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.
[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."