I’m not sure if the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre plans on writing anything for the upcoming elections, but a noteworthy essay he wrote for Notre Dame magazine back in 2004 bears repeating. In it he famously argues that the best vote for the upcoming presidential election is not to vote at all. In my view, this argument is all the more relevant in this current presidential election. It also depends on and moves from a collection of political principles that in most peoples minds, should be called “revolutionary,” principles that I would maintain however, are in fact recoveries of a classical Christian understanding of politics, that go against much of our contemporary acquiescence to the status quo of modern politics, founded on Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, among others. In my opinion, MacIntyre offers the most substantial argument against the modern nation-state and its alliance with neo-liberal capitalism. It is a bracing argument, but provocatively difficult to dismiss:
Modern nation-states are governed through a series of compromises between a range of more or less conflicting economic and social interests. What weight is given to different interests varies with the political and economic bargaining power of each and with its ability to ensure that the voices of its protagonists are heard at the relevant bargaining tables. What determines both bargaining power and such ability is in key part money, money used to provide the resources to sustain political power: electoral resources, media resources, relationships to corporations. This use of money procures very different degrees and kinds of political influence for different interests. And the outcome is that although most citizens share, although to greatly varying extents, in such public goods as those of a minimally secure order, the distribution of goods by government in no way reflects a common mind arrived at through widespread shared deliberation governed by norms of rational enquiry. Indeed the size of modern states would itself preclude this. It does not follow that relationships to the nation-state, or rather to the various agencies of government that collectively compose it, are unimportant to those who practice the politics of the virtues of acknowledged dependence. No one can avoid having some significant interest in her or his relationships to the nation-state just because of its massive resources, its coercive legal powers, and the threats that its blundering and distorted benevolence presents. But any rational relationship of the governed to the government of modern states requires individuals and groups to weigh any benefits to be derived from it against the costs of entanglement with it.
For MacIntyre, the possibility of authentic rational discourse is the key issue. In the modern nation-state, the reality of the political community and the discourse it allows is prohibitive to substantial discussions about the common good. According to
the conception of political activity embodied in the modern state, . . . there is a small minority of the population who are to make politics their active occupation and preoccupation, professional and semiprofessional politicians, and a huge largely passive majority who are to be mobilized only at periodic intervals, for elections or national crises. Between the political elites on the one hand and the larger population on the other there are important differences, as in, for example, how much or how little information is required and provided for each. A modern electorate can only function as it does, so long as it has only a highly simplified and impoverished account of the issues that are presented to it. And the modes of presentation through which elites address electorates are designed to conceal as much as to reveal. These are not accidental features of the politics of modern states any more than is the part that money plays in affording influence upon the decision-making process.
I think those quotes provide a good taste of what MacIntyre’s arguing for. Finally, here is MacIntyre’s essay from Notre Dame magazine, quoted in full:
The Only Vote Worth Casting in November
Alasdair MacIntyre
University of Notre DameWhen offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. These are propositions which in the abstract may seem to invite easy agreement. But, when they find application to the coming presidential election, they are likely to be rejected out of hand. For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility. But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush’s conservatism and Kerry’s liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.
Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.
The basic economic injustice of our society is that the costs of economic growth are generally borne by those least able to afford them and that the majority of the benefits of economic growth go to those who need them least. Compare the rise in wages of ordinary working people over the last thirty years to the rise in the incomes and wealth of the top twenty percent. Compare the value of minimum wage now to its value then and next compare the value of the remuneration of CEOs to its value then. What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.
We note at this point that we have already broken with both parties and both candidates. Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try to advance the case for economic justice as we have described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court. Above all, insist, as we are doing, that these two cases are inseparable, that each requires the other as its complement, and you will be met with blank incomprehension. For the recognition of this is precluded by the ideological assumptions in terms of which the political alternatives are framed. Yet at the same time neither party is wholeheartedly committed to the cause of which it is the ostensible defender. Republicans happily endorse pro-choice candidates, when it is to their advantage to do so. Democrats draw back from the demands of economic justice with alacrity, when it is to their advantage to do so. And in both cases rhetorical exaggeration disguises what is lacking in political commitment.
In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote case for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.
After Virtue should be required reading. Here is my favorite passage:
“When Aristotle praised justice as the first virtue of political life, he did so in such a way as to suggest that a community which lacks practical agreement on a conception of justice must also lack the necessary basis for political community…….For since virtue is now generally understood as a disposition or sentiment which will produce in us obedience to certain rules, agreement on what the relevant rules are to be is always a prerequisite for agreement upon the nature and content of a particular virtue. But this prior agreement in rules is something wihcih our individualist culture is unable to secure.”
-Ch. 17.
MacIntyre is a fantastic philosopher, but is not so good as a political analyst. He says, for example, that if you try “to advance the case for economic justice as [he has] described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court.” Yet the case for economic justice, as he has described it, has consisted simply of the negative income tax, an idea developed by a libertarian and widely supported by Republican officeholders.
But if you are going to read After Virtue, you must also read Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which is an expansion on, modification of and changing of many positions taken in After Virtue. To read one without the other is to not know MacIntyre on virtue.
Yes, I realized that this semester. Hope to get to them by summer. After Virtue by itself, however, was very helpful on Aristotle.
Thanks for the essay, Matthew. MacIntyre is a wonderful and incisive read (as is Taylor!), and I have always admired the manner in which he moves in and out of various rival “traditions,” retaining some and pruning some.
Excellent analysis. And sorry, Blackadder, he is totally right on economic justice and the Republicans. The EITC isa kind of negative income tax– that gets curtailed at the same time as massice tax cuts for the rich.
Actually, the EITC tends to get expanded when taxes are cut. It’s a standard part of the compromise.
Ronald Reagan signed the EITC into law on October 22, 1986. He referred to it as “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
Donald,
And he was right.
The problem with criticisms of liberal democracy from the left, such as the one that MacIntyre presents in his major works, is that the critics never really tell us what they would put in its place. The result is that we get books with lots of brave words printed in them, but when it comes to time to put those words into practice all we get is quietism and counsels to sit out elections.
‘The problem with criticisms of liberal democracy from the left, such as the one that MacIntyre presents in his major works, is that the critics never really tell us what they would put in its place. ‘
That was my thought, too, as I read the second quoted passage, above. Granted that our current political discourse is over-simplified, it doesn’t follow that a ‘political elite’ is necessarily a bad thing, or that ‘rational discourse’ is impossible in a nation-state. To be sure, we suffer from the absence of ‘practical agreement on a conception of justice’, but it doesn’t follow that the problem is with the ‘system’, rather than with the parties involved.
I followed this advice in the 2004 election, not because the GOP seemed oblivious to economic injustice but because the Republicans were the most ardent supporters of the Iraq War. I’m not so sure about 2008. Certainly the Democrats are as strong in their support of abortion as ever. But I am not so sure that all the GOP candidates would be as callous towards the poor as MacIntyre claims, nor as supportive of the endless “war on terror” as Bush and his coterie have been.
Actually, Donald, the EITC was enacted into law by the 94th Congress in 1975, when both houses had veto-proof Democratic majorities.
The problem with criticisms of liberal democracy from the left, such as the one that MacIntyre presents in his major works, is that the critics never really tell us what they would put in its place.
Criticism of the establishment and the proffering of an alternative to the establishment are two separate things. In the history of political rise and fall, the criticism and crumbling of establishment typically occurs without a ready-made alternative at hand as a replacement. One need not have a contrived alternative in order to validly criticize an establishment. So the problem of which you speak is just a phantom.
The “left” is the “left of the liberal democracy.” The democratic matrix accommodates a “left” and a “right.” When one is criticizing liberal democracy, one is challenging the very foundations that underlie the operative “left” and “right.” For example, would you call someone who wants to reestablish a monarchy or aristocracy a “leftist”? Would you call someone who calls for radical deconstruction of the liberal democratic paradigm and advocates local anarchy a member of the “left”? Only if you are misinformed. We must think deeper on such issues.
‘One need not have a contrived alternative in order to validly criticize an establishment. So the problem of which you speak is just a phantom.’
Not entirely. When de Maistre or Kropotkin criticized liberal democracy, we knew what alternatives they had in mind. How about MacIntyre? Just asking.
SMB,
That de Maistre or Kropotkin had alternatives is beside the point. I submitted that it is not necessary to have an formed alternative in mind when criticizing the establishment.
Someone who favors the restoration of monarchy or aristocracy would not be a leftist, not because the terms left and right don’t apply (the very origins of the terms left and right and political indicators have to do with one’s views on the monarchy and aristocracy), but because such a person would be on the right, not the left.
Whether an anarchist would be on the left or the right depends on other factors. An anarco-capitalist would be on the right; an anarco-syndicalist on the left.
The the right/left spectrum may not be appropriate in every circumstance, but it is incorrect to say that the terms only apply to positions within liberal democracy.
Doesn’t MacIntyre’s antipathy towards the modern mega-state support secessionism? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
MacIntyre is a great thinker, but this essay is too much theory and not enough practice. Is he even a US citizen?
People spend too much time moaning about the minimal effect of their vote or the radical corruption of our political system. That time would almost always be better spent yelling at/persuading one of the politicians putatively representing us, or organizing a real opposition. How do you know the system is irreformable without having significantly participated in it?
‘That de Maistre or Kropotkin had alternatives is beside the point. I submitted that it is not necessary to have an formed alternative in mind when criticizing the establishment.’
P., I know that’s what you meant, but I’m not buying it. Influential critics, such as de M. and K., have been able to sharpen their critique by setting liberal democracy against something else. It’s a standard rhetorical topic. MacIntyre must have something ‘better’ in mind, too; so what is it?
SMB
Just because I know that the solution for childhood sexual abuse is not to kill all the children of the world does not mean I have to know the best solution or to promote one in order to criticize such a view.
Someone who favors the restoration of monarchy or aristocracy would not be a leftist, not because the terms left and right don’t apply (the very origins of the terms left and right and political indicators have to do with one’s views on the monarchy and aristocracy), but because such a person would be on the right, not the left.
When we speak of “left” and “right” within a liberal democracy, we are working within a particular political paradigm. Monarchy and aristocracy are not part of this paradigm, and so to think of either in terms of “left” and “right” is absurd and uncritical. Now, when we begin to compare paradigms themselves rather than operating within them, perhaps one can equivocate a bit and call democracy classically “left” and monarchy classically “right.” But why equivocate? “Left” and “right” hold true meaning only within a political paradigm, not outside. When comparing paradigms, it much better to use classical terms such as “liberal” and “conservative.” For example, when comparing democracy to socialism, the former is a “liberal” paradigm whereas the latter is actually a “conservative.”
That said, it is senseless to describe monarchy as “right.” It is sloppy and misleading.
Policraticus,
Sorry, but your just wrong, both as to the etymology of these terms, and as to their current usage. “Liberal” and “conservative” aren’t classical terms. As political labels they aren’t much older than the terms “left” and “right.” Far from being senseless to describe monarchy as right-wing, the term “right” as a political designator had its origin in support for the monarchy. And if we look to how the terms are actually used (as opposed to, say, how you think they ought to be used), then there is nothing sloppy or misleading about referring to monarchism as right-wing. To give but one example, monarchism is listed as a right-wing movement in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
‘Just because I know that the solution for childhood sexual abuse is not to kill all the children of the world does not mean I have to know the best solution or to promote one in order to criticize such a view.’
C’mon, guys. I gathered that some of you were well versed in MacIntyre, and could answer a question that at least three of us have put out there. If you can’t, or if there IS no answer, I am content to move on.
Certainly, one may level criticism without suggesting any replacement, but sometimes that make you rather less interesting to read. In terms of policy, MacIntyre does provide some proscriptive beliefs, but he’s rather unclear on what he thinks would be a better system than liberal democracy. This may make him a bit unsatisfying for those who are not necessarily huge fans of liberal democracy, but who don’t see any better alternatives. Stating that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds is rather an unexciting revelation.
Policratus,
If one is sufficiently into history, it seems to me that views on aristocracy and monarchy can indeed be contextualized as “right” or “left” in a reasonable sense. And indeed, I would say that I see rather more (at least theoretical) support for rule by the optimates in conservative writing than in liberal writing — though the modern conservative movement has indeed absorbed a populist strand.
Obviously, though, this can varry on time and place, an on how one defines “conservative”. In the context of Rome, a move from aristocracy to effectively monarchy was not a “conservative” move by any normal definition. Nor was the movement from limited to absolute “enlightened” monarchy a conservative movement, though some might argue it is “more monarchic” than limited monarchy.
Blackadder,
Since you have been so bold as to state that my understanding of the historical and political use of the terms “left” and “right” are “just wrong,” perhaps you can name one instance in either an aristocratic or monarchical paradigm when “left” and “right” were employed in political discourse. I could save you some time, but I’m probably just wrong. Just as you are not at all conflating classical political terms for paradigms with intrinsic political terms of paradigms. Right?
And Blackadder,
It is a sad day when a digital encyclopedia replaces real, substantial sources of the history of ideas.
France, the 1789 et seq.
Also, while Wikipedia tends to be pretty accurate, I was citing it here only as an example of how the terms “right” and “left” are used today.
As for MacIntyre’s concrete proposals. It is true he has said little in this regard, and does not see his role or vocation in imagining alternatives to the status quo. But he does stress that this is a work of the imagination, and being that our imagination is so impoverished today, we constantly are drawn back into the unhelpful rhetoric he mentions. On several occasions, however, he has mentioned what he thinks is a good concrete proposal: Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and the Catholic Worker movement. He hasn’t said much more than this, an I’ll admit, MacIntyre can be a bit cryptic with these kinds of comments. But if I can infer a practical program from his comments, it would be a kind of anarcho-socialism with economic laws similar to those advocated by distributists, and a healthy local notion of a community more like the city-state or Scottish fishing village. He has also said that the State should be like the phone or electrical company: there are certain things that only it can do, but beyond those, we shouldn’t even think about it most days.
Thanks, Matthew. Now we are getting somewhere.
Blackadder,
The French revolution was defined in terms of the revolt of the people, fighting for the liberal cause (democracy), against the establishment (monarchy/Church), which sought to preserve the conservative machinery. This is not an example of “left” and “right,” and you will not find anyone from that time thinking in terms of “left” and “right.” Why? Because “left” and “right” is situated within the greater liberal democratic paradigm, not in the clash of paradigms. “Left” in our democratic parlance is not equivalent to “liberal,” just as “right” is not equivalent to “conservative.” “Left” and “right” in democratic parlance belong to liberalism. Unfortunately, imprecision reigns in contemporary times where “left” and “right” are conflated with “liberal” and “conservative.” But we must press one another to think more deeply about things rather than passively inheriting poor political talk.
In terms of democratic liberalism, I am liberal. In terms of political paradigms, I am conservative.
It’s not that Wiki is inaccurate, it’s that it is cliff-notes. Just as I would not want to consult an Encyclopedia Britanica in order to write a substantial, researched paper, I do not want Wiki to my shortcut around real study and research.
1924 and Ramsay MacDonald had just won the General Election making him the Labour Party’s first Prime Minister. The British public, particularly the Establishment, was uncertain and curious as to where the first man to call himself a Socialist would take England. A newspaper reporter asked “Mr. MacDonald, there has been a lot of talk about having a Socialist as Prime Minister. The question is, are you a Fabian Socialist? A Christian Socialist? A Marxist? Syndicalist? Mr. MacDonald, what exactly is Socialism?”
MacDonald looked the reporter in the eye, stood up tall and ramrod straight and with all of his Scottish seriousness, intoned “My lad, Socialism is whatever is in this year’s Labour Party Manifesto.”
Policraticus,
The use of the terms “left” and “right” as political designators dates from the French Revolution. The terms originated because those who favored the monarchy in the French National Assembly sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who opposed it sat on the left. Do you really not know this?
Blackadder is correct about the etymology of the political terms left and right, but the etymology is really moot. The modern-day clash between “left” and “right” isn’t a clash between the monarchists and the liberals, it is a clash between right-liberals and left-liberals. Sometimes etymology is helpful, sometimes not.
Zippy: well said.
Matthew: that about sums it up as far as I understand MacIntyre.
Pax Christi,
Here’s what I had in mind in criticizing MacIntyre. MacIntyre thinks that liberal democratic societies are characterized by a lack of consensus on the nature of the Good. That’s true enough. But how should we respond to that? If I’m reading MacIntyre correctly, he thinks that we ought to try and recreate Christendom, a social order characterized by a consensus on the truth of Christianity and a specifically Christian conception of the Good. But how do we do that exactly? It seems to me that pluralism is just a fact of life so long as we are unwilling to use coercion to achieve consensus.
I agree that its not fair to require MacIntyre to specify specific policy proposals. He is a philosopher not a policy wonk. But his critique of liberalism should still be realistic. It shouldn’t require changing things that it simply isn’t realistic to hope that we can change.
It shouldn’t require changing things that it simply isn’t realistic to hope that we can change.
Doesn’t the qualifier “isn’t realistic…” depend on how long a view one is willing to take? Sure, a revived Christendom isn’t on the horizon the day after tomorrow. If one is going to arrive half a millenium from now though it will only be because the repentance from liberalism started today.
Further, while I believe MacIntyre would call for a culture influenced by Catholic Christian morality, I don’t think he confuses the principles of practical reason with the articles of faith. All MacIntyre needs to argue against modern conceptions of the good and for a more consistent notion is natural law.
Pax Christi,
[...] blogged before on MacIntyre’s thesis that we should resist the argument that one MUST vote, even if all [...]