I never knew you were a MacIntyre fan, Noah! Good for you. As I wrote in my post commemorating him (here: https://mittelpolitan.substack.com/p/thoughts-about-macintyre), I don't think his work ever a huge direct influence on my thinking, but of course it was there in the mix of things; I really don't know how any serious thinker who was using the English language in the 1980s and 1990s could avoid the force of his brilliant, teleological challenge to Enlightenment liberalism, even if only to reject it. I recognize that I'm tipping my hand with the reference to the 80s and 90s there, because I still think the old liberal-communitarian debate has value, and I see MacIntyre (as much as he protested against it) providing his own more-localist-than-not, more-Aristotelian-than-not, spin on that argument, a spin which I think the post-liberals can only appropriate for their own thinking somewhat clumsily. I love your example of Ikiru as a demonstration that a community-formed telos can still exist in the context of bureaucracy, and I think you're correct in noting that Ikiru is a great example partly because it shows heroism emerging in a way that arguably rebukes the ethos of the protagonist's own community, and yet is something that everyone else in the office recognizes--because they have received and been shaped by the same stories--as the act of nobility it was, even though none of them are able to follow his example. Anyway, great stuff. A "Liberal Aristotelianism" indeed!
I really enjoyed this. I just want to say that I think the Aristotelian Mill might have already been and gone: Joseph Raz's Morality of Freedom comes pretty close.
You know, I have never read Raz -- and having now looked him up, it certainly looks like I ought to have before writing this post! I'll be sure to check him out.
I agree that a liberal state requires certain substantive political virtues, but would make two qualifications; first, not all of these political virtues are themselves liberal in provenance (ie. the civic friendship underlying trust in good-faith social deliberation is often vitally provided for by nationalism of some kind), and second, I do think that state promotion of a more comprehensive set of "liberal virtues" in the private sphere could easily degrade both liberalism and virtue (the evolution of the postwar educational system at all levels and the metastasizing administrative and judicial interpretations of civil rights laws being notable examples of previous experiments). Generally, I think decentralization and school choice etc should be preferred but combined with immigration moderation to allow organic cultural and political symbiosis to develop.
As for your second qualification, I agree completely with the overall point that the kind of thing you're talking about ultimately ends both in illiberalism and in failure. The policy specifics I think matter less than recognizing that fact.
Thanks for a very stimulating post. BTW, I noticed a typo you might want to correct: "When John Stuart Mill inveigles against not only the heavy hand of the state...". I'm pretty sure you meant "inveighs," not "inveigles."
I never knew you were a MacIntyre fan, Noah! Good for you. As I wrote in my post commemorating him (here: https://mittelpolitan.substack.com/p/thoughts-about-macintyre), I don't think his work ever a huge direct influence on my thinking, but of course it was there in the mix of things; I really don't know how any serious thinker who was using the English language in the 1980s and 1990s could avoid the force of his brilliant, teleological challenge to Enlightenment liberalism, even if only to reject it. I recognize that I'm tipping my hand with the reference to the 80s and 90s there, because I still think the old liberal-communitarian debate has value, and I see MacIntyre (as much as he protested against it) providing his own more-localist-than-not, more-Aristotelian-than-not, spin on that argument, a spin which I think the post-liberals can only appropriate for their own thinking somewhat clumsily. I love your example of Ikiru as a demonstration that a community-formed telos can still exist in the context of bureaucracy, and I think you're correct in noting that Ikiru is a great example partly because it shows heroism emerging in a way that arguably rebukes the ethos of the protagonist's own community, and yet is something that everyone else in the office recognizes--because they have received and been shaped by the same stories--as the act of nobility it was, even though none of them are able to follow his example. Anyway, great stuff. A "Liberal Aristotelianism" indeed!
I really enjoyed this. I just want to say that I think the Aristotelian Mill might have already been and gone: Joseph Raz's Morality of Freedom comes pretty close.
You know, I have never read Raz -- and having now looked him up, it certainly looks like I ought to have before writing this post! I'll be sure to check him out.
I agree that a liberal state requires certain substantive political virtues, but would make two qualifications; first, not all of these political virtues are themselves liberal in provenance (ie. the civic friendship underlying trust in good-faith social deliberation is often vitally provided for by nationalism of some kind), and second, I do think that state promotion of a more comprehensive set of "liberal virtues" in the private sphere could easily degrade both liberalism and virtue (the evolution of the postwar educational system at all levels and the metastasizing administrative and judicial interpretations of civil rights laws being notable examples of previous experiments). Generally, I think decentralization and school choice etc should be preferred but combined with immigration moderation to allow organic cultural and political symbiosis to develop.
I think there are varieties of nationalism that are more or less compatible with liberalism, but yes, there's an inherent tension there. I wrote a bit about that here: https://gideons.substack.com/p/cosmopolitanism-is-also-particularism
As for your second qualification, I agree completely with the overall point that the kind of thing you're talking about ultimately ends both in illiberalism and in failure. The policy specifics I think matter less than recognizing that fact.
Thanks for a very stimulating post. BTW, I noticed a typo you might want to correct: "When John Stuart Mill inveigles against not only the heavy hand of the state...". I'm pretty sure you meant "inveighs," not "inveigles."