Utopias and the Art of the Possible
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Timothy Chappell
Abstract
I begin this paper by examining what MacIntyre has to tell us about radical disagreements: how they have arisen, and how to deal with them, within a polity. I conclude by radically disagreeing with Macintyre: I shall suggest that he offers no credible alternative to liberalism’s account of radical disagreements and how to deal with them. To put it dilemmatically: insofar as what MacIntyre says is credible, it is not an alternative to liberalism; insofar as he presents a genuine alternative to liberalism, this alternative is not credible. In large part the credibility problems that I see for MacIntyre’s project arise from the history on which he bases it; it is with this history that I begin. Reflection on MacIntyre’s profound and subtle political philosophy thus fails to dislodge liberalism from its contemporary intellectual supremacy-a supremacy which I think liberalism has well earned. If anything, such reflection enhances the hegemony of liberalism still further. And a good thing too.
© 2008 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
