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Review: Sociology After MacIntyre

Reviewed Work(s): After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. by Alasdair MacIntyre


Review by: Donald N. Levine
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Nov., 1983), pp. 700-707
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779014
Accessed: 03-09-2018 02:25 UTC

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Review Essay: Sociology after Maclntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. By Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre


Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Pp. ix+ 252. $15.95
(cloth); $7.95 (paper).

Donald N. Levine
University of Chicago

So inured are we to imputations of crisis in sociology that it must be


refreshing to be told that another field is really in trouble and indeed
that the tools of the sociologist are essential to diagnose and treat it
properly. In Alasdair MacIntyre's tractate, the field is moral philosophy;
the crisis is the "interminability" and "shrillness" of contemporary moral
debate; the diagnostic tools are those of what Benjamin Nelson called a
depth-historical sociology of culture; and much of the solution would be
to inform moral discourse with a fitting sociological perspective.
Yet our relief is only temporary for, properly understood, the crisis
MacIntyre depicts is one whose flip side turns out to involve sociology
itself, and the malady in sociology would appear all the more fearsome
for not even having been suspected. I find it hard to reach any conclusion
other than this: if MacIntyre's argument is valid, most sociological work
is misguided or harmful, and a radically new set of research programs
should be devised for the field without delay.
It will be tempting for sociologists who read this work to ignore those
radical implications, partly because they will be put off by MacIntyre's
misleading representation of modern sociology, partly because they will
not read the book deeply enough to discover them. Although they will
be gratified to find a philosopher who is conversant with some of our
major figures and ideas not to mention one who deals with large ques-
tions on such a grand historical scale they will perhaps take umbrage
at three features of his sociological discussion. At least I did.
MacIntyre's sociological foil is Max Weber. He makes Weber's account
of bureaucracy central to his own depiction of modern society. Yet he
lacks the patience to grasp the complexities of Weber's argument and
thus, like so many readers, simplifies Weber's views to the point of dis-
tortion. He repeatedly depicts Weber's notion of bureaucracy as based on
the principle of cost effectiveness (pp. 24, 82), thereby overlooking the
major feature of bureaucracy that Weber highlighted by treating it always

? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.


0002-9602/84/8903-0007$01 .50

700 AJS Volume 89 Number 3

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Review Essay

as a form of authority: its rationality rests first and foremost on its le-
gitimation through rationally enacted legal norms. True, Weber does write
about the instrumental rationality of bureaucratic organization in large-
scale societies, but he also makes clear that that presents a type of ra-
tionality different from formal rationality, which consists of following the
rules. Failure to grasp this leads MacIntyre to the strange interpretation
that bureaucratic authority is legitimated only through its instrumental
effectiveness, that "bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful
power" (p. 25).
Armed, then, with this peculiar version of Weber's account, MacIntyre
sets out to represent modern society in terms of a set of ideal types he
calls "characters" those social roles that embody the central moral def-
initions of a culture. Foremost among these is the Manager. The Manager
is Weber's bureaucrat, but one defined (by MacIntyre) as oriented to
nothing but the exercise of manipulative power and guided by the belief
that he possesses a stock of universal, lawlike generalizations that con-
stitute the grounds for his claim to expertise. Although the character thus
portrayed may well catch some important aspects of modern complex
organizations, it has two serious shortcomings. On the one hand, by
ignoring the distinction between instrumental and formal rationality, it
glosses over the tension between the expert professional and the dutiful
bureaucrat, thereby losing sight of what many post-Weberian students of
bureaucracy have considered fundamental and of what, indeed, consti-
tutes a major axis of moral debate among the "managers" of modern
institutions. Moreover, by reducing all managerial work to manipulative
play, the account simply blinds one to the effect of those normative ex-
pectations that, in all modern institutions, countervail against raw ma-
nipulation.
No less misleading than the way MacIntyre caricatures modern society
by portraying his manipulative Manager as its dominant kind of character
is his delineation of two other characters who round out his modern social
landscape, the Rich Aesthete and the Therapist. What all three have in
common is "the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and
non-manipulative social relations" (p. 29). Without denying the signifi-
cance in modern life of such characters and the amoral orientation they
embody, one might plausibly draw a very different portrait of modern
society by constructing a set of characters whose roles essentially embody
a commitment to moral standards. These could include the Activist and
the Judge, not to mention the types that Weber himself considered es-
sential to the modern social order, the Political Leader and the Scholar.
Although MacIntyre's glosses on modern society do not purport to
represent a serious engagement with sociological literature on the prob-
lem, he does profess such an engagement when mounting his critique of

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American Journal of Sociology

the character of generalizations in social science. And here, I dare say,


he is likely to provoke the loudest howls of protest from our fraternity.
In MacIntyre's view, the social sciences aim, above all, to produce uni-
versal, lawlike generalizations that form the basis for strong predictive
capabilities. Although some social scientists may still espouse such aims,
they must, by now, be in a small minority. Surely it is widely known that
the record of social scientists as predictors is hard to document and poor,
indeed, when it can be documented. Yet it is wrong to assume that this
difficulty is not just as evident in the natural sciences. Each of the sources
of systematic unpredictability in human affairs identified by MacIntyre
has its counterpart in the world of nonhuman phenomena. This point
was made with particular emphasis by none other than Max Weber (and
his senior contemporary, Georg Simmel). We can predict the evolution of
a species, the path of a tornado, or the direction of an avalanche (Weber's
own example) no more easily than next year's inflation rate or long-term
trends in human population. Surely most social scientists, like natural
scientists, understand that, insofar as predictions of naturally occurring
events are to be ventured, they are best made on the basis of maximum
knowledge of the particulars of a concrete situation rather than on the
basis of a few universal generalizations.
MacIntyre's description of the attitudes of social scientists toward their
generalizations is no less misleading than his strictures about predict-
ability. He maintains, for instance, that social scientists continue to cling
to their generalizations in the face of recognized counterexamples and
that their generalizations lack scope modifiers. His evidence for the former
point is the persistent credibility of James C. Davies's "J-curve" theory
of revolution, despite evidence that would discredit it. Of this it must be
said that sociologists of revolution have long since passed beyond the
simple correlation of Davies's thesis. Moreover, as the last generation of
work by historians of the natural sciences shows, it is quite common in
those disciplines for widely held generalizations to be maintained long
after the appearance of contradictory evidence. On his second point:
textbooks in sociological methodology now routinely insist on the pro-
vision of scope modifiers for all generalizations. This is not to say that it
might not be justifiable, on occasion, to have generalizations of very wide
scope indeed. The problem with the law that MacIntyre cites-G. C.
Homans's "If the interactions between the members of a group are fre-
quent in the external system, sentiments of liking will grow up between
them" is not that it is so general but that it is patently false (not to
mention ungrammatical) and was never widely accepted by sociologists
(I hope). But Homans's generalization that by avoiding favoritism a group
leader enhances both the solidarity of the group and the leader's own
authority has not, to my knowledge, been undermined empirically.

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Review Essay

From this part of his analysis, MacIntyre concludes that the social
sciences need to "start out afresh" and find their philosophical ancestry,
not in the likes of Comte and Mill, but in Machiavelli, with his respect
for Fortuna, bitch-goddess of unpredictability. On this point, however, I
would find his position better represented by advocating a renewed af-
filiation with Max Weber who, after all, issued a forthright call for a
probabilistic social science. MacIntyre cannot express such advocacy be-
cause he finds the contemporary vision of the world predominantly We-
berian and sees this vision as one that "depends for its power on its success
at disguise and concealment" (p. 103). Which brings us to the heart of
his argument, one that in spite of the flaws outlined above, sociologists
would do well to consider closely.

Surveying the world of contemporary moral debate, MacIntyre finds a


plethora of ethical positions and claims, all of which purport to derive
from impersonal rational argument but whose oppositions in no way seem
amenable to resolution through rational discourse. MacIntyre sees this
state of affairs legitimated by what he regards as the prevailing orientation
in both contemporary philosophy and public parlance: emotivism. Emo-
tivism is the doctrine that all moral judgments are nothing but direct or
indirect expressions of feelings and hence beyond subordination to rational
criteria. However, although emotivism rests on a claim that every attempt
to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has failed,
and thus entails the rejection of any rationally grounded distinction be-
tween manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations, its hegemony
is challenged in practice by the recurrent pretensions of moralists to a
rational defense of their positions. These contradictions are explicable
only if they are regarded as dislocated fragments from what was once an
integral body of moral thought, in which moral standards were tied quite
comfortably to the justification of consensually supported moral beliefs.
For MacIntyre, the great historical agency of that fragmentation was
Enlightenment philosophy. The Enlightenment project involved a vain
attempt to produce a universal, secular morality based on the sociologi-
cally false assumption that human beings possess an individuality that is
prior to, and outside of, all social roles. In the wake of the Enlightenment
failure, "both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century
and the analytical philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century
are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent
from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project
of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral al-
legiance had left him" (p. 65).

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American Journal of Sociology

Because modern philosophy is anchored to the fragments of what was


once a coherent program, philosophical analysis by itself can in no way
penetrate or transcend the problem. What is needed is a social scientific
view of the entire culture, including a retrospective view of the integral
culture from which these fragments originated. This leads MacIntyre to
examine the heroic culture of Homeric society as the matrix of that clas-
sical view wherein morality and social structure are linked indissolubly,
where the good consists in proper performance of one's social roles through
the exercise of relevant virtues. This view found its classic philosophic
exposition in Aristotle's formulation of the virtues as the locus of the good,
a formulation later cloaked with sacral legitimation through the medieval
achievements of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
What Maclntyre then proposes as a way out of the contemporary moral
Babel is to restore an essentially Aristotelian conception of morality, but
one revised in three important respects. It must be stripped of Aristotle's
metaphysical biology, one that posits a natural telos for man. It must be
cured of the ahistorical character of Aristotle's understanding of human
nature and further historicized by locating all moral choice within a
"narrative" context. Finally it must correct Aristotle's assumption that
tragedy consists only of the conflict between moral aspiration and human
weakness by incorporating the understanding, portrayed in the tragedies
of Sophocles, that the truly tragic conflict is the conflict of good with
good. In MacIntyre's final complex articulation, this neo-Aristotelian ap-
proach rests on an equation of morality with the possession of virtues,
defined by him as the acquired human qualities that enable us to achieve
goods that are internal to practice, that sustain us in the quest for the
good, and that furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing
knowledge of the good. Because of MacIntyre's deep alienation from the
contemporary political and social order, he supposes that the kind of
characters needed to embody this new moral definition could find a home
only in small-scale local communities; thus he closes with the hope that
a leader for a modern quest after virtue in these "new dark ages which
are already upon us" (p. 245) will take the form of another Saint Benedict.

II

This is not the journal in which to confront the specifics of MacIntyre's


account of the history of Western moral philosophy, nor would I presume
to do so. But it is pertinent here to ask, What happens if one turns this
reconstruction over and looks at what it implies about the history of
Western sociology? It would be something like the following.
Surveying the world of contemporary sociological debate, MacIntyre
would find a plethora of sociological positions and claims, all of which

704

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Review Essay

purport to be justified on rational grounds but whose oppositions seem


in no way resolvable through rational discourse. This state of affairs is
buttressed by a doctrine which MacIntyre cites as the sociologists' precise
counterpart of emotivism-the doctrine of value neutrality. MacIntyre
takes this doctrine to mean not what Weber intended an injunction to
social scientists to refrain from making value judgments in the course of
their research but the belief that sociologists cannot ground any kind of
value judgments rationally. By extension, these would have to include
value judgments implicit in research programs in sociology, since all such
agendas derive ultimately from nonrational assumptions about the worth
of those investigations (Weber's "value relevance"). Yet this belief is ac-
companied by arguments presented in impersonal terms purporting to
defend one or another research orientation on rational grounds. These
contradictions are explicable only if they are regarded as dislocated frag-
ments from what was once an integral body of social thought, in which
the inquiries of "social science" were tied quite comfortably to the jus-
tification of consensually supported moral beliefs.
The great historical agency of that fragmentation was Enlightenment
social science. The seminal procreator of that project was Thomas Hobbes,
who expounded a false philosophy-that human actions are understand-
able largely as the outcome of atoms in motion, hence subject to the laws
of a human mechanics and thereby introduced the vain attempt to pro-
duce universal, lawlike generalizations as the sole legitimate mode of
representing them. Following the Enlightenment project, the evolution-
isms of Comte, Marx, and Spencer of the middle and late 19th century,
and the plethora of behavioral "sciences" in the middle and late 20th
century, constitute so many unsuccessful attempts to justify this mode
of investigation by appeals to scientific reason.
Sociological analysis, by itself, cannot penetrate or transcend this prob-
lem. What is needed is a view of the enterprise that involves a retro-
spective conceptualization of the philosophical matrix from which these
fragments came. The philosophy that Hobbesian science sought to over-
throw was basically Aristotelian, one that insisted that the sciences of
human action are essentially practical, in the sense of their being oriented
to the promotion of human happiness through finding ways to enhance
the cultivation of human virtues.
The contemporary solution would thus be to restore an Aristotelian
approach to social science, while removing its metaphysical biological
basis, its lack of historicity, and its failure to appreciate the pervasiveness
of moral conflict. This entails a forthright advocacy of the social sciences
as disciplines devoted to understanding the range of human virtues, their
sources and modes of development, and the conditions of their flourishing
in diverse institutional contexts.

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American Journal of Sociology

III

In espousing a sociology devoted to the understanding and promotion of


human goods and the practices and institutions which embody them, in
maintaining that a binding morality cannot be derived from abstract
universal calculations but is necessarily related to the institutional realities
of a particular historical context, and in suggesting that the fulfillment
of social functions is a master clue to the delineation of binding norms,
MacIntyre has, in effect, reinvented Durkheim (and, to a considerable
extent, George Herbert Mead). What is more, he provides what amount
to three telling improvements over a straight Durkheimian approach. (1)
Just as MacIntyre faults Aristotle for neglecting what Sophocles repre-
sented so vividly the tragic conflicts that stem from the irreconcilability
of diverse human values so Durkheim's sociology can be corrected by
supplementing it with a Weberian stress on the inexorability of conflicts
among values. (2) Instead of (I would argue, along with Weber, in addition
to) representing human institutions and norms in objective structural
terms, MacIntyre argues for the appropriateness of "narrative" recon-
structions as a plausible way of representing the vicissitudes of virtues
and vices in historical experience. (3) MacIntyre replaces an account of
the virtues in terms of behavior in the performance of roles with a stress
on the notion of "goods internal to practices" as an essential defining
characteristic of virtuous activity and contrasts that with the (typically
corrupting) effect of "institutions" with their orientation toward external
goods like money, status, and power.
In neglecting Durkheim, MacIntyre missed the opportunity to ally him-
self with a superbly congenial social theorist. What is more, he missed
the possibility of interpreting the whole panorama of modern European
history, not as a fall from grace, but as a process of secular differentiation,
in which the "fragments" can be seen as meaningful parts of the evolution
of a society now organized through sociocultural pluralism. That, of
course, would be an attractive possibility only to someone not committed
to condemning the entire modern societal order as a dark new age.
In this perspective of what has been called "differentiation theory,"
MacIntyre's critique loses some of its force but is still packs plenty of
wallop. For if this view can be taken to legitimate a variety of sociological
agendas, it does stipulate also that a major direction for social research
has been sorely neglected. At the heart of any sociology after MacIntyre
must be a research program informed by a neo-Aristotelian, post-Dur-
kheimian vision: one that seeks to identify the social and cultural functions
proper to particular historical settings, to delineate the external resources
and internal practices needed to realize them, and to show ways of es-
tablishing conditions that both sustain us in the quest for the good and

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furnish us increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the


good. That this is not an entirely fanciful proposal is implicit, after all,
in MacIntyre's allusion to the man whom earlier generations often cited
as the "first sociologist," Adam Ferguson. "It is Ferguson's type of soci-
ology," writes MacIntyre, "which is the empirical counterpart of the con-
ceptual account of the virtues which I have given, a sociology which
aspires to lay bare the empirical, causal connection between virtues,
practices and institutions" (p. 182).

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