Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science

By Jason Blakely

Today the ethical and normative concerns of everyday citizens are all too often sidelined from the study of political and social issues, driven out by an effort to create a more “scientific” study. This book offers a way for social scientists and political theorists to reintegrate the empirical and the normative, proposing a way out of the scientism that clouds our age. In Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, Jason Blakely argues that the resources for overcoming this divide are found in the respective intellectual developments of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Blakely examines their often parallel intellectual journeys, which led them to critically engage the British New Left, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, continental hermeneutics, and modern social science. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, Blakely claims they each present a new, revived humanism, one that insists on the creative agency of the human person against reductive, instrumental, technocratic, and scientistic ways of thinking. The recovery of certain key themes in these philosophers’ works generates a new political philosophy with which to face certain unprecedented problems of our age. Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780268100674

Jason Blakely

Jason Blakely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu. He is the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics and Power (2020) and Interpretive Social Science (2018).

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ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, CHARLES TAYLOR, AND THE DEMISE OF NATURALISM

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, CHARLES TAYLOR, AND THE DEMISE OF NATURALISM

Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science

JASON BLAKELY

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blakely, Jason, 1980– author.

Title: Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the demise of naturalism : reunifying political theory and social science / Jason Blakely.

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032990 (print) | LCCN 2016033476 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100643 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268100640 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268100667 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268100674 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Naturalism. | Political science—Philosophy. | Social sciences. | MacIntyre, Alasdair C. | Taylor, Charles, 1931–

Classification: LCC B828.2 .B53 2016 (print) | LCC B828.2 (ebook) | DDC 146—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032990

ISBN 9780268100674

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail].

To my first teachers—my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Problem of Superstition and the Divorce of Political Theory from Social Science

CHAPTER 1  The Deeper Sources of the Breakup: The Rise of Naturalism in Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics

CHAPTER 2  The First British New Left’s Rebellion against Naturalism

CHAPTER 3  Analytic Philosophy as a Weapon for Attacking Naturalism

CHAPTER 4  Inspiring a New Social Science: Aristotle and Heidegger

CHAPTER 5  Overcoming Value-Neutrality in the Social Sciences

CHAPTER 6  The Great Reunification: An Antinaturalist Social Science

Conclusion: Future Projects and a Renewed Humanism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has its earliest roots in the summer of 2008, when the most gifted graduate student in the political theory program at Berkeley at that time suggested we spend a summer reading two philosophers (Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre) I knew next to nothing about instead of the slate of contemporary thinkers (including Habermas, Foucault, Rawls, Nozick, and Strauss) I had in mind. My research never would have taken the direction it did without those months of freewheeling, challenging, and mind-expanding discussions with Tyler Krupp.

What follows also would have been impossible to write without a series of interlocutors, critics, and guides: first and foremost Mark Bevir, a great thinker and a rare kind of humanist, but also Kinch Hoekstra, John Searle, Shannon Stimson, Andrius Galisanka, and a number of the participants in the Berkeley Political Theory Workshops. I am also grateful for the support, in the form of a Seaver College Fellowship, of Pepperdine University. Above all, I am grateful to my wife, Lindsay, whose love and support are my most concrete and helpful forms of companionship. AMDG.

INTRODUCTION

The Problem of Superstition and the Divorce of Political Theory from Social Science

Imagine a far-flung, primitive society in which the sudden invention of an alphabet radically improves the lives of the inhabitants. Whereas once they communicated their traditions orally and were able to retain only limited amounts of knowledge, suddenly they are able to store vast quantities of information in written tomes. Their capacity for expression through written media also diversifies and deepens. Captivated by this great leap forward, this society develops a mania for writing. They write letters, journals, and books; they open institutes devoted to the written word and amass vast libraries. Their knowledge of the world advances in countless indisputable ways. They also, however, become so obsessed with written language that they gradually come to devalue speech in any form whatsoever. Various social and political movements that are hostile to speaking arise. Some of society’s brightest intellectuals demote speaking to a lesser form than written communication. Speaking is dead, these intellectuals adopt as their motto—which they write down because they refuse to speak it aloud anymore.

This, of course, is a wild fiction. But something like it has happened in our own time in the wake of the scientific revolution. For although the natural sciences have undoubtedly proved to be a great leap forward, nevertheless their influence has also begun to overstep rational boundaries. As a result, our own society has become like that of the alphabet-obsessed primitives, in that the sciences (or at least a certain philosophical view of the sciences) have started to morph into various forms of superstition and political control. This may seem strange. Science is widely regarded as not only the exact opposite of superstition but also entirely apolitical. Yet science becomes superstitious and political precisely when it oversteps its bounds—when it seeks to replace and displace all prescientific forms of knowing and remake the world in its image.

This book examines how a certain mistaken philosophical conception of the natural sciences has inspired both superstitious and politically menacing forms of thinking in the domains of political theory and the social sciences. This phenomenon is far from new. There is a long history of scientism in the study of human culture and society—for example, the infamous eighteenth-century development of physiognomy, which claimed that an individual’s personality was completely determinable by the physical features of his or her face.¹ Similarly in the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte called for a social physics and posited the law of human development as a three-stage evolution of history culminating in a form of scientific society that eliminated any serious need for religion or the humanities.² Comte’s was of course only one of many sciences of history—including certain strains of social Darwinism, scientific socialism, technocratic utilitarianism, sociobiology, and so on—that crowded, confused, and menaced the political and intellectual life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe. In the coming chapters I will explore in detail how in our own time, these attempts to imitate the natural sciences have become more sophisticated and subtle (if no less problematic) than the physiognomy, the social physics, and the rest of the teeming mass of pseudosciences of two centuries past.

But this book will also propose a way out of the scientism that clouds our age. In doing so, it will show how the reunification of social science and political theory can be achieved. Specifically, it will look to the argumentative resources of two recent philosophers—Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre—who each presented a new philosophical basis for social science theory in the face of reductive instrumental, technocratic, and pseudoscientific ways of thinking. What I offer here is a philosophical history of two of the most important thinkers of the late twentieth century. My basic overarching assumption is that the story of how these two philosophers developed their views of social science generates a new approach to political inquiry that speaks to the concrete concerns of political theorists, social scientists, and policy makers. I will briefly elaborate its relevance to each of these three communities in turn.

First, Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophical formulations of a new social science give political theorists a clear way to overcome the view that science is concerned with hard, objective facts while political theory mucks around in the subjectivity of values. Political theorists are often told that social scientists are concerned with empirical analysis, while theorists must be constrained to purely normative claims of value. But a proper recovery of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s views of social science shows that empirical science and normative inquiry cannot be successfully dichotomized.

In overcoming this fact-value divide, this study offers political theorists and philosophers an alternative to approaches that have dominated Anglophone philosophy for over forty years. For example, one way of thinking of the late John Rawls’s massively influential project is as a vindication of political and normative philosophy after the challenges posed by the fact-value dichotomy. At midcentury, the logical positivists had famously declared political philosophy dead because its language was unverifiable and therefore essentially emotive (a discussion I return to in greater detail in later chapters).³ In other words, political theory was not a true form of knowledge because it dealt in subjective values and not in objective facts. In this context, Rawls’s project was received by many as a resuscitation of political and normative philosophy that showed such research could be established on rational grounds, largely free from questions of fact. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice can be read (and indeed was read by many) as an attempt to carve out a radically autonomous sphere for rational normative justification, separate from the empirical researches of the social sciences, thus not running afoul of the philosophical division between facts and values. Although interest in logical positivism has long since waned, the notion that there is a dichotomy between facts and values has continued to remain largely unquestioned within mainstream social science and analytic philosophy. Partly for this reason, Anglophone political philosophy has been hugely attracted to the Rawlsian paradigm.

By contrast, in rejecting a strong separation between normative and empirical research, Taylor and MacIntyre have opened new, non-Rawlsian routes out of the fact-value dichotomy. Recovering this aspect of their work thus debunks the myth that Anglophone political theory was made defunct by positivism until Rawls arrived on the scene and resuscitated the cadaver.⁴ Rather, the approaches to social science championed by Taylor and MacIntyre have roots extending back to the early 1960s, with normative ramifications that have yet to be fully realized by philosophers and political theorists. I hope to make these ramifications clear in the account that follows.

Second, social science in our own day is overwhelmed by the towering accomplishments of the natural sciences. Social scientists are everywhere on the defensive as they are asked to meet the same success in prediction, explanation, and technological control as is found in the precincts of physics and biology. But what if the predictive, technological-control model of scientific success is a mistaken standard when applied to the social sciences? My treatment of Taylor and MacIntyre is a narrative of the historical emergence of an alternative philosophy of social science to those that currently shape the majority of research programs in society and politics. As shall be made clear, Taylor and MacIntyre each drew on a long tradition of interpretive thought that includes the cultural studies of E. P. Thompson, the linguistic philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Peter Winch, and the phenomenology and hermeneutics of G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, I believe they do represent the state of the art in interpretive philosophy of social science.

In this respect, the narrative that follows is meant to vindicate and revive interpretive insights in the face of skepticism and opposition. Over fifty years have passed since the much hailed interpretive turn emerged in the English-speaking world.⁵ Yet today the reforms of this turn have stalled. And although many social scientists now accept certain interpretive criticisms of their work, they also tend to treat interpretivism as one method among many, one more tool in a kit.⁶ Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophical accounts of the social sciences run directly against this tendency. Their philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research. This interpretive framework also provides social scientists with a normatively engaged way to do research, bridging the gap with political theory and ethics. Social science and political theory can at last be reunified.

Third, policy makers and everyday political actors will find in these pages the philosophical justification for more deliberative, democratic, and antielitist approaches to politics. Both Taylor and MacIntyre, I will argue, adopted conceptions of the human person that rebuff mechanistic and reductive trends within modern policy making. Where modern political authority is often buttressed by the specialized and supposedly value-neutral vocabularies of economic and political experts, these philosophers both give reasons to insist that explaining social reality requires engaging with the beliefs, values, and meanings of nonexpert citizens. Interpretive social science resists modernity’s tendency to authorize rule by value-neutral experts, managers, and technocrats in favor of a more participatory and humanistic vision of political life. Thus, in policy formation also, the dichotomy between normative political theory and empirical social science is overcome.

Of course, the affinities between Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies have been observed by many. Both these philosophers are widely known for their contributions to ethics and are often lumped together as so-called communitarians for their influential critiques of Rawls. However, what has received very little recognition is the way the story of their respective intellectual developments furnishes the resources for an alternative approach to the study of politics—one that fuses normative and empirical research. No study I am aware of identifies the extent of the parallels in their intellectual trajectories or the deep philosophical sympathies that arise from considering their respective works as responses to encroaching scientism. A new set of insights into Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies, as well as an alternative and neglected approach to political theory and social science, is afforded by reading them in tandem within specific historical contexts. The Taylor and MacIntyre that emerge in these pages are thus in some senses unfamiliar and strange. This is not because the abundance of attention paid to Taylor’s work on, say, multiculturalism and secularism or to MacIntyre’s on virtue ethics is wrong. Rather, it is because no one has yet considered in full the approach to social science that is articulated in their respective philosophies. Doing this requires seeing the complex ties between social science and normative theory. It also requires narrating Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s surprisingly parallel tracks through various historical contexts: the British New Left, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and modern social science. In what follows I hope to recover a largely neglected element of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s thought by engaging in a philosophical form of history—a historical narrative with philosophical analysis and implications.

The first context that must be grasped in order to recuperate the force of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s respective positions is that of twentieth-century naturalism. In other words, understanding Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s alternatives first necessitates an understanding of the philosophical and political challenges they sought to overcome. These challenges are those of a society grown superstitious because of the increasing encroachment of mechanistic, instrumental, and technocratic ways of treating human life. I must begin my account, therefore, with a brief