Prolegomenon to an Aristotelian Liberalism

In memory of Alasdair MacIntyre

Aristotle flanked by John Stuart Mill and John Dewey

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The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died last week at the age of 96. To my surprise and delight, among those who (intellectually-speaking) mourned his passing was John Ganz, author of the wonderful When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s and of the Substack Unpopular Front. Ganz says, “When I told a philosophy major friend how much I admired MacIntyre, he replied, ‘Well, that makes sense since you are both cranky Aristotelians,’ which I took as a great compliment.”

I would have done similarly, and I feel somewhat similarly to Ganz about MacIntyre. I remember vividly when I first read After Virtue—at a time in my life when, to be fair, I was much more right-wing than I am today—the feeling I had of “oh, he’s really onto something here,” while simultaneously feeling like what he was harkening back to not only wasn’t reproducible within modernity but hadn’t really existed in antiquity or the Middle Ages either, at least not in the idealized form that MacIntyre describes. Which might be another way of saying that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas was describing a political world that ever actually existed or an ethics that was ever actually practiced, but rather described a way of thinking about the political world and about ethics that those of us operating more or less within the liberal tradition struggle with, a way of thinking in terms of telos, or purpose, and in terms of the practices and virtues that a purpose implies and depends on.

We can, to be sure, still think about telos when it comes to specific objects or roles. Ganz quotes MacIntyre talking about how a watch that told time badly would be considered, objectively, to be a “bad” watch, and that’s because the essential purpose of a watch is to tell time; if a watch doesn’t do that well, then it’s just a bracelet. More amorphously, we retain some concept of a “good” or “bad” doctor, which relates respectively to the social function of the physician. We can debate the details—how conservative or aggressive a doctor should be with trying new treatments, for example, or how important it is that they have a good bedside manner or run a viable business in addition to being an effective healer—and a significant part of After Virtue deals with the way in which modern managerial thinking that is aimed at measuring something like how “good” someone like a doctor is disrupts the practices that produce things like actual “good” doctors (something my bureaucracy-hating physician father had more than a little to say about himself). Nonetheless, we can probably all agree that a doctor whose patients generally did more poorly than those of other doctors serving a similar population would be a “bad” doctor, because the purpose of a doctor is to heal.

We don’t, however, have a language within liberalism for talking about what a “good” person is in the same way—in a teleological sense—and MacIntyre argues, I think persuasively, that because we lack the language for talking about the telos of a human being our moral language—which defines the terms within which liberalism does try to talk about being a “good” person—ultimately doesn’t make much sense. The liberal tradition struggles with teleology because much of the purpose of liberalism is to figure out how we can get along with one another when we don’t agree on things like the purpose of existence, or what the “good life” consists of, and because of this pluralism cannot, even if we wanted to, found a community based on such a shared understanding. A common origin story for liberalism is as a pragmatic compromise necessary to end the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, which may not be the whole truth but is a good portion of it. In any event, this “thin” version of liberalism that we are all more or less familiar with focuses exclusively on the rights of the individual, conceives of the political community as coming into being to preserve those rights, and conceives of politics in terms of maximizing collective preference utility, which is to say, our practical ability to exercise those rights.

But is this the only version of liberalism available to us? Is it even an accurate description of liberalism in action, not only today but in its classical phase? I don’t think it is. When John Stuart Mill inveigles against not only the heavy hand of the state but the private social pressure of communities in stifling individual expression, he’s not really talking about rights anymore. Rather, he is articulating a purpose for existence, a way one ought to live—with, I would argue, even a certain romanticism to it. Similarly, when John Dewey sets out to rethink education in order to rear the next generation into liberalism, he’s engaging in a very Aristotelean enterprise: the inculcation of liberal virtues through practice. Liberalism can’t really avoid thinking about virtue, practice and a life narrative, whether it acknowledges that it is doing that or not, because Aristotle was right.

I probably sound like a post-liberal here, and that’s because I agree with them that, in practice, liberalism is “thicker” than it acknowledges itself to be, and that this “thickness” is unavoidable. I don’t think that makes liberalism either a hypocritical fraud or an inevitable enemy of any kind of traditionalism, but I do think it behooves liberalism to own the fact of its thickness—that liberals believe there is a “good life” and that there are liberal virtues that need to be taught in order to live it—and, having owned it, to develop it further. Where, for example, is the family situated in that good life? Not what is a liberal way to operate within a family—I think we know some of the answers to that, from the belief that marriage should be an equal partnership to the belief that children should be raised to nurture their own talents and interests—but rather where does parenthood as a practice fit into the liberal vision of the “good life?” Similarly, as liberalism has a not-fully-acknowledged conception of the “good life,” does it have a conception of a “good death?” We can feel liberalism groping toward one in debates around end-of-life ethics, but it’s an inevitably stunted conversation since it lacks grounding in an articulated sense of what life is for. More broadly, what does it mean to lead an “experimental life” when we are all inherently time-bound, and when, if we’re not pathological narcissists, we carry our history with us psychologically from one experiment into the next? If we don’t think these things through, then the practices of our liberal institutions will exclusively reflect institutional imperatives rather than human needs even as conceived within a liberal framework. Indeed, some would say that has already happened to such a degree that those institutions can no longer be salvaged, which is why we are in our current crisis.

Ganz cites Napoleon as an example to prove that, contra MacIntyre, that modernity can have all the drama of the age of heroes. Napoleon is, unfortunately, an example of rather too much utility to the post-liberals who would tear down the liberal order. I myself would cite a different kind of hero, albeit a fictional one, who in his own way both rebels against and exemplifies the liberal bureaucratic order: the protagonist of Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru. Ikiru is a portrait of a bureaucrat as existential hero, who, faced with impending death, has to ask himself for the first time what his life is for. One of the many fascinating things about the film is that the bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe, achieves his heroic accomplishments thanks to the peculiar combination of total determination to achieve a goal and the total abjuring of thymos. The effectiveness of that combination says something revealing, I think, about the nature of bureaucracy as such, which is designed to frustrate thymos for good social reasons, but whose institutional imperatives can inculcate the opposite of personal virtue unless they are resisted, which in turn requires a different set of personal virtues. I think it’s also revealing that the recent remake, Living, attributes the virtues necessary for heroism within modern bureaucracy as having more to do with a fast-vanishing traditional character rather than being, as in Ikiru, in some ways a rebuke of same. (I’ve written about both films in this piece for Modern Age.)

As for Napoleon, Aristotle himself taught Alexander, and it was Alexander who destroyed the world of Greek city-states that was the basis for Aristotle’s political theories, as Napoleon destroyed what was left of the world that Aquinas had understood. The Hellenistic world that replaced it, and the Roman Empire that replaced it in turn, was pluralistic and imperial, and in that world more individualist philosophies like Stoicism and Neopythagoreanism naturally grew in prominence. So we who still live in the liberal post-Napoleonic world may not be so different from the ancients as we sometimes think. In any event, pluralism and individualism remain unavoidable aspects of modernity, as clearly exemplified by the post-liberals as by the liberals. If we want an Aristotelianism that can “work” for us, we need a liberal Aristotelianism.

So pace MacIntyre, if we are waiting for someone in our current crisis, it is neither Godot nor a new St. Benedict that we anticipate, but another—and doubtless very different because explicitly Aristotelian—Mill or Dewey.