Democracy, Tradition, and the Local Community I. the Philosophical Roots of Modern Liberalism Iii. Macintyre's Critique of Contemporary Liberalism

Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout are concerned social critics who lament many of the features of contemporary life and political and ethical discourse. They both see the global market and government bureaucracies as institutional arrangements that often rob their citizens of the capacity to hold reasoned debates about important matters and lead virtuous, meaningful lives. And both want to restore a sense of the common good to our social and political arrangements. However, they differ greatly in their beliefs of how such a transformation can take place. MacIntyre contends that the contemporary crisis is a result of a cultural and intellectual breakdown with deep roots in the history of European culture. Owing to the loss of a common theological understanding and a shared conception of the human good that provided tables of virtues on which people could conduct meaningful lives, contemporary ethical thought and political organization are marked by irreconcilable fragmentation. There does not appear to be any way to restore these ways of life within the confines of the contemporary order; only the movement into forms of community that affirm such substantive shared values will afford people the ability to again lead integrated and virtuous lives. Jeffrey Stout argues that such claims are little more than separatist rhetoric that can only distract us from our responsibility of reforming our ethical and political culture. In contrast to MacIntyre's critique of liberalism, Stout offers a positive account of our democratic inheritance and argues that we can affirm virtuous conduct and a just political order as self-conscious participants in the practice of democratic life. In this paper, I will outline MacIntyre's account of the dissolution of morality. I will then examine his theory of how 2 rational moral thought functions as a tradition of enquiry, his critique of liberalism as such a tradition, and his alternative of the local community as the new locus of rational moral life. I will then present Stout's criticisms of MacIntyre's account and his positive alternative of a democratic social order that he thinks can claim the status of a rational moral order. I hope to show that while we may agree with Stout that MacIntyre's critique of liberalism is overly reductive and that democratic social practices can provide a basis for virtue and genuine argument, the overwhelming preponderance of the nation-state and the market make MacIntyre's politics of the local community nonetheless a superior alternative …