself into electoral politics; nevertheless, he should care about justice and the well-ordered political regime. The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics should be harmonized, not separated. Very late in his life, therefore, MacIntyre did dip a toe back into those waters, venturing some thoughts on the questions Manent had once accused him of avoiding. A helpful sampling of this work can be found in a collection recently released by Notre Dame Press, Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, which gives valuable perspective on MacIntyre’s late-life views on politics, economics, and the common good.

　　MacIntyre was an important mentor of mine 25 years ago, at roughly the same time he wasaggravating his fellow Aristotelian across the Atlantic. I remember him being quite reticent to engage political questions. It was interesting, therefore, to have the opportunity to give sustained attention to the more political writings of his later years. They are highly relevant, in fact, to recent debates on “the common good,” though I doubt MacIntyre himself would have relished the chance to weigh in.

　　Certainly, the MacIntyre I remember (as Manent also noted) did very much point towards more explicitly political questions. He was keenly interested in the relationship of moral philosophy to politics and culture. In his lectures, he showed how particular works of moral theory reflected a wider society’s concerns, but also how moral paradigms facilitated (or failed to facilitate) the thriving of ordinary people enmeshed in a given culture. There was no one quite like MacIntyre for turning the story of philosophy into a kind of epic narrative of human civilizations seeking the good, with philosophy and lived experience mirroring each other in complex ways. In his perspective, doing philosophy was a very consequential activity indeed.

　　Contemporary advocates of a “common-good politics” may be pleased to hear that MacIntyre unambiguously wants the same thing.

　　That lofty view naturally prompts a further question: What about our own time? Here, MacIntyre’s answer was famously bleak. He believed that modernity’s moral landscape had fractured, leaving us, like the hapless survivors of Babel, patching together bits of malformed and incompatible languages. Some historical periods had gravely defective moral views, but we ourselves simply had no cohesive moral view. Recovering that for ourselves, and by extension perhaps for our own communities, seemed to me to be the core goal of the courses I took with MacIntyre at Notre Dame in the early 2000s.

　　Those lines of inquiry move naturally towards more explicitly political questions, especially when it’s understood that human beings are deeply shaped (or “habituated,” as a good Aristotelian might say) by their surrounding culture. Since MacIntyre was fascinated by civilization-spanning questions about philosophy, culture, and civilizational greatness, his work overflows quite naturally into political discourse. In a modern context, of course, that probably implies some kind of reclamation or reform. If modern societies are truly as degraded as he suggested in After Virtue, what kind of improvement could we optimally hope to see or advance? Is there some attainable political regime or culture that could more successfully facilitate the thriving of modern people? In the short term, perhaps, Benedict-Option bunkers are a necessary cope, but is there a more sustainable or scalable path out of our modern, Babel-like hellscape?

　　Contemporary advocates of a “common-good politics” may be pleased to hear that MacIntyre unambiguously wants the same thing. His late political writings all posit this as the clear desired goal. His further thoughts on the subject may disappoint, however. His concrete recommendations are exceedingly tentative and modest. He refuses to sanction any existing political party or movement, and categorically rejects the modern state, in anything like its present form, as a suitable agent for implementing a common-good agenda. Again and again he returns to the same evocative point: We really don’t know how to build a politics of the common good. Modernity has raised significant obstacles, and we’re still answering very fundamental questions about how to surmount them.

　　If this point is downplayed, or lost in the political shuffle, one loses practically all the benefits MacIntyre associates with a politics of the common good. It’s child’s play for a political partisan, nominally acknowledging the difficulty of achieving “the common good,” to treat it as aspirational and frame his own platform as a set of incremental steps towards that goal. It’s even easier, of course, to identify one’s opponents as the primary obstacle to success. But that is emphatically not a MacIntyrean perspective.

　　MacIntyre views a robust politics of the common good as something that can only really be achieved within a complete political community. Think of the Aristotelian polis as the archetype: the culture must be rooted in a substantial shared vision, and all members must contribute to, and benefit from, that shared life. To be complete, a community must embrace members of all ages with their wide array of needs, which include moral needs as well as material. It’s not enough to feed people. A complete community must also strive to meet people’s social and emotional needs, and to inculcate the virtues.

　　The “common good” in this sense is distinguished from a collectivist or statist ideal because it incorporates the community’s members, facilitating their real good, instead of treating individuals as expendable cogs in the statist machine. A true common good politics must bring the interests of the community and its members into close alignment, not just with respect to particular practical concerns (such as crime control or trash pick-up) but in deeper and more holistic ways. It must facilitate the moral good of both simultaneously.

　　Even a cursory glance at modern history should make clear that this is, at the very least, quite difficult to attain, though every power-hungry autocrat will cheerfully claim to have something like “the common good” as his goal. Trusting any authority or political movement to deliver on such promises is naïve in the extreme, as MacIntyre clearly sees. If the kind of “common good” he desires is even possible, it can only be achieved in the context of an organic community, rooted in a substantial tradition and governed through processes that inhibit concentrations of power and facilitate community-level deliberation about priorities and policies.

　　MacIntyre loved to muse on small-scale communities that have a real and recognizable common good: fishing crews, string quartets, sports teams. Members work cooperatively towards jointly-embraced goals, and their success or failure is truly “shared” in a thick way that reflects a deeply internalized set of rules, practices, and collectively valued goods. These however are not complete communities; their functions are much narrower, and they lack mechanisms to care for the old or sick, or to habituate the young. People enter and exit them voluntarily, and membership itself is generally conditional on competence; if you can’t haul a net, play a stringed instrument, or catch a ball, these communities have no place for you. A complete community, grounded in a humane moral vision, would have to make room for everyone (or at least all people willing to respect custom and abide by law). Achieving that alignment of purpose and interests in a broader community is clearly a far more ambitious project, especially in today’s populous and pluralistic societies, where the inhabitants of a single township or city block generally represent a wide range of worldviews.

　　One natural move at this juncture, embraced by many present-day influencers, is to decry particular modern circumstances that have ostensibly made complete communities so elusive. Coals can be heaped on “cosmopolitan elites,” global markets, or labor practices perceived as unfair, undignified, or “anti-family.” Almost any aspect of modern life that is plausibly inimical to someone’s thriving can potentially supply the basis for a “common good” demand for political reform. Today’s political right is saturated in arguments of that kind.

　　Within our polarized political discourse, the bar is generally quite low for establishing that a proposed reform measure would in fact address the identified evil. Thus, we have seen a wide range of initiatives ostensibly intended to bring markets into line with some more philosophical (or perhaps ideological) vision of “the good.” Economists will explain ad nauseam why these policies are unlikely to achieve “the common good,” and may not advance anyone’s good for long (is there a “common bad?”), but it can be hard for these arguments to get traction when self-styled reformers have already made a noisy show of rejecting the entire framework of modern economics.

　　In other cases, it may take more work to connect the dots between populist policy and the inchoate yearning for a more robust, shared “common good.” Those connections may be real and revelatory, however. For instance, it is clear that the sprawling, bureaucratic administrative state is spectacularly unsuited to realizing a true common good, with millions of very diverse people under its purview. MacIntyre made that point repeatedly. There’s no neat solution to that problem, but immigration restrictionism can supply a kind of political outlet for the angst people feel about huge, sprawling societies with a limited capacity to embrace a shared vision of the good life. This is not of course to deny that immigration raises real challenges, of a sort that should interest a politician or informed citizen. It clearly does, but one can recognize that reality while still suspecting that the energy populist movements generate surrounding this issue is largely explained by the frustration many feel with the modern state’s incapacity to function as a more fitting vessel for a thick, common-good politics.

　　One can understand, in light of that frustration, why we see angry populists issuing dramatic, uncompromising condemnations of core features of modern life: liberalism, pluralism, the global economic order. But MacIntyre rejected that form of rejectionism. It’s hard to think of anyone with a keener appreciation of modernity’s deficiencies; nevertheless, he insisted it was necessary to find ways to live in the world as it was. He realized, in making that case, that he was working with a limited toolkit. He had no principled commitment to free markets, social contracts, or any understanding of civil, political, or human rights; to the contrary, he had a marked hostility to the entire classical liberal tradition and all its modern-state apparatus, which one can at least understand given his defining life project of charting the fragmentation of modern moral discourse. The downside to that view, however, was that he simply had no framework for securing order without falling prey to the power-hungry state. He believed deeply in organic order, but rejected all plausible accounts of emergent order, which left him with no practical account of how a functional political community could actually form under modern circumstances.

　　Anyone sincerely trying to execute MacIntyre’s recommended project would have to conclude that today’s right is, at the very least, getting very far over their skis.

　　He was admirably aware of the problem, and he did speculate a bit on possible solutions. Certainly, his preference was for an order that would emerge from rational, communal deliberation. Occasionally (as for instance in his essay on “Two Kinds of Political Reasoning”), he muses a bit on scenarios in which a kind of common good politics begins to grow out of a shared community need, such as a local effort to build a good school. But this is fairly far-fetched, as he himself seemed to recognize. He denies that it’s Utopian (to me it sounds pretty Utopian), but he indulged only a little in that kind of speculation. In general, he contented himself with urging others to continue building a framework that could facilitate a more common-good-oriented politics. 

　　How would we do that? To the very end of his life, MacIntyre harbored hope that certain pieces could be mined from Marxist literature and grafted successfully into a more Aristotelian-Thomist framework, leading to a more viable common-good politics. The above-mentioned essay also claims that “there have been some notable cases in the modern world from the seventeenth-century onwards in which a politics of the common good was able to achieve its ends in a small scale political society.” He cites four: the Jesuit-led Guarani Indian settlements of eighteenth-century Paraguay, the kibbutzim of British Palestine, the Indian state of Kerala after the Marxists came to power in 1957, and “successful farming and fishing cooperatives” in Glencolmcille in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. These examples have something in common. They’re all essentially communist. In a rather remarkable discourse on the financial system, titled “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” MacIntyre calls for a new foundation for economic analysis that “brings Aquinas and Marx together.” Any takers?

　　There’s a reason, though, why MacIntyre still wanted to draw on Marx as a possible resource for building a common-good politics. If one insists on rejecting classical liberalism wholesale as a resource, that leaves political theory with some very sizable deficits to be filled. It’s to his credit that he saw this and largely accepted the fact. His essay on the financial section, for instance, includes an explicit rejection of the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, accompanied by this explanation:

　　The critics of globalization sometimes talk as though there is somewhere offstage some alternative to the globalisating economy that we now have, a set of possible economic structures that would be free from the evils of globalization. The truth is that we have no alternative to the globalising economy as it now is and that its propensities for good and for harm cannot be split apart. To be for or against globalization is in some ways like being for or against the weather.

　　Today’s New Right would do well to read and reflect on this essay. If one wants to build a complete politics on a thoroughgoing Aristotelianism, with no compromising concessions to the likes of Hobbes or Locke, it’s hard to think of a more brilliant or principled foundational resource than MacIntyre. But anyone sincerely trying to execute MacIntyre’s recommended project would have to conclude that today’s right is, at the very least, getting very far over their skis. Right-wing influencers and politicians love to talk as though they understand the common good, and even know how to achieve it, but are hindered primarily by narrow-minded utilitarians indifferent to human dignity. No MacIntyrean could take that stance.

　　To underscore that point, here is MacIntyre’s conclusion to a 2011 essay in which he criticized Jacques Maritain for trying to bridge the Thomistic tradition with a more modern understanding of human rights. This work is particularly interesting when one reflects that MacIntyre and Maritain were surely the twentieth century’s two most illustrious converts to Aristotelian Thomism. The Scot regards the Frenchman’s harmonizing effort as a failure. But, sympathizing with the project, he ends on the following lines:

　　Even if we reject Maritain’s view of the possibilities of the modern state, we need a politics of the modern state that is consonant with a politics of the common good. And this we do not as yet have. Moreover, the rhetorical politics of universal human rights, the partial definition of conflicts by referring to such rights, is an established fact. So that a skeptical critique of the very idea of human right has to be a prologue to an account of how protagonists of the politics of common goods should position themselves with regard to such conflicts. And this we do not as yet know how to do.

　　Would that everyone were so frank about the things they “do not as yet know how to do.”

　　Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.