In an interview on Liberty and Morality

That’s an interesting transition into After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, written in 1981. MacIntyre was born in 1929. I think it’s fair to say that this is his most important or best-known book.

I think that’s right.

It’s very much a critique of modern liberalism, which, in his view, undermines virtue. Virtue is grounded in membership in a community and he critiques modern society as ‘a collection of strangers each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints’. He says we all have too many disparate and rival moral concepts and he speaks of the new dark ages which are already upon us. ‘This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond our frontiers. They have already been governing us for quite some time.’ Not a man given to understatement, and another fairly scathing critique of modern liberal individualism.

This is a sweeping book that goes from Aristotle up to today. The argument is not just the collapse of communities as you suggested, though it is the collapse of communities. It’s also about the transformation in how we think about the moral life that has purged the language of virtue from our speech and from our sensibility. According to MacIntyre’s argument, up until about 200 years ago, up until about just after Jane Austen finished writing her magnificent novels, through most of recorded human history, the moral life was discussed, thought of, experienced, in terms of the virtues. Were you courageous and self-disciplined? Generous and magnanimous? A good friend? Reliable? And so on. This is what defined the moral life, your qualities of mind and character. Round about the time of the high enlightenment, especially starting with Immanuel Kant, a new way of thinking of morality gained hold. This way of thinking about morality emphasises rules and intentions. If you could just figure out the right rules and if you have an intention to obey the right rules then you will have achieved moral excellence.

MacIntyre emerges as a critic of this view, this substance-free adherence to open-ended rules.

Exactly.

In some sense, one could argue that all three of the books you mentioned are cries of protest against modern libertarian conservatism with its notion of a completely open-ended commitment to individual freedom above all. Or is that going too far?

It’s probably true in many cases, but it might do an injustice to some libertarians because there are some versions of libertarianism which are essentially, as I understand them, philosophies of government’s relationship to the individual. After Virtue is not about the relationship between government and the individual; it’s about the individual and the moral life. In other words, I can affirm that government has a very limited role and still believe with Alasdair MacIntyre that the language in which we speak about morals has been degraded, that the virtues and language that involves quality of mind and character is the right language if we’re talking about the moral life. That this way of thinking about the moral life makes sense in a lived community, but that government doesn’t have much to do with all of this.

But you could argue there’s a fundamental tension between the anarchic anything goes mechanism of capitalism and modern liberalism and a vision of virtue rooted in community tradition and faith.

Yes, you could push back with that and you would be justified in pushing back.

MacIntyre publishes at the dawn of the Reagan era, in 1981. I came to this book sometime later, but I saw it as a first shot over the bow, that what came to be known as the religious right was reasserting some very profound questions about enlightenment, liberalism and libertarianism. It was itself starting to push back in ways that only became much clearer as the next two decades ensued.

Yes, though in MacIntyre’s case the intended target was not libertarians in America or in England but actually professors with progressive doctrines, people like John Rawls and those who follow John Rawls. But I think you’re right that the arguments that were targeted for John Rawls, and the Rawlsians of this world and other left-wing progressives, who thought that you could develop theories and that theories would provide you with instructions on the moral re-organisation of social and political life, also strike important blows at American libertarians.