Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Section 3
Liberalism

MacIntyre's disappointment with liberalism is more
extensive and more profound than that of other Western critics: more extensive
because it applies to the political theories of both the left and the right,
more profound because it traces the failings of liberalism to its origins in
the Enlightenment, and traces the injustice of the modern nation‑state to
its very essence. As Ronald Beiner observes:

What makes MacIntyre unique is that for him the problem is
not merely individualism or liberalism but modernity as such. Therefore he
includes even Marxism within the scope of his critique. [16]

In some ways, MacIntyre's rejection of liberalism is
similar to his rejection of relativism. Just as the relativist contradicts
himself if he would proclaim the absolute truth of the proposition that there
are no absolute truths, the liberal contradicts himself by proclaiming
neutrality between all ideologies, when, in fact, liberalism itself is an
ideology. Liberalism is an intellectual tradition as ideological as any other,
and it allows for scholarly inquiry only after initiation into accepted modes
of appraisal which deny the worth of serious challenges to liberalism itself.

Just as Haldane argued that the relativist need not
claim that relativism is absolutely true, independent of any tradition,
defenders of liberalism have responded to MacIntyre's criticism of liberalism
by admitting that liberalism is an ideology, that it is not absolutely neutral.
[17] Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre
responds that liberalism is a defective and ultimately incoherent ideology. His
insight into the defects of liberalism is one which was first expressed in his
first book, Marxism: An Interpretation, which
was written when he was only twenty‑three years old. In the revised
edition of this work MacIntyre emphasizes the need for an ideology on the scale
of Christianity or Marxism that can offer an interpretation of human existence
by means of which people can situate themselves in the world and direct their
actions to ends that transcend their own immediate situations. He argues that
liberalism is an ideology that cannot function effectively as such.

The axis about which the failure of liberalism turns
is its assertion of the fact/value gap. [18] Liberalism fails as an ideology
because it does not permit one to discover one's own identity and appropriate
ends by gaining knowledge of nature and society, or by understanding human
existence in relation to al‑Haqq, the Exalted. In liberalism, all values
are personal except the value of respecting personal values, and this is simply
not sufficient to orient one's life.

Modernism
inhibits orientation because from the point of view of modern liberalism,
religious traditions seem irrational. The standards of rationality to which the
religious traditions of enquiry appeal are so different from those which
dominate the natural and social sciences in the West today that traditional and
modernist ways of thinking have become nearly mutually

incomprehensible. Nevertheless, a tradition may come
to be rationally accepted by those who live within the horizons of Western
liberal culture once they come to

recognize
themselves as imprisoned by a set of beliefs which lack justification in
precisely the same way and to the same extent as do the positions which they
reject but also to understand themselves as hitherto deprived of what tradition
affords, as persons in part constituted as what they are up to this point by an
absence, by what is from the standpoint of traditions an impoverishment. [19]

The impoverishment of which MacIntyre speaks here is
one which Islam excels at eradicating. What the individual posited by liberal
thebry lacks is an

effective ideology to provide understanding and
purpose on the basis of which communities can be established. Modern liberal
thinkers imagine themselves to be independent, but MacIntyre charges that from
an Aristotelian point of view they have refused to learn or have been unable to
learn that "one cannot think for oneself if one thinks entirely by
oneself," and that it is only by participation in rational practice‑based
community that one becomes truly rational.

MacIntyre admits that this kind of recognition
amounts to a sort of conversion. Individuals at the point of conversion

will invite a tradition of enquiry to furnish them with a
kind of self‑knowledge which they have not as yet possessed by first providing
them with an awareness of the specific character of their own incoherence and
then accounting for the particular character of this incoherence by its
metaphysical, moral, and political scheme of classification and explanation.
The catalogs of virtues and vices, the norms of conformity and deviance, the
accounts of educational success and failure, the narratives of possible types
of human life which each tradition has elaborated in its own terms, all the
invite the individual educated into self‑knowledge of his or her own
incoherence to acknowledge in which of these rival modes of moral understanding
he or she finds him or herself most adequately explained and accounted for.
[20]

Not only does MacIntvre explain how someone
in a liberal society may evolve to the point of being able to convert to a
religious tradition, his astute observations regarding the logic of liberal
thought also helps to illuminate the West's failure to understand the current
Islamic movement and its hostility towards it. The liberal's moral analysis is
one which begins by abstracting the claims to be debated from their contexts in
tradition, and then proceeds with an evaluation of rational justifiability
which is supposed to convince any rational person. The liberal fantasy of universal
progress implies that the most rational standards are those which dominate the
most recent trends of its own thought. To the extent that Muslims are unwilling
to adopt the standards of modernism, they are thought to be irrational. Islamic
intellectual traditions are taken to be more or less the same as what the West
progressed beyond when it abandoned medieval scholasticism. The caricature of
Islam drawn by the liberal West requires neglect of the particularities of
character, history, and circumstance. This makes it impossible to engage in the
kind of rational dialogue which could move through argumentative evaluation to
the rational acceptance or rejection of a tradition. Thus, the kind of debate
which is enforced in the public forums of enquiry in modern liberal culture for
the most part effectively preclude the voices of tradition outside liberalism
from being heard.

Materialistic consumerism is a direct result of the
liberal's pretense of neutrality. Since all the citizens of the liberal state
are supposed to be free to pursue their own happiness, and since despite their
differences about what ultimate happiness is, the vast majority seem to be in
agreement on the idea that its pursuit is aided by ever increasing acquisition
and consumption, which goes by the euphemism of economic development, it becomes nearly self‑evident that it
is in the national interests of the liberal state to pursue economic
development. [21] MacIntyre explains that those who adhere to the standpoint
dominant in peculiarly

modern
societies recognize that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensable to
continuous and limitless economic growth, and one of their central beliefs is
that continuous and limitless economic growth is a fundamental good. That a
systematically lower standard of living ought to be preferred to a
systematically higher standard of living is a thought incompatible with either
the economics or the politics of peculiarly modem societies. . . But a
community which was guided by Aristotelian norms would not only have to view
acquisitiveness as a vice but would have to set strict limits to growth insofar
as that is necessary to preserve or enhance a distribution of goods according
to desert. [22]

From
the Aristotelian point of view advocated by MacIntyre, the problem with the
modern liberal state goes way beyond its worldliness. There is no way,
MacIntyre insists, for those who rule in a modern state to avoid doing
injustice.

[M]odern nation‑states which masquerade as embodiments
of community are always to be resisted. The modem nation‑state, in
whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself
on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is
always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and
on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites
one to lay down one's life on its behalf; it is like being asked to die for the
telephone company . . . [T]o empower even the liberal state as a bearer of values
always imperils those values. [23]

His criticism of the liberal state is so harsh that
it could be mistaken for a form of anarchism were it not for the fact that he
explicitly advises his readers to cooperate with the state by paying their
taxes. What sort of politics does MacIntyre
advocate? MacIntyre suggests that the focus of the political life of an
Aristotelian of the sort he lauds should be "the family, the neighborhood,
the workplace, the parish, the school, or clinic, communities within which the
needs of the hungry and the homeless can be met." [24] Are we then to
leave the state to "the barbarians" mentioned at the close of After
Virtue? [25]And what are we
to do about the hungey and homeless who live outside our parish? Is it not
incumbent upon a religious society to take the reins of state power out of the
hands of those who are driving it to ruin, even if the nation‑state of
its own momentum will not readily change course? A more realistic political
Aristotelianism than the one advocated by MacIntyre would not shun the need to
shoulder the burden of the modern state in full recognition of its deficiencies
and in the hope that it could be transformed into something better. MacIntyre
does not see this as a live option because he seems to be thinking of Europe
and the U.S., whereas the prospects for anything better than liberal government
are unpromising, because the major alternative there to liberalism is
nationalism, and nationalism easily degrades into fascist rage we have
witnessed in the attempt to exterminate the Muslims of Bosnia. Within Muslim
societies, however, there is an alternative to both nationalism and liberalism
which is not taken seriously by Western theorists?

MacIntyre's retreat to the local takes the punch out
of his critique of liberalism. Liberals do not oppose local associations with
substantive ideologies, values and purposes. Liberal political theory is a
theory of government, not of local voluntary associations. If MacIntyre
had announced at the start of his book that his quarrel with liberalism was
over how local associations are to be organized, and not about government, it
would not have attracted the attention it has. Indeed, if one were to read Whose Justice? Which Rationality? from
the start with the assumption that the critique of liberalism was not to extend
to liberal theories of government, much,of what MacIntyre says would not make
any sense. Consider the passage quoted above in which limits to economic growth
are advocated. What is at issue here is how whole societies conduct their
economic affairs, and no matter how large and thriving the private sector of
any society is, the role of governments in directing the economic affairs of
the societies they rule is undeniable. So, what MacIntyre is objecting to is
the flaws of liberal governments and of liberal theories of how governments
should conduct their affairs.

Here again, MacIntyre's work should be helpful for
those engaged in the development of Islamic political theory. If we accept
MacIntyre's critique of the modern form of nation state, the creation of
Islamic republics cannot be the ultimate goal of Islamic political activity,
but only an .intermediary stage in a development leading to more perfectly
Islamic forms of governance, culminating in the governance of the Wali al‑Asr, may his emergence be
hastened.

Notes:

[16]. Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), p. 35. Beiner is a political philosopher at the
University of Toronto.

[17]. See Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd ed.,
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

[18]. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1984), p. 124.

[19].
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 396.

[20].
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 398.

[21]. For a critique of unrestrained development by
the Muslim American scholar of tasawwuf, William Chittick, see his
"Toward a Theology of Development," Echo of Islam, October 1994, the
Farsi translation of which by Narjess Javandel appeared in Marifat, No. 14, pp. 40‑49.

[22]. Whose
Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 112.16. Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism?, p. 164.

[23].
After MacIntyre, p. 303.

[24]. Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre in The American Philosopher, Giovanna
Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 151.

[25]. After
Virtue, p. 263. There he writes, "What matters at this stage is the
construction of local forms of community within which civility and the
intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the. new dark ages which
are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive
the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for
hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time."