Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science [1 ed.] 0268019665, 9780268100643, 0268100640

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AlAsdAir MAc intyre, chArles tAylor, And the deMise of nAturAlisM

AlA sdAir M Ac i n t y r e , chA r l es tAy lo r , An d th e d eM ise of nAtu r Alis M 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 9780268100667 ∞ 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 [email protected].

To my first teachers—my parents

contents

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Acknowledgments

ix

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

1

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

7

The First British New Left’s Rebellion against Naturalism

24

Analytic Philosophy as a Weapon for Attacking Naturalism

38

Inspiring a New Social Science: Aristotle and Heidegger

60

Overcoming Value-Neutrality in the Social Sciences

75

The Great Reunification: An Antinaturalist Social Science

94

Conclusion: Future Projects and a Renewed Humanism

110

Notes Bibliography Index

114 126 135

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.

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i ntro d u c ti o n 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 1

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

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,

Introduction

3

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

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

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, nonRawlsian 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, technologicalcontrol 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

Introduction

5

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,

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

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 twentiethcentury “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 picture of what this political philosophy is intended to refute: social science morphed into superstitious forms of reasoning and domination, frequently dubbed “naturalism” by philosophers.

C H A P T e R

1

th e d e e p e r so u rc e s o f th e B r e A ku p The Rise of “Naturalism” in Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics

In the twentieth century, naturalist assumptions were pervasive, even dominant. Indeed, so powerful was naturalism’s influence that Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s contributions to social science can hardly be rendered intelligible except as critical responses to this cultural and philosophical movement. Moreover, because naturalist intuitions are still widely held, a definition and brief sketch of this cultural and philosophical movement are necessary to reflect on the current situation. At the most basic level, naturalism is driven by a particular response to the success and prestige of the natural sciences. Naturalist philosophers and social scientists are those who, justly impressed by the accomplishments of natural science, set out to remake their own disciplines in its image. Taylor and MacIntyre suggest that naturalism was born when seventeenth-century thinkers, inspired by the revolution in the natural sciences, applied the mechanistic forms of explanation of Newton’s physics to the social sciences.1 Instead of explaining human behavior by referring to people’s beliefs, intentions, and purposes, early naturalist thinkers increasingly favored mechanistic and impersonal forms of explanation inspired by the new physics. In this sense, naturalism originated as the attempt to replace classical and medieval teleology (founded on Aristotle’s notion of individual purposes as the sources of human action) 7

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

with a social science of underlying, mechanistic causes. Such efforts to eradicate teleology through mechanistic explanation gained momentum in the nineteenth century through the writings of philosophers like Auguste Comte and his english admirer John Stuart Mill, whose works spread widely amid european intellectuals.2 Naturalism, from its birth in the seventeenth century, was always characterized by what Taylor refers to as a “metaphysical motivation.”3 This metaphysical motivation consists of the attempt to demote or even eliminate human properties from social explanation in favor of supposedly more scientific and impersonal factors. A recurrent feature of naturalism, in other words, is the assumption that subjectively human dimensions of reality (e.g., meanings, purposes, values, and even beliefs) must be explained in terms of supposedly “harder” and more objective data (e.g., brute facts about demography, surrounding environments, or neurobiology). One of the most important examples of this naturalist effort has been the attempt, dating back to the enlightenment, to separate facts from values in social science research. The doctrine that facts must be dichotomized from values, still very much alive today, rests on the assumption that values are purely subjective and therefore must be filtered out of truly objective scientific knowledge. For it to be considered a bona fide science, therefore, social science must be ethically and politically neutral. There are other commonly recurring assumptions that reflect naturalism’s quest to account for what is specifically human, for example, that human behavior is determined by scientific laws, that human action is reducible to impersonal causal mechanisms, that “higher” human motives are simply the function of “lower” ones, and that individual interpretations and meanings must be replaced by brute and verifiable facts. I will return to all these features at length in the coming chapters in the context of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s critiques of naturalism. For now the key point is that naturalism is a certain outlook or worldview consisting of recurring assumptions and doctrines that are general enough to take on a great variety of differing and even competing forms. In other words, there is not just one but many naturalisms. For example, note that naturalism as defined above does nothing to determine whether a particular research program in the social sciences should consist of sociology,

The Deeper Sources of the Breakup

9

economics, neo-Darwinism, psychology, or some other approach. Naturalism, in this respect, encompasses rival research programs that nevertheless hold certain basic philosophical resemblances. Dealing with such a broad philosophical category requires some caution. This is because such a general term might easily lead to essentializing the varied research programs of the social sciences into a single, monolithic caricature or straw man.4 Likewise, the term naturalism might be defined so broadly that it becomes too capacious to be useful. Indeed, even within the parameters of the above definition, a full historical account of the naturalist outlook would include a very wide set of thinkers, spanning Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Denis Diderot, Nicolas de Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon, David Hume, Auguste Comte, Adolphe Quetelet, John Stuart Mill, emile Durkheim, William Stanley Jevons, and Max Weber, to name only a few. In this sense, the definition of a concept like naturalism, if it is to be of any constructive use, must be appropriately general without being either unfairly simplified or too sprawling and vacuous to be of any use. Fortunately, my own purposes are much more limited. I do not endeavor to write anything like the full history of naturalism but only to flag the particular versions of naturalism that formed the background to Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s work. This means briefly reconstructing how, during the twentieth century, something very complex, yet also clearly identifiable as naturalism, became predominant not only intellectually but also as a form of power. Specifically, there are three representative areas that offer a sense of how naturalism captured the intellectual and political mainstream during the early and mid-twentieth century. The first area is englishspeaking philosophy; the second, the study of politics; and the third, the management and governance of nation-states, big business corporations, and other major sites of organized power. Taylor and MacIntyre never responded to naturalism as simply an intellectual phenomenon. It was also, they believed, one of the modern world’s primary forms of power. Naturalism has been a massively influential cultural movement, and like many of the most influential cultural movements, it has become almost invisible because of its very success. One might even say that naturalism is hiding in plain sight. Looking at its intellectual roots will make it

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

conspicuous again and help to clarify how often unstated intuitions in the general populace have reached high levels of sophistication, articulacy, and rigor in the work of professional philosophers and social scientists. Although naturalism is a dispersed and widespread worldview found in various forms throughout modern culture, it gained intellectual heft and cogency through the help of the following theories. Because Taylor and MacIntyre began to think and write in midcentury, this world of rising naturalism marks the starting point to their respective philosophical stories.

naturalism in philosophy

Some of the most influential and articulate defenders of naturalism during the twentieth century were philosophers working in the Angloanalytic tradition—a tradition in which both Taylor and MacIntyre were highly trained. Indeed, the analytic tradition originated in the englishspeaking world in part as an attempt to revalorize empiricist approaches against what early analytic philosophers saw as the metaphysical obscurities of Hegelian and idealist philosophy.5 A brief look at a few of the founders of analytic philosophy will clarify how the natural sciences, to the exclusion of nearly all other forms of knowledge, were crowned as almost the sole authorities for knowing what is real. Naturalist tendencies were evident from the outset in two of the greatest pioneers of analytic philosophy: G. e. Moore and Bertrand Russell. These two philosophers famously sought to revive British empiricism by rejecting the Hegelian idealism that then reigned supreme. British Hegelians like F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green were teaching that one ought to understand the world in terms of a holistic and historically cumulative system of ideas. By contrast, Moore and Russell wanted to restore the empiricism of John Locke, Hume, and Mill by creating an ahistorical and atomistic philosophy that was made in the image of the natural sciences. Inspired in part by the atomism of modern physics, Moore suggested that philosophy be reconceived as the activity of decomposing complex ideas and concepts into their atomistic parts through analysis.6

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Similarly, Russell’s “logical atomism” held that the goal of philosophical analysis was to break down ideas into the “ultimate simples” out of which the world was built.7 Russell’s philosophy was part of a wider effort to grant the natural sciences greater authority within human knowledge. He not only modeled philosophy on the natural sciences but also argued that other disciplines should conform to this paradigm. Both Russell’s and Moore’s turn toward atomism also marked a rejection of idealist notions of philosophical understanding as intertwined with historical knowledge. Instead, Moore and Russell made appeals for an ahistorical, common sense perception as the starting point for all sound philosophical analysis. Russell thus wrote, “The process of sound philosophizing . . . consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, [and] definite.”8 In the same passage he lauded Descartes’s scientific method of philosophy, which always began by appealing to immediate and obvious data. In short, Moore’s and Russell’s atomistic philosophies were meant to rehabilitate empiricism by repudiating any dependence on holistic, historical narratives. Instead of being formed on the basis of historical narratives of idealism, sound disciplines would be built on atomistic and empirical principles. Thus, philosophy itself would conform to a particular vision of natural science—with basic concepts that could be perceived in unproblematic, empirical fashion, while more complex concepts could be broken down into easily identified atoms. Such a naturalist bent of mind became even more strongly apparent in the next generation of analytic philosophers—the logical positivists. Radicalizing Russell’s call for the dominance of the natural sciences, the logical positivists argued that only inquiry modeled on the natural sciences could provide true knowledge about the world. But unlike Moore and Russell, the logical positivists largely rejected attempts by philosophers to articulate a basic picture of reality. Only a naturalistic science could speak authoritatively about what was real and what wasn’t. The question was entirely empirical and was not to be left to the metaphysical speculations of anybody—be they philosopher, artist, mystic, or prophet. Probably the single most influential logical positivist, A. J. Ayer, defended naturalist positions by adopting an extreme version of the

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

analytic-synthetic distinction. Although this distinction could already be found in the work of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as in that of various members of the Vienna Circle, Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) helped popularize it beyond philosophical circles. Specifically, Ayer argued that all meaningful propositions must be one of two types: either analytic tautologies that were true by definition (e.g., “All unmarried men are bachelors”) or synthetic propositions that were verifiable hypotheses (e.g., “John Thomas is unmarried”). According to Ayer, analytic propositions were the business of logic, mathematics, and philosophy, while synthetic propositions needed to be verified by empirical science. If a proposition was neither verifiable by science nor a truth of logic, then it was “metaphysical” and thus “neither true nor false but literally senseless.”9 I will return to Ayer, logical positivism, and Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s critiques of this philosophy in later chapters. For now the point is to see Ayer’s thought within a larger movement that was busy trying to turn the natural sciences into the sole authorities on truth about the world. For Ayer, math, logic, and philosophy were analytic disciplines that dealt with things that were true by definition. But the actual picture of reality was the domain of the natural sciences alone. This meant that, if social scientists wished to offer valid knowledge about the world, they would have to build theories strictly on the verification of synthetic propositions. No less important to logical positivism’s brand of naturalism was Ayer’s famous (and famously problematic) verification principle of meaning. The verification principle connected the meaningfulness of propositions in language to the ability to verify them. Again, a term could be analytic and therefore meaningful as a tautology, but otherwise, all meaningful language depended on empirical verifiability. The natural sciences thereby not only furnished truth but also set the boundaries of meaningful language. Accordingly, Ayer polemically denounced all statements that used ethical, religious, aesthetic, and philosophic language as “meaningless.” For example, “God exists” was neither a truth of logic nor a proposition subject to straight verification. The proposition was therefore deemed meaningless. A similar line of argument discounted key ethical words like good and evil or aesthetic terms like beautiful. In

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short, nonscientific forms of understanding and ways of approaching the world were not simply incapable of producing verifiable knowledge but were also without meaning. Ayer and the logical positivists thus furnished a philosophical justification for the most extreme and thoroughgoing stripe of naturalism. Anything beyond the bounds of science and logic could be tossed onto the trash heap of history. Naturalism is in part defined by the tendency to reduce distinctly human aspects of reality to purportedly objective and verifiable facts. In logical positivism we see a particularly extreme example of this. Famously, Ayer inspired other logical positivists like Charles Stevenson to argue that moral and ethical language is primarily emotive. Ayer’s emotivism, which presupposed a version of the fact-value dichotomy, maintains that good and bad are examples of purely subjective language with no cognitive content and therefore no meaning at all. To call something a “good x” is like shouting “hooray for x!” Similarly, to call something a “bad x” is like shouting “boo for x!”10 In other words, values are not a form of objective knowledge or even of meaningful language. Values are instead the equivalent of a subjective or emotional outburst. The implication is clear: social science, like the natural sciences, would need to purge itself of any ethical and political commitments. Social science must be value free. Logical positivism loomed large in the 1950s and 1960s when Taylor and MacIntyre were completing their university studies and coming of age as philosophers. Moreover, the logical positivists and other analytic philosophers, who shared naturalist sympathies, had enormous success in granting a certain prestige to philosophical naturalism that extended beyond the boundaries of philosophy departments to various fields in the social sciences. This, combined with the already impressive and growing accomplishments of the natural sciences, put increasing pressure on the social sciences to conform to naturalist models during this period. So, for example, naturalism took hold in psychology departments through the increasing influence of behaviorists like edward Tolman, Clark Hull, and B. F. Skinner. Parallel naturalist trends also gained traction in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.11 A brief sketch of the rise of naturalism in Anglophone

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

political science during the twentieth century will help show how this cultural movement revamped the social sciences as well.

naturalism in Modern political science

Like analytic philosophy, the modern discipline of political science was born out of a struggle against an earlier paradigm that was primarily historical and narrative in approach. Also like analytic philosophy, the new discipline that emerged reflected strong naturalist inclinations.12 In the late nineteenth century, the study of politics largely consisted of the construction of large-scale historical narratives. This approach typically assumed that the task of students of politics was to lay out the developmental structure of human history and its progression toward some fixed and final goal. There was, in this vein, everything from the Darwinian-inspired narrative of Henry Jones Ford to the historical accounts of Karl Marx and American Hegelians like John W. Burgess.13 Although these were rival accounts, they all equally assumed that the study of politics consisted of narratives that revealed the progressive stages of history. By contrast, the new discipline of political science that emerged in the early twentieth century, when scholars broke free from these developmental and historical narratives, employed formal, ahistorical explanations modeled on the natural sciences. Scholars in the late nineteenth century had largely considered the study of politics and the study of history to be a single enterprise. But the new political scientists began to distance themselves from history, preferring to emphasize policy-relevant knowledge that was abstracted from historical contexts and articulated the purportedly timeless and essential features of political life.14 Charles Merriam, often credited as one of the founders of modern political science, provides an example of this shift in approach. Beginning in the early 1920s, Merriam called for a political science that focused on classifications, typologies, and atomized beliefs culled from surveys. Like his contemporary Graham Wallas in england, Merriam believed that political science needed to make “broader use of the instruments of social observation in statistics . . . the analytic technique and results of psychology” while forming closer relations with the “disciplines

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of geography, ethnology, biology, sociology and social psychology.”15 Notably, history was not included in Merriam’s list of allied disciplines (an omission that would have been unthinkable only a few decades earlier). Merriam also helped form the Chicago school of political science that trained several of the leading political scientists of the next generation, including Harold Laswell, Harold Gosnell, V. O. Key, and Quincy Wright.16 For the Chicago school, history was not primarily a source of narrative but rather was made up of quantifiable, measurable units. History was a data trove for ahistorical typologies and inductive causal generalizations. Thus, in 1931 Merriam wrote approvingly of a new generation of political scientists that sought to discover the “measurable units of political phenomena.”17 In this way, the new political science revamped its subject matter as quantifiable, atomistic, and ahistorical, making it fit more closely with a certain ideal of the natural sciences. This effort to remake the object of study in politics along naturalist lines also put the emerging method of mass survey research to specific uses. Political polling and survey statistics (as will be discussed later) can be employed by naturalists and antinaturalists alike. Yet initially they were mostly sought out by those of a naturalist persuasion. Mass polling had its origins in nineteenth-century straw polls and market research, but it became a field of intense academic interest during the twentieth century. For example, three major centers for survey research opened during the 1940s: Paul Lazarfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia, the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.18 Although polling itself is by no means necessarily naturalistic, the use of polling data at this time was often touted as being part of the wider effort to transform the subject matter of politics into an ahistorical and measurable discipline consisting of atomistic units. As a reflection of this aspiration, the study of politics was renamed “political science” to convey the hope that its pursuit could discover the general causal laws determining the mechanics of human political life. The message was clear: the study of politics was on the road to joining the ranks of the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. The rise of this new naturalistic political science thus coincided with the formation of a unique disciplinary identity. The period between 1920

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and 1945 saw a great increase in the number of universities that housed political science departments (older disciplinary formations like political history were largely replaced or overshadowed by the new approach), and membership in the American Political Science Association during this period nearly tripled from 1,300 members to 3,300.19 As political science became its own distinct profession, scholars increasingly presented their research as not only quantifiable and ahistorical but also as value free and therefore ready for use by political elites regardless of ideological persuasion. Much of this push was motivated by a wish to contribute to a wider twentieth-century trend toward social engineering that swept not only modern universities but also governments, businesses, and other forms of institutionalized power (a point I return to in greater detail in the next section). To this end, the new political science portrayed itself as a form of expert knowledge analogous to the natural sciences: technical but also instrumental and thereby in principle useful to anyone who might happen to be in power.20 The social-scientific laws that the nascent discipline of political science promised to yield would also allow politicians, policy makers, and social engineers of all varieties to predict and manipulate political fortunes. The growing effort to fashion political science into a policy-relevant discipline also helped motivate a critique of early political science from within its own ranks. In this context, the famous “behavioral revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s was not so much a complete break from Merriam and the Chicago school as it was an attempt to criticize political science’s own ability to meet the naturalist goal of a policy-relevant science.21 The natural sciences had yielded the wonders of modern technology, and political science, too, needed to provide levers and gears for efficaciously controlling political reality. Political science, in other words, needed to produce a technology. Initially, the behavioral revolution formed as a new generation of political scientists confronted the problem of hyperfactualism. Like their forerunners in the Chicago school, the behavioralists also wished to emphasize ahistorical typologies, quantification, and atomistic treatments of political reality. However, unlike their predecessors, the behavioralists believed that the attempt to induce explanatory laws from ever growing amounts of data was wrongheaded. After several decades of the new

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political science, there were simply too many facts and too few theories. In other words, the aspirant science suffered from the problem of hyperfactualism—a problem that had vexed Merriam. In order to resolve this problem, behavioralists (led by the likes of David easton, Robert Dahl, and Gabriel Almond) drew from Carl Hempel’s deductive-nomological theory. Hempel, an analytic philosopher, had intended his model to be only an idealization of the natural sciences and not an actual method for going about the work of science. But behavioralists seized on it as a way to prioritize deductive theory-building over inductive data collection.22 Specifically, behavioralists hoped that the deductive-nomological approach to formulating social theories would yield predictive laws that would overcome the abundance of data and would yield the breakthrough so desperately needed to give political science the prestige of natural science disciplines. Whereas the early political scientists had favored patient inductions to fit ahistorical classifications and typologies, the behavioralists advocated for first constructing deductive laws that could later be tested and verified. The ongoing debate between these two forms of political science— one more inductively minded and the other inclined toward beginning with deductive generalizations—has largely defined the opposing poles in the discipline up to the present day.23 But it is important to see that despite real differences, both these approaches were colored by naturalistic philosophical aspirations. That is, both sought to build an atomistic, formal, ahistorical, and law-governed subject matter analogous to that of the natural sciences. This predominant naturalist trend within political science has a parallel set of developments across the social science disciplines,24 evident most notably in what is perhaps the standard-bearer for naturalism in the social sciences today—neoclassical economics. Although there is not space to do justice to the complex and nuanced history of this discipline here, it is worth noting that like the turn to behavioralism in political science, neoclassical economics attempts to begin from a deductive form of theory-building as a way of achieving scientific footing.25 Neoclassical economics tries to do this through rational choice or decision theory, which formulates certain abstract, idealized axioms about how a certain kind of rational agent makes decisions—a process known

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as “axiomatization.”26 In this way, neoclassical economics constructs a thin or minimalist view of human rationality. In doing so, it has proved to be a powerful tool for modeling how idealized strategic and rational decision-making scenarios might play out, casting light on scenarios as diverse as economic exchange, geopolitical strategy, voter behavior, and other game-like scenarios. Running ahead of myself for a moment, the naturalist pitfall for rational choice theory and neoclassical economics is to mistakenly assume that its idealized model offers a universal, historically transcendent account of the human subject. In later chapters, we will see that Taylor and MacIntyre each argue, contra naturalism, that the actual explanation of human actions requires taking into account the thick beliefs and meanings motivating individual action. Those who engage with neoclassical economics must keep firmly in view the way in which rational choice theory’s axiomatization and idealization of social reality is seriously domain limited and most effective where individual self-understanding approximates the model.27 This is something many economists realize. Yet at present, there are also many who wish to treat neoclassical economic models as examples of a universal science of human behavior—a deductive science of action with aims akin to those of the behavioral revolution of political science.28 Such parallel naturalist stories—ramifying throughout the social science disciplines—are characteristic of a wider intellectual trend that took hold during the twentieth century. A full exposition of this history could fill a large shelf with tomes. Fortunately, my aims are far more modest. enough has been said to give readers a taste for the diverse ways naturalism advanced as a worldview, not only within academic philosophy, but in research programs in the social sciences as well.

naturalism as a form of power

By the mid-twentieth century, naturalist assumptions were firmly entrenched across various academic disciplines. Naturalism informed in diverse and often conflicting ways, not only the schools of thought feeding analytic philosophy, but also the myriad research programs of the social sciences. Nevertheless, naturalism was never simply limited to the walls

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of academia. During the twentieth century, it also infiltrated some of the central institutions of modern power. Naturalism, in this sense, became its own uniquely modern kind of politics. The full story of the shift from the political forms characteristic of the late nineteenth century to those characteristic of the twentieth is much more complex than space affords. Still, looking at some of the key features of this shift not only helps clarify Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s thought but also sheds light on some of the forces shaping the world even today.29 One central feature of this transformation was the way a new politics emerged as naturalistic forms of social knowledge undermined and discredited prior understandings of the state. The tendency at the end of the nineteenth century had been to view the state as a unified expression of national identity, forming the historical end goal of a people. By contrast, political elites in the early twentieth century, inspired by the new forms of political and social science, began to treat the state as a conglomerate of competing and self-interested groups that were not tied together by any prepolitical bond. In this way, an image of the nation-state as a progressive moral and political unity was increasingly replaced by a disaggregated, pluralistic picture of it as atomized units organized by the formal structures of institutions. These changes in the conception of the state rested in part on new theories of the self. Particularly important in this regard were various models of individual rationality that, although they had roots in the early enlightenment, gained greater political cachet during the twentieth century. Drawing from sociology and neoclassical economics, policy makers increasingly conceived of human beings as either self-interested, utilitymaximizers or conformers who make choices in accordance with preexisting social roles and norms.30 In the nineteenth century, statesmen had commonly viewed individuals as participants in the political and moral unity of the state, but now individuals were cast as isolated, selfinterested atoms or as beings defined by social group demographics. These new understandings of the state and its citizens in turn had an enormous impact on actual political practices. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in the bureaucracy. The common nineteenth-century idea of a state as a political unity had sustained a view of bureaucrats as the servants of an identifiable, objective, and shared national good. By

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contrast, the new social sciences produced a different view of bureaucrats as presiders over a collection of contingently related groups. Bureaucrats increasingly presented themselves not as trustees but as experts negotiating competing interests as they pursued the values and preferences furnished by the political process. Their professional authority in this regard was often staked on the success of sciences that purported to articulate value-neutral, factual knowledge of the laws governing human behavior. The ends of the new bureaucracy were thus conceived of as given by the political process, while the means were considered to be the instrumental and factual knowledge of an administrative elite. So too arose a modern division that has become so widespread that it appears to many today as nearly natural or self-evident. This is the division between value-laden “politics” and supposedly value-free “administration.” Administrative bureaucracies and management teams spread into all the major institutions of modernity by presenting themselves as purely instrumental and thereby serviceable to any ideology, business plan, mission statement, or goal. States, corporations, small businesses, and nonprofits all invested heavily in hierarchical, managerial structures. This was made possible by a claim to value-neutral power that has become one of the central features of modern power. Yet this entire approach to social organization was completely contingent on the massive shift away from an older conception of the political community as emerging from a historical narrative of progress. This shift also rested on a belief in the dichotomy between subjective values and objective, scientific knowledge of the means. Managers were scientific experts on the means, who were able to forward any subjective value-mission of a corporation or polity. Likewise, this dramatic shift was evident in the new concept of performance evaluations. Where nineteenth-century bureaucracies had emphasized a morality of “responsibility” to an identifiable common good, naturalist-inspired elites introduced the notion of “accountability” in evaluating outputs through procedures and later through quantifiable performance reviews.31 Measuring outputs, benchmarks, examinations, and other auditing functions thus became an increasingly common way of presenting purportedly objective evaluations of administrators, teachers, and politicians at the end of the twentieth century. Such quantification has been viewed by some historians as a political strategy for coping

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with the increasing deferment of power to the bureaucracy and experts in democratic societies.32 What is certain is that it marked a shift away from the political ethos of the late nineteenth century. In short, modern bureaucratic and administrative power and its inherent instrumentalism have their sources in the new, naturalist social science.33 Of course, this modern conception of the state and its citizens has not been without tensions. In democratic societies, there is an inherent conflict between an ideal of democratic rule and the ever-larger class of bureaucrats, managers, and experts who make the actual policy decisions. Taylor and particularly MacIntyre both have taken issue with this politically elitist dimension of naturalism as a cultural movement. Yet such tensions withstanding, the influence of managerial authority predicated on a naturalistic social science has been a steady presence in democratic countries of the english-speaking world since the turn of the century. This modern, managerial authority has gained strength not merely by criticizing older, traditional forms of authority but also by receiving and interpreting a number of the events of twentieth-century history in specific ways. Many saw the First World War in particular as casting doubt on developmental views of the state by discrediting German idealist and Romantic thought while also making dubious the assumption that history was naturally progressive. No less important, however, was the way that the First World War furnished the conditions for what historian Dorothy Ross has called the rise and implementation of an “engineering” project among political and administrative elites.34 In the nineteenth century, a number of wars had already facilitated increasing interventionist and statist approaches to politics. However, the flourishing of hierarchical bureaucracies steered by the new social sciences was also accelerated by the First World War because of the unprecedented scale of social planning, which involved the mobilization of entire economies and populations. As part of this, there was a great push toward technical intervention and the creation of sciences that could determine large-scale social and political outcomes. A parallel process was carried out in the marketing research of the private sector. Statistics bureaus, government and corporate bureaucracies, and other such organizations all saw rapid growth across europe and the United States at this time.35

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As I already mentioned, statistics need not necessarily be naturalistic (a point I will return to in the final chapter); the point is that during this time they were often put in the service of naturalist ambitions and aims. Indeed, the perceived need for social, economic, and political organization guided by naturalistic, managerial modes was only further heightened by the stress of the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the United States, the New Deal and the Great Society were both heavily colored by the bureaucratic and managerial ambitions of institutions. But, again, the spread of such organizations was by no means exclusive to the public sector as can be seen in the flourishing of naturalistic management strategies in private corporations and businesses at this time. Demand for statistical knowledge in both the private and public sectors boomed at midcentury. Research reflected this demand as social scientists, market strategists, pollsters, journalists, and many others scrambled to clarify the desires and preferences of two of the most influential sociological composites of the modern world—the consumer and the voter. The ensuing market and political research helped create greater sophistication in statistical techniques as the university and other private institutions became increasingly involved in the business of creating the information desired by political parties, business corporations, the media, and other organizations.36 A new kind of expert authority, one that prized naturalistic types of social scientific knowledge over practical know-how or contextual judgment, thus flourished.37 Naturalist assumptions therefore informed modern political practice, giving a new shape to government and financial authorities, who in turn demanded more investment in such research. A kind of reinforcement loop for naturalistic culture, practices, and ideas was formed. Money flooded into research programs from both public and private sources. Universities refashioned certain disciplines (such as politics and economics, which were examined above) in terms of the demand for social engineering knowledge.38 In the United States, the financial support for the new social knowledge came from the most powerful institutions, both public and private. Throughout the twentieth century, wartime budgets and postwar state projects all contributed to the development of various forms of naturalistic social science. At the height of federal funding reached in the 1970s the US government invested an average

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of a billion dollars per year on commissioned research for use in social science–guided planning; during the same period the National Science Foundation became a major source of funding for techniques and methods modeled on the natural sciences.39 The scope of these efforts were spread abroad during the Cold War, in attempts to combat Soviet power through the liberalization and modernization of poorer nations in the hope of inoculating them against totalitarianism and communism.40 Many private foundations were no less eager to invest money in the quest to establish a social science more like the natural sciences. The Rockefeller Foundation hoped to nurture an emergent behavioral political science in the early part of the century by funding the American Political Science Association and the Social Science Research Council (organized by Charles Merriam). During the 1920s alone, the Rockefeller Foundation invested $40 million in social science research, and, along with other groups like the Russell Sage and Carnegie Foundations, made further contributions in the 1930s.41 Later, as the Rockefeller Foundation reduced its donations, the Ford Foundation took its place in funding the new conception of social science among academic and policy elites. The drive for naturalistic social knowledge has thus been among the best-funded intellectual programs of the last century. And although a social science akin to the natural sciences has eluded researchers, its cultural and political forms have nonetheless successfully spread throughout society. Indeed, the widespread dissemination of the political authority of naturalism has led some historians to speak of a “mainstream” that by midcentury had begun to “marginalize alternative forms of reflection.”42 In sum, naturalism in the twentieth century was always something much larger than just an intellectual movement in philosophy and social science. It was also a cultural-political form. Its ideas informed institutions and practices. It was a form of power. This was the world in which Taylor and MacIntyre first began to reflect on the social sciences. And amid the rise of naturalism, both of these philosophers gravitated early on toward the British New Left—a dynamic but short-lived movement that was strenuously antinaturalist and opposed reducing human life to mechanistic and impersonal causes. The British New Left, as an incubator of antinaturalist sentiment, is where my account of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s own personal intellectual development begins.

C H A P T e R

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th e f i r s t B r iti s h n e w l e f t ’ s r e B e l l i o n Ag A i n s t n At u r A li s M

Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s calls for an alternative to naturalism have their origins in the 1950s and their encounter with a group of scholar-activists that came to be known as the “first British New Left.”1 Led by such figures as e. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, this group sought to articulate a more humanistic form of Marxism.2 The originality of this movement lay in its critique of both Western liberal democracies and Soviet communist regimes as being implicated in mechanistic and naturalistic worldviews. British New Left thinkers advanced this critique by adopting a nonreductive account of human agency, which allowed them to denounce the mechanistic tendencies in both the east and West. The result was a novel intertwining of antinaturalist social theory with a humanist critique of the two major political ideologies of the day. This New Left synthesis of social theory and humanistic politics provided Taylor and MacIntyre with a basic and enduring agenda for their own work in the social sciences. Both of their philosophies of social science would remain tied to a humanistic, antinaturalist critique of modern patterns of thought and institutions of power. Taylor, who had arrived in Oxford as a young Rhodes scholar in 1952, helped found and edit one of the New Left’s major journals, Universities and Left Review (later the New Left Review). The influence of New Left ideas on his mature work was indelible. As he later put it, “[The New Left’s] way of 24

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thinking about politics not in a narrow and technocratic way but in a broader way really changed my outlook. I do not think that I have ever changed from that.”3 And while the young MacIntyre remained slightly more aloof toward the New Left, he nonetheless spent a substantial portion of the 1950s publishing in its outlets, befriending Thompson, and sitting on the editorial board of the New Reasoner, one of the movement’s major journals.4 The New Left drew MacIntyre, as it did Taylor, through its rebellion against both Soviet communism and Western capitalism “in the name of a conception of human nature”—a debt MacIntyre has continued to affirm.5 As boys and young men, both Taylor and MacIntyre had other, prephilosophical influences (e.g., Romantic poetry for Taylor, Gaelic storytelling for MacIntyre, and the Christian religion for both), but the New Left is where such humanistic commitments were made part of an explicit and sophisticated political philosophy.6 Yet despite both men’s New Left inheritance, each also came to the independent conclusion that achieving the group’s goals would require transcending the limitations of Marxist philosophy. This would mean that the New Left, insofar as it remained entangled in Marxism, would have to be overcome. While the New Left offered a fundamental breakthrough in terms of the relationship between social science, philosophy, and politics, its Marxist commitments were too problematic. The task then was to see how a creative and often sharply critical dialogue with the ideas of the New Left served as the basis for Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s respective calls for a new social science. If the following analysis is correct, the New Left, by setting a certain political and philosophical agenda, should be considered as having made an absolutely vital contribution, but it should also be recognized as having been ultimately inadequate as an alternative to social scientific and political practice today. I will first elaborate on the invaluable British New Left inheritance before turning to the reasons each philosopher had for refusing to make it his final intellectual home.

the new left’s critique of naturalism

While the first New Left was highly sympathetic to Marx, it was distinguished in part from many other Marxist groups of that time in that it

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found the Stalinism ascendant in the Soviet Union to be philosophically untenable, politically unacceptable, and morally repugnant. Stalin had championed an interpretation of Marxism that was crudely naturalist. This naturalism was apparent in Stalin’s theoretical writings, in which he asserted that society could be explained “in accordance with the laws of movement of matter.”7 Stalin believed the only difference was that, while physical matter was determined by atomic structures, social life was the product of the material and economic structures of a given historical period. This meant that the beliefs and intentions of particular individuals were the epiphenomenon of deeper causal mechanisms determined by a specific mode of production. As Stalin put it, “The origin of social ideas, social theories, political views, and political institutions should not be sought for in the ideas, theories, views and political institutions themselves but in the conditions of the material life of society.”8 In this way, Stalin espoused a social science that (like so many forms of naturalism) was meant to successfully achieve for politics what the natural sciences had achieved for the world of brute objects. And although it is colored by Marxist theory, Stalin’s political thought also clearly shares family resemblances with other forms of naturalism explored above. For example, it not only expresses suspicion of uniquely human properties of reality-like intentions and beliefs but also shares in the goal of uncovering general laws that determine social and political life. Like other forms of naturalism, Stalin’s theory was also never intended to remain an idle or speculative enterprise. Rather, its ambition was to provide party leaders and technocrats with an instrumental technology of power to reshape society. Thus Stalinism was used to authorize a hierarchical, bureaucratic organization of society, in which elites engineered the future socialist society according to supposedly indubitable laws. Stalin’s naturalist social theory encouraged Soviet leaders to treat particular citizens as objects susceptible to scientific manipulation in such a way that what began as social theory ended in the butchery of the gulags and the purges. This complex dynamic between naturalist forms of social science and antihumanistic politics is what the New Left first diagnosed and found deeply troubling. Indeed, the New Left’s formation in 1956 was in large part an outraged response to the Soviet suppression of Hungarian students, as well as to leaked reports of Nikita Krushchev’s “secret

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speech” confirming the horrors of the Stalinist purges.9 The deep insight of the New Left was to see that naturalist theory and political practice were complexly interdependent. For example, e. P. Thompson criticized Stalinist social theory for “belittling” conscious human agency by reducing it to impersonal economic laws that helped underwrite political atrocities.10 He then exhorted those who wished to rescue Marxism from Stalinist interpretation to reject ways of explaining human life that were “passive and impersonal” by insisting on the “activity and agency” of human beings.11 Crucial to Thompson’s vision of a humanistic Marxism was a central role for the creativity and rationality of individual human beings—themes that were clearly present in the early work of both Taylor and MacIntyre. Taylor was an integral part of the New Left’s effort to disentangle Marxism from naturalist and reductive social theories. For instance, he introduced the leading members of the New Left to Marx’s early, more humanistic writings. Taylor had discovered these writings (which had not yet been translated into english) while he was still a student on a trip to Paris.12 And this discovery of a humanistic Marx became a watershed moment in the life of the first British New Left since it furnished the group with an alternative to the later Marx and engels, who had both increasingly slid into naturalistic forms of social theorizing. The New Left would frequently cite the unfinished work of the early Marx as an inspiration for a future socialist theory uncorrupted by naturalism. Similarly, in articles Taylor wrote for New Left journals, he sounded New Left themes, calling for a “third way” between Soviet communism and Western liberalism, as well as for a new social theory that was humanistic as opposed to scientistic and technocratic. But unlike Thompson, Taylor believed from the outset that the accomplishment of a social humanism would require a more thoroughgoing critique of Marx. This is evident as early as 1957’s “Marxism and Humanism,” in which Taylor argued that Stalinist communism’s drive toward social engineering had roots in a deficiency within Marxism itself. According to Taylor, Marx had argued that communism was not an abstract ideal but was the result of the actual activities of the working class as it arose to overcome capitalism. The working class, in this view, was the sole creative agent of this phase of history. This meant that the Soviet Union had been able to use

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Marxist social theory to open the door to a situation in which all creative agency within human history was vested in a vanguard class (initially in the working class, later in the party, and eventually in the sole figure of Stalin). As self-appointed vanguards, Stalin and others could claim to be substitutes for the working class, who were entitled to actively bring about the future society in a way akin to how an engineer manipulates the objects of the natural world. As Taylor phrased it, if the “subjective, creative side of man” were vested in the vanguard alone, then opponents of the revolution, “imagined or real, ceased to be really human” and could “be swept aside like obstacles, as a bulldozer removes the unevenness in the terrain.”13 What was needed, Taylor argued, was a more humanistic socialism that was guided by a less problematic theory of transition to a postcapitalist world.14 Although this early criticism of Marxism put Taylor in conflict with those like Thompson who adhered to a harder Marxist line, it also reinforced the basic and shared New Left aspiration to develop a humanistic social science and politics that avoided replacing “capitalism by yet another form of paternal bureaucracy.”15 Taylor’s search for forms of social democracy beyond the cramped Cold War borders of the liberal-communist split has arguably become one of the basic driving forces for his political philosophy ever since. Similar New Left themes and concerns are found in MacIntyre’s early writings. Like Taylor, Thompson, and other New Left thinkers, MacIntyre believed that Stalinism operated on the assumption that human agency was reducible to the deep economic structures of materialist history. Soviet party elites, gulags, and the forced industrialization of the peasants were all justified as scientifically necessary parts of the mechanics of history that would give bloody birth to the future utopia. Likewise, MacIntyre insisted that liberal, capitalist democracies were pervaded by an “enormous faith in the ‘levers’ of social engineering” that eliminated anything distinctive about human behavior.16 In liberal democracies, this faith in technocratic sciences of human behavior was evident among top politicians and bureaucrats, corporate chiefs, economists, and managerial gurus. Thus, in both the United States and the Soviet Union, MacIntyre claimed that life was increasingly dominated by a politics in which the “mode of understanding human beings resembles the mode of

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understanding natural objects in that to understand is to control.”17 In this way, like members of the New Left more generally, MacIntyre pursued an elusive third way that was at the same time both humanistic and antinaturalist. MacIntyre’s early writings stand out even among the New Left for arguing early on that naturalism was not simply an issue within traditional politics but had entered the practices of care of self. In terms of the latter, MacIntyre argued that technocratic, naturalist forms of human science had infiltrated the psychological practices of the day, reshaping individuals’ moral outlooks by giving them instrumental and mechanistic ideas of themselves. For example, in his 1958 book The Unconscious, MacIntyre argued that certain strains of Freudian analysis had become encumbered by deterministic, neurophysiological theories of human psychological life. What needed salvaging, according to MacIntyre, were the features of Freud’s psychoanalysis that did not crudely eliminate human agency. Thus, for MacIntyre, the problem of naturalistic social theory extended far beyond Cold War politics and into the modes of individualistic selfcare that proliferated in modern societies. MacIntyre’s New Left writings were also tied to a critique of ethics that he would return to much later in his most well-known work, After Virtue. Specifically, MacIntyre argued that naturalistic theories of human life had not only bolstered social control by technocrats but also wreaked havoc on individual moral reasoning. This was because deterministic views of human agency had a tendency to reduce moral responsibility to causal structures, at worst rendering “moral life as traditionally conceived [into] a charade” and at best producing dualistic conceptions of moral agency.18 A dualistic view of moral life was one in which a ghost of pure volitional agency floated within the purely deterministic machine of the body. In ethics this gave rise to the fiction of an utterly autonomous ego: voluntarism, the will-to-power, and (less grandly) consumer preference all became plausible if not attractive visions of moral life in societies awash in varieties of naturalistic theory. The young MacIntyre saw the Homo economicus of capitalism as being the result of a naturalist view of the human body that left the ego disembodied and radically subjective. Thus, MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s engagements with the first British New Left gave them each a way of framing one of the basic problems

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facing modernity: the problem of the human sciences and their relationship to the central forms of modern power and practice. After their engagement with the first British New Left, both philosophers would retain a profound and sweeping idea of the reach and effects of naturalism not merely as an abstract or formal theory but as power. Likewise, they would also both have, albeit in a form that was not yet philosophically defended, a guiding alternative inspiration to naturalism: that is, a view of human life that asserted the basic dignity and creative agency of human beings. As we shall see, the New Left’s pitting of a beleaguered humanism against the various behemoths of modern naturalism would become a central, even key theme in the mature work of both of these thinkers. But neither philosopher remained under the banner of the New Left’s Marxist theoretical agenda. The question is, why didn’t Marxism provide the basic route out of the problems of naturalism as many of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s New Left comrades believed it would? The New Left gave both Taylor and MacIntyre a basic agenda of questions, but it failed to furnish them with definitive answers. More generally speaking, if Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s reasons for leaving the New Left were valid, then Marxism cannot be accepted as the best philosophical home for a social science that is antinaturalist.

the failure of Marxism: reasons for leaving the new left Behind

At the heart of both Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s diagnoses of the failure of the New Left lies the failure of Marxism. The first British New Left had hoped to recover and develop a humanistic Marxism, one that took a new route forward away from the horrors of Soviet Communism but that also retained Marx’s critique of capitalism. This band of scholaractivists had hoped that some version of Marx’s philosophy—inspired perhaps by his early manuscripts—might still form the basis for an adequate social theory of modernity. Yet as the years passed, both Taylor and MacIntyre would grow increasingly pessimistic about whether Marxism had the resources necessary for such a theoretical or political position. Indeed, both came to see Marxism as largely part of the problem facing modern social theory and political practice.

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The first British New Left is widely considered to have faltered in simple practical and political terms. Stuart Hall, for instance, observed that it failed on its own terms as a political movement. As he retrospectively put the problem, “The ‘first’ New Left, however mistakenly, thought of itself as a movement rather than simply a journal,” and the failure to build a “historic bloc” amounted to a breakdown of one of its most basic goals.19 While both MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s respective assessments support Hall’s critique, they are also tied to a much deeper criticism of the Marxist tradition and its theoretical resources. Indeed, for strikingly similar reasons, both Taylor and MacIntyre maintained that the New Left’s quest for a revival of Marxist theory was ultimately in vain. This failure can be thought of as occurring at the level of Marxist social theory as well as with respect to its particular brand of ethics. First, both Taylor and MacIntyre came to believe that Marxism as a tradition had failed to generate a viable social theory. MacIntyre, in an essay from the early 1960s, argued that the Marxist tradition was split by two general tendencies, both of which failed to generate a workable theory of the transition from capitalism to postcapitalism. On one side were the crudely naturalist social theories advanced by the likes of engels and Stalin. These naturalist theories usually rested on the idea of a structural material base determining the consciousness and actions of particular agents. These theorists expected that a mounting crisis in capitalist economies would generate a distinctive class identity and revolutionary consciousness among workers. Capitalism would create its own gravediggers because the extreme material stratification of the capitalist economy would inevitably generate revolutionary action in the proletariat class.20 Of course, these crudely naturalist social theories were not simply frustrated by the actual events of twentieth-century history (though they certainly proved false in this regard). As MacIntyre noted, the deeper source of error was a naturalist conception of human agency, by which beliefs and actions were explained mechanistically according to certain inevitable laws. Contrary to this assumption, beliefs were the result of the creative capacities of particular individuals who were reasoning within a context and were not simply fixed by economic and social realities. For this reason, the working classes in Western societies had proved to be no more radicalized by poverty than by affluence. Nor did their political

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identity necessarily come to center around a Marxist, proletariat sense of self. To the contrary, during the twentieth century many workers in capitalist societies tied their hopes and aspirations to a conservative avowal of capitalism and not to revolutionary socialism. To make matters worse, “proletarianization,” far from making it “necessary for workers to resist,” often deprived them of the resources necessary for resistance.21 These unexpected developments were possible because human beings (in this case, the individuals who made up the working class) were able to interpret their situations creatively and by their own lights. There is no fixed direction to history because there is no fixed direction to human beliefs and actions. Marxism’s theory of history was thus rendered problematic by the false naturalist assumption that society is governed by fixed laws that set in motion natural phases. In a related line of criticism, MacIntyre argued that the actions of capitalism’s owner and managerial classes had also not been nearly as predictable as the crudely naturalist strain of Marxism proposed. Rather, capitalists had been able to avert future economic crises precisely by regulating aspects of the economy. In this way, too, the law-like model of mechanistic Marxism was unable to cope with the reality of individuals creatively changing their beliefs and modifying their behaviors within capitalist societies. This regulated economy foiled the expectations of many Marxists, who forecast that revolutions in London, Paris, and New York would result from the inevitable pauperization of the working and middle classes under the extreme laissez-faire economic regimes of the nineteenth century. Instead these expectations were indefinitely postponed or, worse still, given over to the violently impatient social engineering of Stalin and his admirers.22 If history wasn’t following the natural pattern predicted by Marxist theory, then technocratic manipulation would have to achieve this end goal by force. Yet, as we have already seen, the first British New Left vigorously rejected all such naturalist variants of Marxist theory. And they were not entirely alone in this rejection either—Trotskyites and other more peripheral Marxist groups, too, were skeptical of this naturalist strain. But, according to MacIntyre, the problem with even such antinaturalist critiques from within Marxism was that they failed to provide an alternative theory for how the transition from capitalism to revolutionary socialism

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would occur. Instead, the assertion was simply that individuals would accomplish this radical transformation of capitalist society through a sheer act of the will. In other words, MacIntyre believed that Marxism was caught between a deterministic naturalism and an anemic voluntarism that lacked any adequate social theory of transition. The former maintained that socialism was an inevitability, while the latter insisted that socialism would happen just as soon as the working class and its allies willed it. The problem, according to MacIntyre, was that this split between two unsatisfactory alternatives was not anomalous but actually constituted the general “Marxist pattern.”23 Marxism was caught between a hard-nosed naturalist analysis and a fuzzy voluntarism in which changes happened, not because of the materialist theory of history, but simply because individuals willed it. Similarly, Taylor would also increasingly question whether any cogent Marxist social theory for the transition to postcapitalism could be developed.24 Akin to MacIntyre, he would note that Marxism had always been animated by two opposing drives. On the one hand, Marxism had been presented as an explanatory social theory that shared much of the enlightenment’s quest to discover a technocratic, naturalistic science of society. This scientific aspect of Marxism promised a definitive account of the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. On the other hand, Marxism was also motivated by a Romantic, humanist commitment. This was evident in its theory of liberation, according to which human history was animated by a process of the increased humanization and maturing of the species. The human species would become gradually more human throughout history because it would gain greater control over both nature and its own social relations, allowing humanity to actualize its inborn potential and unique creative capacities. ever less beholden to mere animal survival needs, the human species would be increasingly emancipated by a situation in which work was not simply a means to existence but a creative, self-expressive end in itself.25 The problem, according to Taylor, is that these two essential features of Marxist thought are at odds with one another and are ultimately philosophically incompatible. This is because Marxism as a scientific explanation of society relies on impersonal, mechanistic conceptions, while the ethical and humanist aspiration asserts the centrality of human creativity

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and agency. In other words, one side of Marxism insists that history unfolds according to certain predictable laws, while the other maintains that humans have the creative capacity to choose their own way forward. Within the Marxist tradition, these two sides have often formed opposing camps. Sometimes the naturalistic side would receive greater emphasis (as in engels) and other times the humanistic theory of liberation (as in the early Marx or in the first British New Left) would be emphasized. And yet Taylor believed Marxism as a political movement couldn’t abandon either side “because its political punch precisely depends on holding onto both.”26 Lose the science, and the humanistic dream of full creative potential becomes vaguely utopian. But drop the account of creative potentialities, and the science side reduces human history to the lifeless workings of a machine. In sum, the seemingly insoluble dilemma of Marxist social theory is how to account for the purported objective, scientific necessity of the breakdown of capitalism, which would at the same time bring forth a society of creative individuals, freely reaching their full potential. Taylor variously considered how Marxism might resolve this goal, by either asserting a teleological plan that guides history or, similarly, putting forward a functional account of universal human needs that create tendencies toward certain outcomes. However, both solutions would mean dropping the usual mechanistic, law-like forms of naturalism. Furthermore, Taylor also noted that both these potential solutions are unsatisfactory as they would involve Marxism positing a universal historical subject for whom the plan unfolds. Yet one of Marxism’s central claims is that the logic of history progresses in spite of and even due to the fact that the agents involved are largely unaware of it. So according to Taylor the problem of to whom, in particular, the plans can be attributed remains intractable in these theoretical scenarios.27 This leads to the second way in which both MacIntyre and Taylor deemed the quest to revive Marxist philosophy to be ultimately defective—namely, in terms of its humanistic ethical theory. Although he was extremely sympathetic to its humanism, Taylor gradually began to argue that this ethic was in no way unique to Marxism. To the contrary, the historical sources for Marxism’s expressive humanism were to be found in the Romantic movement (a tradition that Taylor would eventually come to definitively favor over Marxism).28

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More important still was the fact that Marxist theory had certain features that seriously compromised its humanism and threatened to turn it into its opposite. “Marxism suffers from being an extremely inadequate humanism,” Taylor wrote in one of his last essays (presented as part of a retrospective on the first British New Left) on the subject.29 One problem with Marxist humanism, Taylor argued, was that it promised a society that would ultimately bring deep political conflict to an end. Overcoming capitalism would be the final, dramatically violent political event in history. In this sense, human politics was perfectible. Thus, when it was faced with intractable, incorrigible, and imperfect specimens of humanity, Marxism could quickly turn into its opposite. Because its future conception of human unity held forth such a lofty aspiration, the impatience with humans in their present form could become overwhelming. Noble philanthropy could thus turn into violent misanthropy. According to Taylor, this problem with Marxist ethical theory arose from its inadequate, Rousseau-inspired view of human sociality as governable by a general, unanimous will. Unable to secure nonconflicting unanimity among fellow citizens, Marxism often drifted into a system that involved the centralized enforcement of power and the substitution of a vanguard ruling party for the future, unanimous general will that never arrived.30 MacIntyre’s critique of Marxist ethics bears some similarities to Taylor’s, insofar as both saw the problem of Marxism as being its inability to retain a consistent humanism. However, MacIntyre made his critique of Marxist humanism in light of the major traditions of enlightenment ethics developed within liberal and capitalist societies. This meant that MacIntyre ultimately came to the conclusion that Marxism was in fact another child of the social world in which it was born, that is, capitalism. As such Marxism lacked a “distinctive” moral theory, instead vacillating incoherently between Kantian-type claims of the absolute value of individuals and Benthamite utilitarian reasoning that treated individuals, who were considered part of a means-to-ends calculus whose goal was to maximize social utility, as potentially expendable.31 Was a Marxist revolution proposed in the name of the absolute dignity and rights of individuals? If so, how could it retain its revolutionary commitments to class warfare and the violent elimination of bourgeois opposition? Or was the Marxist revolution instead justified by a utilitarian calculus? If so, would

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this not seriously undermine its claims to humanism by allowing for a consequentialist approach that posited any one human life as expendable in the name of wider social utility? According to MacIntyre, Marxism had never developed a moral theory that could ground the revolutionary transition. It either remained Kantian and rights based, largely conserving the given liberal order, or it became a utilitarian philosophy of revolution that ran afoul of its basic humanist commitments. In the latter case, the bloody means are justified by the future ends. (“You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,” as the old French adage gruesomely suggests.) MacIntyre further claimed that during the twentieth century, whenever they came close to power, Marxists opted for a Weberian moral voluntarism, according to which a technocratic monopoly on the use of violence became the governing ethic. This, together with its failings as a social theory, finally led MacIntyre to conclude—after many years of work trying to salvage it—that “Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition.”32 But such a declaration also amounts to calling the first British New Left’s basic project fatally flawed, for the first New Left’s central ambition had been to devise a Marxist-inspired social theory that was both antinaturalist and fully humanist. In sum, Taylor and MacIntyre abandoned the first British New Left because they both came to believe that it had failed to revive some version of a more humanistic Marxist theory on two interconnected levels. First, it had failed to achieve a social theory of the transition to a postcapitalist society that was not steeped in either problematic naturalist assumptions or the ultimately unhelpful and vacuous assertions of voluntarism. And second, because the Marxist tradition was unable to give a consistently vigorous defense of its humanism, it also remained in the lurch with respect to ethics. In practice, Marxist societies were distinguished not by increasingly egalitarian social relations but the most vicious kinds of bureaucratic hierarchy. The aspiration to a Marxist-inspired framework therefore had to be abandoned as bad social theory and bad ethics. And these two were interconnected. Likewise, the humanism animating both MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s philosophical projects increasingly made them withdraw from the first British New Left’s efforts, which for all their dynamism and genuine zeal were unable to provide satisfactory

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philosophical resolutions to these problems. The first British New Left’s very goal of an antinaturalist, humanistic social theory required abandoning Marxism and the New Left. The movement had ultimately provided the grounds for its own transcendence. Yet the first New Left’s theoretical resources were not simply too entangled in the problematic legacy of Marx. They were also woefully underdeveloped philosophically. Thinkers like Thompson, the young Taylor, the young MacIntyre, and others had all asserted creative agency as a better model for understanding human social and political life. But they had done next to nothing to actually philosophically justify such an account. The rival view of human nature was largely assumed and then deployed argumentatively to make the claim that it fit better with the actual course of human history. But no philosophical defense of this view of human agency had really been offered. Because of both its strengths and inadequacies, the first New Left set an agenda of basic problems for both young philosophers as they went forward. What was needed was an approach to social science that was at once able to fully overcome the defects of naturalism while not running afoul of the ethics of humanism. These general outlines, first articulated (however provisionally) by the New Left, in some senses set the basic trajectory of these two thinkers’ careers. And although neither Taylor nor MacIntyre remained within the British New Left for very long, they would never abandon its sense of mission as a final, beleaguered bulwark of humanism against a tidal wave of the politics of naturalism.

C H A P T e R

3

A n A ly ti c p h i lo so p h y A s A w e A p o n f o r At tAc k i n g n At u r A li s M

Very early on in their intellectual careers, both Taylor and MacIntyre were set on a path distinctly shaped by the successes and failures of the first British New Left. From that point forward they were seeking a form of social and political theory that rejected mechanistic, impersonal modes of explanation in favor of one joined to a politics capable of recognizing the basic moral worth and creativity of human agents. Yet a crucial part of their intellectual development involved the influence of an entirely different school of thought, one traditionally hostile to Marxism—linguistic or analytic philosophy. At midcentury, both philosophers encountered linguistic analysis on its home turf in Britain. Although during this time the influence of Viennese-style logical positivism was waning, the Oxford ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and, to some extent, the late Wittgenstein was at the very height of its power. For Taylor the exposure came after his history studies at McGill, when he was granted admission to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1952.1 There he discovered the work of ordinary language philosophers like Ryle and Austin, while he also debated with A. J. Ayer and the logical positivists. He also wrote his doctoral thesis under Isaiah Berlin and Wittgenstein’s acolyte elizabeth Anscombe.2 Likewise, MacIntyre, although he was always a rebellious outsider with respect to analytic philosophy, was also 38

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heavily shaped early on by this tradition of thought. Specifically, during his graduate studies and early years as a professor, he encountered Ayer’s students, engaged with the work of Ryle, and internalized some of the insights of the late Wittgenstein.3 Both philosophers show significant marks of analytic philosophical influence in ways that are crucial to understanding the basis for a new social science and political theory. And yet some readers may object that neither Taylor nor MacIntyre was ever much of an analytic philosopher. Certainly both expressed very early on a critical ambivalence, even active hostility, toward the analytic tradition. This is hardly surprising. After all, both men were knee-deep in the British New Left’s Marxism, a philosophy that analytic thinkers rarely deigned worthy of notice. Furthermore, from their earliest intellectual formations, Taylor and MacIntyre were both keenly interested in Continental streams of thought such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism that were, by analytic lights, equally dubious. (The hugely important influence of the phenomenological tradition on Taylor in particular is treated in the next chapter.) At present, the key point is that despite a certain critical hostility toward the mainstream of linguistic philosophy, both thinkers were nonetheless significantly indebted to its approach. Specifically, both Taylor and MacIntyre incorporated some of the features of Oxford ordinary language analysis in their early efforts to discredit naturalism within the human sciences. Thus, official disavowals and critical remarks by Taylor and MacIntyre withstanding, I will argue that both thinkers were drawn to certain aspects of linguistic analysis and the ordinary language school of thought in particular. Neither ever became full-blown ordinary language philosophers, but both drew on this school of thought creatively in order to advance their basic philosophical agenda within the debates over social science. What attracted Taylor and MacIntyre to ordinary language analysis was manifold. First, there was a more superficial, largely strategic or opportunistic component to both thinkers’ employment of ordinary language analysis at this time. At midcentury, analytic philosophy simply was the reigning philosophical language in the english-speaking world, and any philosophical project that aimed to reverberate among a majority of Anglophone philosophers would need to use its language.

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Indeed, Taylor later admitted to such a strategic motive, noting that he seized upon analytic philosophy as a way of “reformulating MerleauPonty’s ideas in the rigorous style esteemed by Austin and others.”4 And yet this purely instrumental account of the appeal of analytic philosophy is inadequate. There were at least two further points of attraction that require a more extended consideration. First, as will become clear below, Taylor and MacIntyre both realized that the rigor of ordinary language conceptual analysis could provide tremendously powerful immanent critiques of naturalist research programs and approaches in the human sciences. Ordinary language analysis consisted of a sophisticated assessment of the conceptual logics immanent in a given theory, which could furnish determined critics with an extremely potent way to search for and reveal contradictions internal to particular research programs. Indeed, Taylor and MacIntyre used the techniques of ordinary language analysis to attack nothing short of the biggest and most prestigious naturalist research programs in the social sciences at that particular time—psychological behaviorism and political science behavioralism (a crucial set of critical projects analyzed in greater detail below). Second, precisely because it tended to ignore deeper metaphysical questions about human nature and to advance in a piecemeal fashion, ordinary language analysis afforded a certain flexibility. Both philosophers began their quests for a humanistic social science in the midst of the fallout from the first British New Left and its restless search for a viable theory of social science and politics. Taylor had already committed himself to a view of human nature derived from Merleau-Ponty and Catholic thought. Likewise, both men were sympathetic to a vision of human agency that was Romantic in its view of human beings as essentially creative and had appeared among other places in the never fully realized work of the early Marx. Yet we also saw in the prior chapter that neither philosopher believed a complete humanistic social theory had been developed that could overcome certain key dilemmas. Rather, part of the drama of the first New Left was the urgent search for a theory that did not exist—at least not in any fully formulated version. In short, Taylor and MacIntyre each had a sketchy program, some inspirations, and a set of intuitions, but neither had anything like a full-blown philosophical alternative to the social sciences of the day.

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In this regard, ordinary language philosophy’s very piecemeal approach (which both philosophers would later go on to criticize) gave them ways of conducting sharp antinaturalist critiques while having only a provisional account of a rival conception of human nature. As I will explore at length in later chapters, both men would go on to articulate their own positive visions. But for at least a short time, ordinary language philosophy allowed them a way to go on the offensive against naturalism, even while each philosopher’s humanistic commitments mostly involved simply asserting a basic nonreductive vision of human agency as creative and purposeful. This account also helps explain the seeming paradox of how both Taylor and MacIntyre could remain on the periphery of analytic philosophy, often denouncing it, while nevertheless incorporating some of its techniques very deeply into their own approaches.5 What is required then is an examination of the antinaturalist uses to which Taylor and MacIntyre put ordinary language analysis. Specifically, how they employed this approach to attack two major naturalist research programs of the day (the influence of ordinary language analysis on their work is also evident in their criticisms of other naturalist programs such as cognitive psychology, in Taylor’s case, and neurophysiological reductivism, in MacIntyre’s). Understanding the resources and limitations of ordinary language philosophy is the next component in the story I am tracing: the emergence of a conceptual basis for a new, antinaturalist social science and political theory. Ultimately, the quest for such a philosophy would drive both Taylor and MacIntyre well beyond the borders of the analytic school of thought, but not before they had incorporated some of its strengths into their philosophical program.

how ordinary language Analysis inspired Antinaturalist critiques

I will begin by briefly examining ordinary language as a school of thought more generally. Ordinary language analysis, an approach within the broader analytic tradition that emerged in the postwar period, was developed by Austin and Ryle. The work of the late Wittgenstein is often cited as helping to corroborate their assumptions. At the heart of ordinary language analysis was a shift by analytic philosophers away from

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the construction of formal, ideal philosophical languages and toward an analysis of language as it is used by everyday agents. Ordinary language philosophers like Austin and Ryle rejected the early classics of analytic philosophy, such as Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica and Carnap’s Aufbau, on the grounds that they mistakenly assumed there was a hidden, universal grammar beneath the surface of conventional languages. Instead, following the late Wittgenstein, Ryle exhorted philosophers to shift their attention to the informal logics of what he called “ordinary language.” Ordinary language referred to the standard speech of a given community and could include the technical jargon of specialists as well as the vernacular of everyday life. What concerned Ryle in both types of linguistic communities was the underlying logic governing the use of concepts. Learning a language, Ryle believed, was like learning to use “coins, stamps, checks and hockey-sticks,” as it required “learning to do certain things” and not others.6 Language was made up of an infinitely varying set of games that one learned to play by the governing grammar or logical rules. And the role of philosophy in all this, according to Ryle, was not to construct its own ideal language reserved for philosophers but to alert language users of the logical rules entailed by their own concepts, correcting mistakes and offering useful distinctions.7 Philosophy was in this view to be a kind of referee of the conceptual logics informing the uses of language. In a similar vein, Austin turned his back on early analytic philosophy’s attempt to build a universal, metalanguage of philosophical analysis. Instead, he focused his analysis of concepts on the ways in which people actually used speech. Famously, Austin conducted research into what he called “speech acts” in order to logically parse the many ways in which people actually performed actions with words. By scrutinizing the logics inherent in particular uses of language, philosophers like Austin could gain critical leverage over what constituted uses and abuses of language on its own terms. For example, Austin argued that early analytic philosophers, who had maintained that “the business of a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact,’” were misunderstanding the very logic inherent in their own uses of language.8 What they were completely missing, according to Austin, were the ways

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in which language was not simply descriptive but rather the performance of various classes of action. Therefore, ordinary language had a critical dimension. Its normativity was a result of an analysis of the logics immanent to a language community. Like Ryle, the philosopher was one who determined when inconsistencies or muddle had seeped into the conceptual logic of a given linguistic community. This ordinary language approach was the one adopted by MacIntyre in his critiques of the social sciences prior to After Virtue. In a 1972 interview, MacIntyre argued that “philosophical analysis” should come to the aid of social and political research by scrutinizing “ordinary agents in their practices—pre-scientific, non-scientific, and scientific” and overcoming “conceptual difficulties” present in their language.9 In addition, he argued that an analysis of conceptual distinctions in ordinary language entailed an interpretive conception of the social sciences that was incompatible with naturalistic explanations—a point returned to in greater detail below.10 Although considerably less vocal about the connection, Taylor has also affirmed that his now classic critique of psychological behaviorism, The Explanation of Behavior, was written in the style and approach of Austin and like-minded philosophers.11 Thus, he too made key use of the ordinary language approach. Ordinary language maintained that if a research program had run afoul of the logics entailed by its own concepts, a philosopher could make a powerful case for revamping or even abandoning those concepts in favor of more philosophically consistent ones. Thus, a philosophical critique of language could force the radical reconceptualization of ideas cherished by a particular group of researchers. This ordinary language analysis inspired both MacIntyre and Taylor to employ a form of philosophy whose major task was the logical and conceptual assessment of language as it was actually used by particularly prominent research communities in the social sciences. And although an unusually informed reader can detect in Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s early criticisms of social science the basic agenda of the New Left, on the surface these efforts appear to be straightforward forms of ordinary language analysis. How ordinary language became a weapon that could be wielded against naturalist concepts—and the inherent limitations of this approach—will

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become clearer by looking in detail at Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s respective critiques of behaviorism in psychology and behavioralism in modern political science.

critiquing Midcentury psychology’s reigning paradigm of Behaviorism

In its heyday, psychological behaviorism was of far greater importance than its being limited to psychology departments might imply. This was not only because (much like rational choice and neoclassical economics today) it held the title of standard-bearer for a more rigorous and scientific form of social research but also because at midcentury behaviorism had a well-funded political front. These psychologists advocated and carried out experiments in engineering human behavior through various models of stimulus and response that often purported to eliminate the need to include beliefs and intentions as part of the explanation of human actions. Instead, behaviorists believed human action could be studied as being primarily determined by various triggers or stimuli in the environment. Probably the most famous and sophisticated exponent of behaviorism was the Harvard professor B. F. Skinner, who argued that this science could be used to design and modify the behavior of individuals in all domains of life. Skinner believed behavior modification had the potential to massively improve society, making workers more productive, students more teachable, and citizens more law abiding. All that was needed would be the continued advance of a behaviorist science that would yield “the power of a technology of behavior” able to engineer “a social environment in which people behave well.”12 In Skinner’s own case, the politics of behaviorism included an especially paternalistic streak, in that he publicly touted behaviorism as the cure to what he saw as the social disorders of the 1960s and 1970s youth culture and counterculture. According to Skinner, protests, the burning of draft cards, and increasingly informal styles of dress could all be eliminated through massive-scale behavior modification. Indeed, in the face of such tumult, Skinner argued that behaviorist social engineering could turn the tide by inculcating “the value of order, security, and affluence.”13 For thinkers like Taylor and

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MacIntyre, who were shaped profoundly by the first New Left, such research programs could not but have appeared as the most brazen combinations of a reactionary brand of technocratic rule with antihumanist forms of science. Behaviorism in this way constituted one of the frontlines in the humanist struggle against naturalism. But the weapon of choice for these philosophers was no longer Marxist critique but rather meticulous ordinary language-style analysis. Taylor’s first systematic critique of behaviorism appeared in his dissertation, followed by his first book, The Explanation of Behavior (1964). This highly nuanced, technical piece of philosophy cannot be justly encapsulated here because in this book Taylor doesn’t attempt to offer a single, silver-bullet criticism of the behaviorist enterprise. Instead, he presents criticism after criticism of the substantive particulars of this research program in an attempt to demonstrate how it is saturated with inadequacies. Nevertheless, describing the general contours of Taylor’s strategy, along with an example of how he put this strategy into operation, should be enough to clarify how ordinary language became a tool for antinaturalist critiques of social science. The central goal of behaviorism, according to Taylor, was to offer an account that eliminated all purposive and teleological explanations of human action in favor of mechanistic forms of causation.14 As has already been noted, behaviorists normally advanced this view by arguing that human actions were not a result of the goals, plans, and aims of individuals but were instead determined by an individual’s mechanical response to a given trigger or stimulus existing in the environment. For Taylor, attacking behaviorism meant investigating to what extent behaviorist psychologists had in fact been able to disentangle their research from the common assumption that actions are purposive. If the best attempts at advancing a behaviorist program were unable to do without purposive concepts, this would demonstrate their philosophical inadequacy.15 The philosophical critique of behaviorism would thus show that it had failed to consistently employ the internal logic in its own concepts. In other words, we are in the domain of a sophisticated use of ordinary language conceptual criticism. Take, for example, Taylor’s criticism of behaviorist attempts to philosophically define their central concept of stimulus. Stimulus was

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a key concept for behaviorism because it constituted that feature or set of features in the environment that behaviorists claimed conditioned and ultimately determined the behavior of particular individuals. What the stimulus-response model of behaviorism required was a concept of stimulus that could be adequately distinguished from other aspects of the environment that might also count as stimuli. As Taylor put it, stimulusresponse theories required that “the environment must be marked off in some way from others in which this response is not called for, and for this some specific description of the [stimulus] must be singled out.”16 But here is one place where behaviorist theories ran into philosophical trouble. For, as Taylor observed, if the response of a particular individual was conditioned by any true description of the stimulus, then behaviorists would be unable to distinguish it from other potential stimuli. For instance, if the activating component in the stimulus was redness, the stimulus would be indistinguishable from other red objects in the environment. Or if the stimulus was distinguished by its number (say, two), then it would be indistinguishable from other pairs of objects in the environment. On the other hand, if the stimulus was instead overdetermined, that is, defined by all true descriptions that could be given of it (red, two, etc.), then even the slightest change in the stimuli would have to result in a complete disorientation of individual behavior. A slight change in position, light, or time of day would all seriously compromise the power of the stimulus. Worse still, the number of classifications of the stimulus object would have to be indefinite, “and this means that we should never be able to determine finally what properties are selected in any given situation.”17 That is, the notion of what specifically was stimulating the behavior would no longer be identifiable precisely because the number of true classifications was indefinite. Taylor’s conclusion was that the behaviorist concept of stimulus was inadequate without some criteria of perceptual relevance. But responses to relevant versus nonrelevant factors in the environment presupposed a being with aims and goals who was able to actively and intelligently discriminate between objects in the perceptual field. Taylor thus came to the conclusion that the logic of the behaviorist concept of stimulus was unworkable without the assumption of a purposive agent. And the latter, of course, amounted to a revision of behaviorism’s key assumption:

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that human action could be explained by merely mechanistic, impersonal triggers in the environment. This argument (which clearly shows the heavy influence of MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of perception) was in its approach and critical effect indebted to the conceptual analysis of the kind favored by ordinary language philosophers. Taylor’s basic strategy, in this respect, was to show that a philosophically defensible account of the behaviorist concept of stimulus still required the concept of purpose. Thus, there was an inconsistency in the use of concepts insofar as behaviorists insisted that their form of explanation had eliminated the need to make explanatory use of purposes and intentions. The role of the philosopher in this case was to show how the research program would require major revamping or would even need to be abandoned altogether if it were unable to free itself from such conceptual inadequacies. Likewise, in light of the prior chapter’s findings, the deeper agenda of Taylor’s ordinary language analysis should now be clear: to attack the most prestigious naturalist social science program of the day. With respect to this antinaturalistic and humanist political concern, Taylor’s Explanation of Behavior was still very much structured by the basic agenda set by the first New Left. A similar pattern is evident in MacIntyre’s engagement with psychological behaviorism, which began in the late 1950s and became more intensive during the 1970s. At the most general level, MacIntyre rejected all forms of explanation that attempted to circumvent human intentions by drawing a Wittgensteinian-inspired distinction between the conceptual logic of actions and physical movements. Specifically, MacIntyre argued that physical movements (e.g., involuntarily twitching one’s head) could be exhaustively explained by nonagentive chains of causation such as those presented in neuroscience or by stimuli in the environment. By contrast, actions (e.g., nodding one’s head) required grasping the beliefs and purposes that distinguished one action from another, as in the case of, say, nodding “hello” versus nodding one’s head in time to the music.18 Thus, actions required a different kind of explanation from physical movements because the former entailed interpreting the beliefs and intentions of the person in question, whereas the latter did not.19 In addition, MacIntyre argued that this conceptual analysis of human action revealed not only that the social sciences were interpretive

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(that is, concerned primarily with deciphering and bringing coherence to meanings and beliefs) but also that they were contextual and historical. Social science was contextual and historical because deciphering the beliefs and meanings informing particular actions required understanding a wider language community, including “the socially recognized conventions, the rules in virtue of which the movement is taken as signifying this or that.”20 The explanation of human actions was historical in nature because these linguistic contexts changed across time—a point that made social science incompatible with “mechanical explanations” that were “unhistorical” because “a machine runs or breaks down” but “has no historical development.”21 Sounding a New Left theme, MacIntyre concluded that the beliefs of particular agents could not be merely reduced to some impersonal strata of explanation. Social science needed to be equally humanistic and interpretive. Behaviorists, according to MacIntyre, had conflated actions and physical movements. That is, they had invalidly collapsed the distinction between the two. Yet MacIntyre’s employment of ordinary language analysis also went far beyond this. Indeed, like Taylor’s, his conceptual critique of behaviorism was multifaceted and complex. Yet looking at one example will be sufficient to substantiate how he employed ordinary language analysis as a weapon against naturalism. Behavioral psychology, MacIntyre noted, assumed the existence of a necessary, noncontingent connection between emotions and observable behaviors. This assumption was vital to their research program because it allowed them to treat actions not as expressive of the meanings and beliefs of particular agents but as chains of verifiable behavioral types subject to scientific verification.22 Yet the problem with this key assumption was that it rested on a basic confusion about the logic of the concept of human emotion. The concept of emotion, according to MacIntyre, was contingently constituted by beliefs in such a way that there could be no necessary link between a given emotion and an observable behavior. Rather, emotions could manifest themselves in an indefinite variety of behaviors. There were at least two reasons for this, MacIntyre argued. First, the physiological symptoms of two vastly different emotions could be the same. So, for example, fear and gratitude might both be characterized

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by a dry throat, a raised pulse rate, and the prick of tears in the eyes.23 Although the felt qualities between the two emotions might be indistinguishable, they were clearly differentiated by the attendant beliefs that informed them. Second, different emotions might manifest themselves in the same action depending on the surrounding web of beliefs. An office worker, for instance, might throw a colleague a surprise party out of anger and the belief the colleague disliked surprises. Likewise, someone might throw that same colleague a surprise party out of kindness and because of the false belief that the person loved surprises. Such examples imply that there is no necessary link between emotions and either observable actions or physiological states. Rather, emotions are dependent on a particular individual’s beliefs, which makes the behaviorist assumption that human actions can be treated as observable, verifiable types invalid.24 Of course, the failure of the behaviorist movement’s own concepts, given its political and social goals, would prove devastating to the project Skinner dubbed “a technology of behavior comparable in power with the technologies of physics and biology.”25 And the inability of behaviorists to reduce beliefs to observable forms of locomotion brought back to the fore the need for a conception of human agency as uniquely creative, rational, and purposive. The dignity of the human agent in the explanations of the social sciences was thus tied to an antitechnocratic politics. In this manner, MacIntyre’s use of ordinary language philosophy as a weapon of attack was oriented toward the same basic New Left agenda: devising a humanistic social theory and politics. At least in the case of psychological behaviorism, MacIntyre and Taylor both believed that the tools of analytic philosophy, by exposing the work of behaviorist psychologists to be conceptually untenable, could be put to the service of humanism. Analytic philosophy had been turned into a form of antinaturalism.

critiquing political science’s “Behavioral revolution”

Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s respective critiques of political science at midcentury further substantiate my claim that they forged ordinary language philosophy into a weapon at the service of a New Left–inspired theoretical agenda. Political science at this time had just experienced the

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famous behavioral revolution. Led by scholars of considerable renown such as Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, and David easton, behavioralists also drew in part on the philosophy of Carl Hempel to help legitimize their favored naturalistic approach to political inquiry.26 A brief look at Hempel’s philosophy will help clarify both the ambitions of the behavioral revolution and its shortcomings. A seminal figure within analytic philosophy, Hempel held that scientific explanation in the human sciences required the discovery of “general empirical laws,” which might in turn predict and control social outcomes.27 According to Hempel’s “deductive-nomological” model, the explanation of a given statement of fact (the explanadum) could be logically deduced from the relevant statements of antecedent conditions together with the relevant general laws of science (the explanans).28 However, according to Hempel’s theory, building such causal explanations also required identifying atomistic, universal properties of reality that repeated themselves across contexts. In other words, scientific explanation necessitated the discovery of “kinds or properties of events” that could migrate across historical contexts and establish the “determining conditions” for the scope of a given causal law.29 Yet this atomistic requirement is precisely what MacIntyre argued behavioral political science could not secure without falling into a conceptual muddle. The problem here can be clarified by examining MacIntyre’s critique of one of the major early works of research produced by the behavioral revolution: Almond and Verba’s classic, The Civic Culture (1963). The authors of this substantial tome gathered an impressive array of data in hopes of explaining why some political cultures were more conducive to democracy than others.30 As such, their work was one of the major Cold War–era studies of democracy. MacIntyre, however, homed in on how the deep flaws in behavioralism as a research program could be demonstrated by analyzing one of Almond and Verba’s more modest claims: that the Italians were less committed to the actions of their government than the British were. Almond and Verba came to this conclusion on the basis of surveys in which Italian respondents ranked “government actions” lower on a list of items in which they took pride than their British counterparts did.31 The problem with this finding, according to MacIntyre, was that pride could

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not be treated as an atomistic unit that was capable of migrating across cultural contexts in order to prop up generalized explanations (à la Hempel). Rather, beliefs and meanings were constituted by reference to linguistic contexts and thus did not serve as “identifiable units in different societies and cultures about which we may construct true causal generalizations.”32 Rather, the Italians did not mean the same thing by pride as the British, a point that was evident in the fact that if you asked Italians at that time “to list the subjects which touched their honor, many would spontaneously place the chastity of their immediate female relatives high on the list—a connection that it would occur to very few englishmen to make.”33 The meaning of pride, in other words, was not some brute form of reality, like a stick or a stone, that could be carried around from context to context without its meaning being changed. MacIntyre’s analysis showed that transporting beliefs from one linguistic context to another while assuming a uniformity of identity was conceptually invalid. Thus, Almond and Verba were misconstruing the Italian and British meanings of pride as a result of a failure in the logic of behavioralism’s concepts. This was the failure of treating human beliefs as if they were natural, atomistic kinds, when in fact they are holistic in nature and informed and justified only by further beliefs. The meaning of pride was not the same in Italy as in england. The only way to understand what an Italian versus a Brit meant by pride would have been to scrutinize the further beliefs with which the meaning of pride was filled out within a specific web of beliefs. To make matters worse for behavioralists, this objection held even if the units of explanation shifted from single political beliefs and attitudes to the seemingly greater stability of institutions and practices. This was because, as MacIntyre put it, “Social practices, institutions and organizations are partially constituted by the beliefs and concepts of those who participate in . . . them.”34 Behavioralists were unwittingly running afoul of the basic distinction between the identity of particulars that constitute the core of relevant phenomena in the natural sciences (e.g., atoms, amino acids, and chemical compounds) and the identity of the particulars that constitute the core of relevant phenomena in the social sciences (e.g., political parties, religions, and the practice of marriage).35 Whereas the former are independent of beliefs for their existence, the latter are

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not. And this meant that while the objects of natural science could be abstracted into universal kinds, those of political science were historically situated and specific to particular contexts of belief.36 MacIntyre’s conclusion was therefore that a mechanistic, general causal science of politics was a conceptually confused endeavor.37 The entire attempt by the behavioral revolution to discover general scientific explanatory laws governing political science in a manner inspired by Hempel’s philosophy was built on a series of conceptual errors. In this way, MacIntyre’s ordinary language analysis of the concepts used by a particular linguistic community (in this case behavioral political scientists) was again at the service of a humanistic vision of agency. Political scientists, MacIntyre believed, should not deny or ignore the creative, purposive intentions and beliefs of human beings. To do so would not only be ethically objectionable but also introduce social scientific distortion. Moreover, if political scientists could not construct the atomistic properties necessary for law-like causal explanations, then neither could the predictive power of a Hempelian model of science be achieved in this discipline. MacIntyre observed that what many social scientists had failed to understand was that unpredictability was an inescapable and “central feature of human life.”38 The domain of politics could not be conquered by the knowledge of a managerial, technocratic, expert class working in government bureaucracies, corporate hierarchies, or academic disciplines that could predict and generate certain social outcomes. Thus, in a way deeply reminiscent of the first New Left, MacIntyre’s ordinary language critique was put at the service of unmasking modern technocratic power and practice. In 1971—the same year that MacIntyre took behavioralism to task in “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?”—Taylor published his extremely influential article “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in which he similarly criticized behavioral political science for atomizing social reality. Specifically, Taylor focused on how leading behavioral political scientists such as Robert Dahl and Seymour Lipset had conducted their research by assuming a concept of brute data.39 A political phenomenon, according to these behavioralists, was truly brute only insofar as it allowed for verification and was therefore no longer subject to serious disputes over interpretation.40

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The main form of brute data evoked by behavioralists was so-called political behavior. examples of political behavior included clearly observable actions like running for office, dropping out of high school, or owning a firearm. But political behavior also extended to verbal actions like assenting or dissenting to items in a questionnaire or ballot or providing types of answers on an opinion survey. The importance of political behavior was that it allowed political scientists to construct correlations between more or less interpretation-free items of brute data. So, for example, behavioralists might try to prove the thesis that voters who expressed negative opinions about the economy on a survey were more likely to vote against incumbent candidates in the next election (or, more generally, behavioralists might try to establish a relationship between perceptions of the economy and voter choice in elections). These findings in turn might be correlated with other social facts about individuals like their race, economic class, gender, or age. By constructing ever-stronger correlations between items of brute data, social scientists might eventually identify promising candidates for general laws. The concept of brute data was (and continues to be in much of political science up to the present day) deployed in the naturalist quest for causal laws. Integral to the behavioral approach to political science is the reduction of questions of meaning and interpretation to questions of verification and correlation. The problem with interpretation, from a naturalist perspective, is that it doesn’t allow for a starting point that is epistemologically certain. As Taylor noted, interpretation is a form of understanding that is not based on observation but on insight. It seeks degrees of coherence, of “making sense or nonsense,” out of languages or meanings.41 This is why interpretation is the dominant mode of inquiry in disciplines such as literature, theology, law, the arts, and history that are concerned primarily with the study of meanings. Such disciplines are not without objectivity, but the criterion for a correct interpretation is that cloudier understanding becomes clearer and greater coherence is gained. This process of replacing meanings with other meanings is the well-known phenomenon of a “hermeneutical circle,” in which interpretive understanding advances but never goes beyond the circle of interpretation to discover some kind of rock bottom data or foundation beyond the circle of interpretation. There is no strict method of verification for

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settling the question of the best interpretation of Hamlet or a passage from the Psalms—objectivity must be conceived in terms completely unfamiliar to naturalist philosophy. Much more about the problem of objectivity within interpretive disciplines will be said in later chapters. For now, the point is that Taylor’s objection to behavioralism was that it sought to break out of the confines of the hermeneutic circle through the concept of political behavior as a form of brute data. This was a fundamentally problematic move because human behavior is no less expressive of meanings than a line of Shakespeare or the Psalms. Indeed, Taylor argued that human actions could not be understood apart from the particular meanings that constitute them because “the language by which we describe our goals, feelings, desires is also a definition of the meaning things have for us.”42 There is an analogy between social reality and texts: namely, both are coded or expressive of meanings. Taylor illustrated this crucial point with an analysis of the concept of shame. With shame the actions and behavior that express it are not separable from the agent’s meanings. Thus, the urge to hide oneself that often accompanies shame requires reference to situations that are only identifiable if we understand their meanings or significance for the people involved. There is no phenomenon of shame without the specific meanings (e.g., nakedness, a blemish, a mistake, a secret, or a reminder) that an individual person perceives. The point is that, “what is interpreted [in the social sciences] is itself an interpretation: a self-interpretation which is embedded in a stream of action.”43 This line of argument also led Taylor to observe that behavioralism was fundamentally inadequate as a method for explaining human political and social life across the wider sweep of history. Specifically, it was unable to account for the continual shifts, developments, and radical breaks in meaning that traverse history. As Taylor put it, behavioral political science “cannot accommodate a genuine historical psychology.”44 In this regard, Taylor’s efforts in this early essay can be viewed as a prologue to the recuperation of a genuinely historical study of politics—one that could come to terms with the vast changes and variations in meaning that have shaped human political life (a project, as we will see, that Taylor put to great effect in his magisterial study of secularity, A Secular Age).

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The behavioralist research program, by contrast, was in the thrall of concepts like brute data that were unable to grasp the central phenomena of political life. In this way, Taylor’s critique of behavioralism showed the unmistakable influence of ordinary language analysis. For ordinary language claimed that the aim of philosophy was the analysis of the logic of concepts in order to determine whether they were being properly used by a particular linguistic community. Taylor’s critical leverage came from showing that a central concept of the behavioral approach was being employed in conceptually invalid ways that were inconsistent with the internal logic of the concept. Finally, like MacIntyre, Taylor also fused this conceptual analysis of the social sciences with a critique of mechanistic and technocratic politics. So Taylor argued that the conceptual problems plaguing behavioralism also implied a failure to achieve the predictive power sought by technocratic authorities. In the natural sciences, prediction requires that “all states of the system, past and future, can be described in the same range of concepts” or variables.45 But the practices and institutions studied by political science were subject to unpredictable and radical conceptual innovations, as agents creatively reinterpreted the meanings informing their actions. So, for example, tsarist Russia had been radically transformed into Soviet society or, in another context entirely, the Reformation fundamentally altered Christianity. The behavioralist goal of prediction in the domain of politics would require nothing short of the ability “to . . . explicate so clearly the human condition that one would already have pre-empted all cultural innovation and transformation.”46 The predictive knowledge that behavioralism promised policy makers and politicians was therefore illusory.

the limits of ordinary language Analysis as Antinaturalism

Thus far I have argued that Taylor and MacIntyre employed the resources of ordinary language philosophy in order to advance an agenda predominantly shaped by the first British New Left (though as we will see later Taylor was also drawing on phenomenology). Such an approach offered a very powerful tool for antinaturalist critique by revealing the internal

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conceptual contradictions of specific research programs. In this respect, many of the insights generated by Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s ordinary language analyses are still of enduring value, as several of the same conceptual confusions continue to fuel some of the most prestigious and well-funded social science research. Nevertheless, ordinary language analysis also came with inherent limitations. At the most general level, the problem was that ordinary language employed a largely ahistorical mode of argumentation, one that fostered the false belief that universal, formal analysis could resolve deeper philosophical controversies. An example will help illuminate this problem. Consider MacIntyre’s conceptual distinction between physical movements versus actions examined above. MacIntyre presented this analysis as a rebuttal of naturalist research programs. But, in fact, all he showed was that the common, purposive concept of action is philosophically incompatible with that of a physical movement. What his analysis couldn’t do is exclude the possibility that a future research program might reveal the common conception of action to be illusory. If this happened, everyday users of the english language might continue to use the concept of action but with the underlying understanding that this meaning had been invalidated. A prescientific conceptual language might then persist even as it was overtaken by new scientific concepts. This very transition has happened, of course, in all sorts of instances concerning the natural sciences. Consider, for example, english speakers who often say, “The sun is setting,” when in fact astrophysics has long since established that the sun remains fixed while it is the earth that moves. The common meaning of the phrase “The sun is setting” is therefore prescientific and, if taken literally, false. Moreover, even if english speakers choose to retain the language that best describes the ordinary perception of the sun, the scientific conception is authoritative and overrides the logic of the meaning of “setting.” An analogous point pertains to MacIntyre’s distinction between action and physical movement. Namely, a skeptic might still retort that action conveys nothing more than the prescientific understanding, which will be replaced by an account of human behavior as a series of purely physical stimulus responses. MacIntyre’s analysis in this particular case, therefore, doesn’t necessarily do damage to the behaviorist position.

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This doesn’t mean such analysis never has any critical force. To the contrary, both MacIntyre and Taylor used ordinary language analysis to devastating effect when they were able to show that a particular naturalist research program was unable to disentangle itself from concepts that were incompatible with its own aims (as shown above in the case of the concepts of stimulus, belief, and brute data). In such cases, the internal contradictions might prove definitive. Nevertheless, a future naturalist program might still be devised that is free of any contradictory recourse to antinaturalist concepts. In such cases, immanent critique is of no avail and analysis alone cannot resolve the deeper dispute between naturalists and antinaturalists. This is because at bottom naturalism and antinaturalism offer rival, incompatible ontologies of the human person. And what is required is a further philosophical defense of a particular ontology—seeing which ontology better resolves certain dilemmas and advances fruitful new avenues of research in the social sciences. In this respect, as long as new, cogent naturalist programs are being constructed, antinaturalists must continue to critically engage them on their own terms. Analysis cannot spare antinaturalist philosophers and social scientists a priori from the need for future reengagements with naturalism. And yet the mistaken conviction that the formal analysis of concepts alone could dissolve substantive disagreements of this kind was very common in the heady days of ordinary language and Oxford analytic philosophies. At that time, many analytic philosophers anticipated that all serious philosophical problems would be resolved in a matter of years and philosophy would have finished its work. For example, Bernard Williams, reflecting on his experience with ordinary language and Oxford analytic philosophy at midcentury, said that analytic philosophers at this time believed that “when you had taken the problems of philosophy apart, you’d find that many of its traditional questions had not been solved but had disappeared. . . . The promise this offered was very exciting. There really were people saying that the whole of philosophy would be over in 50 years.”47 This erroneous view, described by Williams and found at the height of analytic philosophy’s dominance in Britain, I will call “a priorism.” MacIntyre’s pre–After Virtue critiques of the social sciences often exhibited the flaw of a priorism, appealing to certain conceptual distinctions

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as if they were universal and capable of permanently legislating what was possible within certain domains of knowledge without pursuing the deeper ontological and empirical questions.48 As a result, there remained something deeply ahistorical in MacIntyre’s early philosophy of social science despite his great sensitivity to the importance of history. This created a tension between the ahistorical, “detailed, analytical, conceptual inquiries” of some of the essays collected in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971) and the more historical orientation of works like A Short History of Ethics (1966).49 In terms of the former, MacIntyre’s approach followed in the footsteps of Ryle and the notion of the philosopher as a referee of the uses and abuses of ordinary language. In the case of the latter, MacIntyre’s models were quite different—Hegel and R. G. Collingwood, who provided a form of philosophy that engaged the history of the transformation and development of concepts. MacIntyre himself was acutely aware of this tension between his influences, and during this time he avowed the analytic approach while at the same time chastising this tradition for its “lack of attention” to the “historical and social sources” of language and concepts.50 This ambivalence, as MacIntyre later admitted, reflected a basic problem of his early approach, which was carried out “piecemeal” in the manner of analytic philosophy and “without sufficient reflection upon the larger conceptual framework.”51 Taylor, by contrast, recognized very early on the inherent limits of analysis. So in 1959, Taylor argued that ontological problems do not simply dissolve away through linguistic analysis. Rather, real philosophical disputes persist even after ordinary language analysis and conceptual clarification have had their say. And this is because rival theories, instantiated in different languages, entail conflicting ontologies.52 In The Explanation of Behavior, Taylor made the point even more starkly, noting that “the argument from ordinary language” couldn’t provide a “shortcut” to solving the debates in the social sciences because there was “no a priori way of deciding the issue.”53 Much more effective would be to proceed by seeing whether naturalist research programs could, on their own terms, create concepts that eliminated the need for a purposive view of human agency. If they could not, they had failed on their own terms. As seen above, this was in fact the strategy employed by Taylor and MacIntyre in their most effective assaults on naturalist research programs. It

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also points to the continued relevance of this immanent critique strategy in ongoing debates between naturalism and antinaturalism. But Taylor’s line of reasoning also had a further crucial implication. Namely, even the most successful immanent critiques of a naturalist research program always depended (whether implicitly or explicitly) on a substantive, ontological view of the human person. Specifically, antinaturalist conceptual critiques assumed an ontological view of the human person as an intentional, purposive, and creative agent. Yet up to this point in their careers, this was a linchpin in both MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s philosophies that had been left mostly undefended and unjustified. What both Taylor and MacIntyre came to realize was that the critique of naturalism remained inadequate insofar as the underlying ontological assumptions of a rival viewpoint were not explicitly defended. Ordinary language analysis that simply assumed a purposive agent without philosophically justifying this basic assumption was in danger of becoming dogmatic and superficial. Philosophers could not simply appeal to “our” shared language of action or physical movement precisely because the conceptual languages informing a naturalist versus an antinaturalist social science were incompatible. There was no monolithic “our” language nor was there the “logic of our concepts” that a philosopher might leverage. Rather, there were only competing traditions and bodies of theory that housed rival ontologies. This basic dilemma meant that both philosophers would have to delve into sources far beyond those of the analytic tradition in order to make good on the goal of articulating and defending an antinaturalist social science and political theory. Taylor started this project very early on by turning to phenomenology, while MacIntyre, later in his career, quite dramatically recovered Aristotle.

C H A P T e R

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i n s p i r i n g A n e w soc i A l sc i e n c e Aristotle and Heidegger

During the 1970s, Taylor and MacIntyre were becoming increasingly established as notable philosophers and academics with growing international reputations. Nonetheless, each encountered a basic inadequacy in terms of their work in the philosophy of social science. Namely, their respective critiques of naturalist research programs, which were widely read, relied on an underdeveloped conception of human agency. Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s own critiques of the primary political science and psychology research programs of their time had not actually settled the underlying ontological dispute. And this, I have argued, revealed a basic limitation of the resources of linguistic analysis, which offered certain formal tools for deciding a priori questions of conceptual compatibility and coherence but not for settling fundamentally different ontologies. Indeed, if the above line of reasoning is correct, then one of the philosophical lessons of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s engagement with ordinary language philosophy was that the naturalism versus antinaturalism controversy could not ultimately be resolved without considering the nature of the human person. There was no escaping this philosophical problem. And social scientists who ignored this ontological question must nevertheless have assumed implicitly some vision of human beings that undergirded their models. 60

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During the 1970s and early 1980s, Taylor and MacIntyre each attempted to ground an antinaturalist social science within a purposive, intentionalistic, and creative view of the human agent. The latter vision of human nature first emerged in inchoate form in each philosopher’s engagement with first New Left humanism and was also consistent with earlier, prephilosophical influences such as the Christian religion and Romanticism. But in order to mount a philosophical defense of this view of the human agent, both thinkers reached for the resources of other philosophical traditions. In Taylor’s case, these were the theories of phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and above all Heidegger, which were an influence from his earliest days as a graduate student at Oxford and throughout his antinaturalist critiques but were now developed into his own original ontological argument. MacIntyre, by contrast, derived an ontology of the human person considerably later on as part of his dramatic historical recuperation of classical Aristotelianism, albeit in a form that was colored by certain neo-Aristotelian advances made by Heidegger and aided by the antifoundational insights of Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. (The considerable influence of Hegel on both philosophers is also weighed in a later chapter.) By creatively engaging with these traditions, both philosophers came to the independent conclusion that a purposive account of human agency—as championed by humanists of various stripes—entailed an antinaturalist and interpretive approach to the social sciences. establishing how this is true and what it means for the day-to-day work of social scientists and political theorists is the work of this and the remaining chapters.

Macintyre’s Aristotelian conception of human Agency

In pre–After Virtue critiques of the social sciences, MacIntyre sometimes slipped into treating conceptual distinctions as if they were quasi universal and therefore able to legislate the bounds of possible knowledge within a domain a priori. This problem was only resolved when he abandoned piecemeal linguistic analysis, a development precipitated by his reflections on the famous debate in philosophy of science between

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Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. As MacIntyre put it, “What I learned from . . . Kuhn and Lakatos together was the need . . . to break free from that [analytic] framework.”1 MacIntyre’s breakthrough essay in this regard was 1977’s “epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science.” In positive terms, MacIntyre adopted here an antifoundationalist concept of rival research programs (explained in greater detail below), which led directly to the writing of After Virtue. This antifoundationalism in epistemology allowed him to develop a defense of a purposive conception of human nature within the context of a tradition and against rival traditions that held differing assumptions about the human subject. This key philosophical move is worth examining in closer detail. The lesson MacIntyre drew from Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was that objective knowledge was always developed internally within the context of a shared theory or paradigm. Straight appeals to brute, theory-neutral facts were not always possible when arbitrating rival theories. For example, one could not simply assert the brute fact of human purposive behavior to settle the naturalist versus antinaturalist debate. As noted above, a dogmatic assertion of it as a brute fact would simply beg the question from those who instead asserted that the brute fact of human agency was, say, behavioristic and determined by impersonal, mechanistic causal triggers in the environment. The mere observation of individuals in action would not settle the case. Kuhn’s basic insight was to see the way that facts in this respect are never simply theory neutral. Rather, facts always take the form of beliefs about the world and require justification from further beliefs. Pure perceptions do not have such a justificatory structure. Only beliefs can take this form. Therefore, the ultimate unit of objective comparison is a web of reinforcing beliefs (that is, a theory) or what Kuhn famously called a “paradigm.” This rejection of pure facts or experiences as the basis for epistemology is commonly referred to today by philosophers as antifoundationalism and associated with a host of otherwise differing figures, including Willard Van Orman Quine, Richard Rorty, and Heidegger. In debates over the social sciences, the implication of Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm was that one could not establish the ontological ascendency of a particular vision of human nature simply by appealing to

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it as a brute, foundational fact. Instead, a conception of human nature was always part of some larger theoretical paradigm. What Kuhn left unresolved, however, was how to rationally arbitrate between radically rival paradigms.2 Lakatos’s contribution, according to MacIntyre, was to resolve this dilemma by devising an antifoundationalist mode of objectivity between competing paradigms. Specifically, Lakatos saw that claims between competing paradigms could still be arbitrated in terms of criteria of comparison such as fruitfulness in opening new avenues of research, the ability to better resolve the dilemmas of a rival paradigm, and the availability of resources for facing tensions internal to its own theories. A paradigm was objectively superior if it could better cope not only with its own problems but with those problems facing a rival paradigm. This meant that defending an antinaturalist ontology as the basis for the social sciences would require self-consciously developing the resources of a particular paradigm and comparing its relative success to rival paradigms. Thus, neither formal, a priori linguistic analysis nor some assertion of a brute, foundational fact could settle the controversy. Rather, the antinaturalist paradigm needed to develop its own theoretical resources, employ them within social inquiry, and compare their relative success or failure in explaining the world and dealing with dilemmas. (Concrete examples of this form of objectivity in the social sciences are discussed in light of MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s late work in the final chapter.) In this way, what the exchange between Kuhn and Lakatos made clear to MacIntyre was the need to rethink his critique of the human sciences. Specifically, his criticisms of mechanistic presuppositions in various disciplines of social science could no longer be presented as part of a necessary, universal analysis belonging to no paradigm or research program in particular. MacIntyre had recognized at least as early as 1971 that the danger of analytic analysis was precisely that it might confer a false “necessity, inevitability, and universality on some conceptual scheme,” thus appearing to “guarantee one way of looking at the world by seeming to demonstrate its necessity” a priori.3 After reflecting on the Kuhn-Lakatos debate, MacIntyre realized he would need to be more selfconscious about grounding his own critiques of the social sciences within a particular paradigm.

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But rather than adopting Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm, MacIntyre opted for Gadamer’s historicist concept of traditions. As is well known, Gadamer had rehabilitated this concept of tradition from its discrediting in the enlightenment, arguing that traditions were not simply a passive cultural inheritance but the inescapable context for all rational human cognition and inquiry.4 A tradition was like a Kuhnian paradigm in that it amounted to a defense of antifoundationalism against appeals to brute, foundational perceptions or experiences. However, unlike a paradigm, Gadamer’s concept of a tradition was more self-consciously historical and sensitive to the ways that theories continually change, mutate, and develop iterations through time. In an essay devoted to Gadamer’s importance, MacIntyre argued that all thinking is “shaped by tradition” and “all understanding is inescapably historical.”5 In this way, Gadamer’s hermeneutics reinforced and enriched the basic lesson of the KuhnLakatos debate: namely, that antinaturalism could not be piecemeal as in analytic philosophy but needed to situate itself within a wider framework of thought. The need to situate his own work on the social sciences within a tradition made possible MacIntyre’s dramatic adoption of Aristotelianism in After Virtue. Prior to After Virtue, MacIntyre had not necessarily treated Aristotle’s theoretical framework as a live philosophical option that one could attempt to inhabit and vindicate. But MacIntyre’s shift from piecemeal analytic approaches to traditions allowed him to rearticulate his antinaturalism in terms of an Aristotelian theory of human agency and ethics. In effect, MacIntyre met the old goal of the first British New Left by replacing Marx with Aristotle. From this point forward, the decline and loss of Aristotelian forms of understanding became the major preoccupation of MacIntyre’s mature work.6 Unlike his earlier self, the later MacIntyre situated the problem of mechanistic modernity within a larger historical narrative about the rise of competing traditions. From the publication of After Virtue onward, Aristotelianism appeared in MacIntyre’s works as the best framework for defending nonmechanistic and purposive accounts of human action. This shift also makes clear why many of MacIntyre’s earlier conceptual critiques of the social sciences were recycled in After Virtue, except rather than being presented as freestanding linguistic analysis, they were

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interwoven into a defense of Aristotelian concepts in the spirit of offering “alternative and rival schemata” and “systematically different possibilities of interpretation.”7 At the heart of this framework was the basis for an antinaturalist ontology. Following Aristotle, MacIntyre argued that human actions were only ultimately intelligible when placed in the context of an agent’s further goals and aims (in other words, teleological forms). Borrowing from Heidegger’s revival of an Aristotelian philosophy of action, MacIntyre defended a conception of human agency as structured by narrative sequences.8 According to this view, human beliefs and actions are not carried out in atomistic, disconnected segments. Instead, they are unified by a context of goals and desires that relate the past, present, and future to one another in a narrative stream. In this way, human agency gathers and temporally orders belief and action. As MacIntyre put it, human agency actually embodies a narrative and a human being is “a story-telling animal” that continually enacts narratives.9 Here we have the crucial assumption of an antinaturalist and interpretive social science: ontologically, humans are best understood as creatures that orient their actions through narrative sequences. Narrative structures are ontological features of human behavior and action. The importance of this point for an antinaturalist social science is that rendering beliefs and actions intelligible requires placing them in the context of narratives. A social scientist working with Aristotelian ontological assumptions about human agency is thus faced with the task of constructing narratives about actual, lived-out narratives (interpretations of interpretations). Moreover, because human beings can revise and change their beliefs and aims based on contingent reasoning, such a social scientist must construct contingent narratives rather than necessary, law-like generalizations about political life. In other words, the narrative structure of human agency requires a narrative structure of the explanation of action. MacIntyre’s elaboration of Aristotelian ontological theory thus forms the grounds for specifically antinaturalist approaches and explanations in the social sciences. A key New Left theme was thus revived and deeply enriched within the context of Aristotelian philosophy: the successful social scientist was not the one who could generate technocratic predictive outcomes. Rather,

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the successful social scientist was the one who could tell the most complete, coherent, and convincing narratives—the narratives that could account for the greatest number of features of social reality. But, of course, the difference between stories and formal laws is that the former are linked by contingent causal connections, while the latter appeal to supposedly necessary causal bonds. A story is always about a sequence of events that could have gone differently if the agents involved had reasoned otherwise. By contrast, formal laws require the discovery of necessary causal sequences (so long as certain antecedent conditions obtain). This led MacIntyre to conclude that if the Aristotelian narrative ontology of human agency were true, even the most distinguished social science generalizations could only be applied “generally and for the most part” and not with the predictive certainty of laws.10 Social scientists should expect their generalizations, unlike those in physics, to always exist with counterexamples.11 But this is not a reason for abandoning a narrative explanation (as one would reject a law that had been contradicted by counterexamples). Rather, the best explanations in the social sciences are in principle not capable of the same kind of precision found in the natural sciences. The later MacIntyre thus defends a view of political expertise that might be considered an elaboration on Aristotle insofar as expertise is not predicated on a formal set of rules or scientific calculus but rather on skilled know-how. A social scientist must have an understanding of meanings within context and be able to apply them to analogous contexts that are never quite the same. The need for a skilled judge or practitioner can never be fully elided. MacIntyre’s arguments likewise amount to an Aristotelian defense of interpretive social science—that is, a social science that sees the explanatory task primarily as one of the interpretation of meanings embodied and expressed within human social reality. explanation in the social sciences consists not of correlations between variables but of the construction of narratives—the best story about a series of actions or sequence of events. These might be fine-grained stories that cover single individuals or grand narratives that encompass entire populations, societies, or civilizations. Interpretive social science need not be constrained or incapable of generalization. But the basis for any generalization must always be contingent meanings and not supposedly mechanistic, necessary causal bonds.

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The success or failure of this interpretive approach to social science depends on whether the underlying ontological assumptions are vindicated when they inform actual, concrete research. An Aristotle-inspired interpretive social science would not only be expected to give more comprehensive and less problematic explanations of the world but would also be expected to show naturalist research programs becoming riddled with dilemmas and continually unable to reach their own goals. This is a point that will receive more attention later on. For now it is enough to underscore that the continued failure of researchers to generate a social science that meets the criteria of philosophical naturalism counts prima facie against that approach.

taylor’s heideggerian conception of human Agency

Like MacIntyre, Taylor also conceived of philosophy in this antifoundational, fully historical sense. Thus, he too understood all his philosophical claims as occurring within the context of some tradition or framework that competed with rival frameworks.12 Indeed, from early in his philosophical development, Taylor was critical of analytic philosophy’s tendency toward supposedly apodictic first principles. Yet Taylor’s defense of an antinaturalist conception of human agency also has become the state of the art—distinguished not only by his debt to the phenomenological tradition but also by the sheer depth to which he has taken his arguments. The influence of Merleau-Ponty on Taylor from very early on is well known. And clearly many of his first philosophical efforts, such as The Explanation of Behavior and short articles written while he was still a student at Oxford (e.g., “The Pre-objective World” and his debate with A. J. Ayer) show the heavy influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.13 Yet Taylor’s own substantively original defense of a purposive conception of human agency did not occur until a number of years later when he turned to the work of Martin Heidegger. In asserting the priority of Heidegger’s influence on Taylor’s mature thought, I follow a number of scholars, most notably Ruth Abbey, Naomi Choi, and Nicholas Smith, who have all stressed the central importance of Heidegger’s

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ontological thesis that human agency is uniquely “self-interpreting.”14 However, my own presentation is different from that of those scholars in that I believe the justificatory force of Taylor’s position can be better appreciated by seeing how it rests on a much less frequently noted Heideggerian phenomenology of moods. What needs to be made clear is how Taylor justifies the thesis that humans are self-interpreting animals by formulating a Heideggerian-inspired analysis of what he refers to as “the logic of our language of the emotions.”15 Some grasp of the key Heideggerian assumptions is therefore necessary. Abbey and Smith both note that Taylor follows Heidegger in “ontologizing” interpretation into the very structure of human action.16 A similar move was also made by MacIntyre in his claim that humans are storytelling animals. Prior to Heidegger, interpretation was concerned primarily with texts. But Heidegger advanced the view in Being and Time that humans are embodiments of self-interpreted meaning. Like an octopus that can change color or a butterfly that goes through different phases in the life cycle, self-understandings change and restructure the very way humans exist in the world. So Heidegger wrote that in the case of human beings “understanding constitutes this being.”17 According to Heidegger, a primary way humans embody selfunderstanding is through what he called “attunement” or “moods.” Heidegger maintained that human beings are “always already in a mood” so that they “never master a mood by being free of a mood, but always through a countermood” whether it be “elevated,” “a bad mood,” or even the apparent “smooth, and pallid lack of mood.”18 Moods, in other words, are an inescapable feature of all motivated human action. Moreover, according to Heidegger, these inescapable moods or motivational stances are not simply projections. Rather they disclose features of reality.19 Moods in this way have a cognitive dimension and are ways of knowing and accessing features of reality that would otherwise remain inaccessible. In short, Heidegger’s view of humans is that their way of being in the world is inescapably constituted by understanding in the form of various moods that cue them into different facets of reality. Taylor was clearly impressed by Heidegger’s account of human agency. So he explicitly set out in “Self-Interpreting Animals” to vindicate the view of human life “adumbrated by Heidegger.”20 But in doing

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so, Taylor also hoped to go beyond Heidegger and create arguments capable of greater leverage in the debates over the social sciences. In order to accomplish this goal, Taylor began from Heidegger’s premise that moods are an inescapable feature of human agency (though he substituted Heidegger’s moods with the more common social science term emotions). According to Taylor, insofar as we are acting or even deciding not to act we are being motivated by some emotional mode of perception— for example, wonder, steadfastness, excitement, listlessness. emotions thus make up the “experienced motivation” of human action and behavior.21 But in what sense are these emotions not merely subjective projections but cognitive modes of understanding that grant access to certain features of reality? Taylor’s argument here rests on a phenomenology of emotional language. Specifically, he sets out distinctions between three classes of emotion. Together these distinctions are meant to establish an account of embodied human agency as essentially self-interpretive. The first type of emotion distinguished by Taylor is what he called “immediate feelings.”22 Immediate feelings do not require language and are shared by nonhuman animals and humans alike. An example of an immediate feeling is pain. Pain is immediate in that it requires no interpretation and is not contingent on or mediated by judgment. If the dentist’s drill slips onto a hapless patient’s gums, the stimulus and response are direct. There is no way to be wrong or mistaken about pain in this sense. It is simply a direct response to a stimulus. As Taylor put it, “a situation is painful, just because we feel pain in it” so that “we cannot . . . feel pain mistakenly.”23 For this reason, social scientists need not grapple with human self-understanding in order to account for this kind of pain. Likewise, humans have no trouble imagining what it is like for nonlinguistic animals—say, birds or polar bears—to feel such immediate sensations as this type of pain. A second type of emotional mode is also shared by humans and some nonhuman animals. This kind of cognitive mode requires the ability to judge the significance—or what Taylor called the “import”—of a situation. An import, in Taylor’s sense, is inseparable from an affective relationship to some feature of reality. So Taylor claimed that imports are “affective modes of awareness” that cue us into a “property of something whereby it is a matter of non-indifference to a subject.”24 Import

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emotional modes thus disclose the significance of certain features of reality in Heidegger’s sense. An example of an import emotion is fear. Fear requires the ability (whether linguistically or not) to grasp the significance of a situation as menacing or dangerous and therefore fear inducing. A herd of elk perceives the stalking pack of wolves and flees for safety because the elk ascertain the significance of the wolves as menacing. This type of perception depends on judging a situation correctly and therefore may also be prone to error. Thus, the same herd of elk might fear the forest ranger who is trying to administer medicine. Likewise, a lonely foreigner might fear the stranger who has come to help. The point is that judgment in these cases is inextricable from an affective mode. Fear is the mode through which the significance (e.g., menacing property) of the situation is normally ascertained. Human subjectivity is partly made up of the above two types of emotional or perceptual modes. That is, humans experience both immediate sensations like pain and feelings that require judgments like fear. This much human beings share with nonlinguistic animals. Yet there is a third type of emotional or perceptual mode that Taylor argued is peculiar to linguistic beings and key to the thesis of self-interpretation. What distinguishes this class of perceptual modes is that they are strongly evaluative of what it means to be human.25 Taylor lists shame, dignity, envy, remorse, and pride as examples of the many strongly evaluative perceptions that human beings experience. What this wide range of emotional or perceptual modes shares is that they are all made up of affective judgments about the significance of our “lives as subjects” and “as self-reflexive beings.”26 Crucially, strongly evaluative modes involve qualitative judgments of worth, that is, seeing some goals and states of affairs as higher than others. Thus, they capture the way humans experience not only immediate de facto or felt desires but also desires about their desires. As Taylor put it, unlike other animals, humans don’t take “de facto desires as the ultimate justification” but move “beyond that to their worth.”27 Smith has made the important observation that strong evaluation need not be consciously or reflectively carried out; that is to say, such evaluation might remain entirely implicit to an agent’s actions and behavior.28 Take the example of pride. Pride is defined by strong evaluation in that it consists of a judgment as to the worthiness of a particular state of

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affairs and how this reflects on one’s sense of self. So one man might feel pride in his ability to seduce women while another feels shame; likewise, one woman might take pride in her money while another might take pride in her ability to renounce worldly goods and serve the poor. As these brief examples suggest, strongly evaluative emotional modes do not merely judge some feature of reality but also the significance of one’s own desires, actions, and identity as part of that reality. Indeed, Taylor claimed that strong evaluation is at the very heart of human agency insofar as it is what makes human identity possible.29 In contrast to other animals, when we ask a person “Who is that?”, we won’t know the full answer unless we also ask about what the individual finds of crucial importance (i.e., his or her desires about desire).30 Questions of human identity are questions about the self-interpretations and strong evaluations that shape a life. For example, Is she a nationalist? An anarchist? A vegetarian? Is he a Muslim? A “good old boy”? A Buddhist? Strongly evaluative emotions are expressive of the self-interpretations of human identity.31 This is so much the case that, according to Taylor, for humans even emotions occurring in the first two classes tend to be colored by the interpretations that make up a person’s sense of identity. Thus, an emotion like fear or even pain might be considered cowardly or heroic, joyful or masochistic. And this means “Human life is never without interpreted feeling; the interpretation is constitutive of the feeling.”32 It is worth emphasizing that with this last move Taylor does not collapse the importance of the prior two distinctions in his account of the logic of our emotions. Rather, his basic point is that, although human emotional and perceptual modes are colored by self-interpretations, some kinds of emotions can exist independent of language. Thus, immediate feelings (e.g., pain) as well as emotions that are not subject referring (e.g., fear) are both what Taylor called “language-independent” and can be experienced by nonlinguistic animals.33 This is in marked contrast to subject-referring emotions, which absolutely require language and articulacy to be experienced. As Taylor put it, “What we experience in the dentist’s chair, or when the fingernail is rubbed along the blackboard, is in a sense quite independent of language . . . we feel that this pain is language-independent; and we have no trouble imagining an animal having this experience.”34

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At the same time, human subjectivity is such that people incorporate even immediate emotions into their articulated, subject-referring sense of self and perception. Thus, for example, human pain is typically perceived against some background sense of articulated emotion and identity.35 There is no contradiction here, for Taylor’s claim is that humans, as linguistic animals, can experience even their immediate feelings in light of further, subject-referring emotions. Thus, to return to the original point, self-interpretation can color even immediate sensations as cowardly, prideful, shameful, elevating, self-defeating, and so on. How does this series of arguments suggest an antinaturalist, interpretive social science? One basic upshot of Taylor’s series of arguments is that it vindicates the ontological thesis that human agency (belief, action, and identity) is expressive of self-interpretation and as such constitutes a unique object of study differing from the objects of study of the natural sciences. How this is true can be brought out by two interrelated features of Taylor’s account. First, Taylor argued that strong evaluation is possible only for animals with linguistic capacities because it presupposes the ability to characterize a situation in relation to distinctions about what is worthy or unworthy of oneself. Thus, human emotional life is what might be termed language dependent in that it typically exists through a process of self-articulation and self-expression. As Taylor noted, “These feelings are articulated” even if only implicitly.36 And this means that human action is expressive of these self-interpretations. The explanation of human action requires understanding the reasons and motives that fueled it. And these reasons, which are forms of meaning, must be interpreted. Second, the language dependency of human emotion and action gives human agency a unique ontological status. That is, in the case of strongly evaluative perceptual modes, there is not an independent relationship between object and description but a dimension of being human that is shaped by what Taylor referred to as “redescription.” In cases of redescription, “description and experience are bound together in [a] constitutive relation . . . [that] admits of causal influences in both directions” in such a way that an “altered description of our motivation can be inseparable from a change in this motivation.”37 So I might reinterpret my resentment toward my brother as a form of repressed envy

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and then struggle to transform this into a nobler sentiment such as admiration. Because human emotions are susceptible to redescription, the reality of emotion and perceptual experience can itself be transformed through self-interpretation. This kind of redescription highlights a basic difference between the social and natural sciences. As Taylor noted, the objects of the natural sciences like livers, DNA helix, or chemical compounds are not capable of transformation through self-interpretation.38 Yet this is centrally true of human action, motivation, and self. Thus, the meanings of the human sciences are not fixed but are creatively changed as humans innovate and develop new ideas, languages, concepts, and senses of self. The social scientist must not treat meanings like fixed, natural types but always interpret them as being reshaped and changed on a temporal, historical axis. A major consequence of this for the social sciences is that explaining human action, motivation, and self requires, as a first step, grasping the self-interpretations, meanings, and language of the subject.39 Again, this is not true of objects of the natural sciences, which are incapable of self-interpretation and redescription. The natural sciences no doubt involve interpretation, but the social sciences involve interpretations of interpretations. A human being “cannot be understood simply as an object among objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation.”40 Taylor’s arguments thus converge with MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian assertion that man is a teleological, storytelling animal and social science explanation must conform to the object of study. Specifically, social scientists must conceive of their work as being the interpretation of the meanings of beliefs, actions, practices, and institutions. Because human action is creative (self-interpretive) and expressive of meaning, the human political and social worlds must be viewed as no less expressive of meanings. Taylor’s account thus directly challenges all attempts to explain normal human action through impersonal, mechanistic forms of causation. For example, reductive neuroscience of a certain kind and the psychological behaviorism discussed above are examples of the attempt to reduce human behavior to material, impersonal causes. Similarly, certain forms of social science try to reduce the explanation of human behavior to the correlation of demographic classifications or to some ideal

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of economic rationality. The problem with these various naturalist approaches is that they misunderstand the language-dependent nature of human motives and actions. Grasping human actions requires interpreting the languages that inform them and not simply diving into a supposedly more absolute dimension of reality. Narrative is thus the primary form of explanation in the social sciences. Social science is an interpretive science. This is because reconstructing the contingent reasons and meanings of agents that led them to pursue certain actions requires telling some kind of a story. This story may be buttressed by statistics or other kinds of data (a point I will return to), but it must always remain sensitive to the interpretation of meanings as a narrative and not a formal, mechanistic, causal account. In this way, Taylor’s philosophical ontology, like MacIntye’s, helped ground and enrich the analytic critiques he had been making of the coherence of naturalist research programs all along. In sum, Taylor and MacIntyre both offered accounts of human agency that implied an approach to social science research that was interpretive and historical. In doing so, they also established a philosophical basis for a humanistic study of individuals—that is, one that takes seriously the creative agency and dignity of the human person. Social science, in the interpretive view, cannot reduce the human person to a being for which lower levels of impersonal and mechanistic explanation are sufficient. Interpretive social science is thus entwined with a humanist ethical outlook. Yet how exactly an interpretive approach to social science entails this political and ethical stance still requires further clarification. This brings me to one of the more dramatic features of an antinaturalist and interpretive social science: its overcoming of the belief that social science must separate facts from values. Perhaps nothing has been so much to blame for the divorce of social science from political theory as this naturalist doctrine.

C H A P T e R

5

ov e rco M i n g vA lu e - n e u tr A l it y i n th e soc i A l sc i e n c e s

Inquiry in the natural sciences is normally completely separate from normative questions of ethics and values. For example, the study of cellular structure in biology or rock formation in geology is logically separate from the ethical positions that researchers in these empirical disciplines might happen to hold. Naturalism attempts to import this same division, under the banner of “value-neutrality,” into the social sciences. The basic idea is that researchers wishing to achieve true scientific status must as much as possible exclude value judgments from their accounts of the social and political world. This is because values are the result of subjective perceptions and are not part of the objective furniture of reality. Ideological dispute is thus thought of as precisely what social science researchers must avoid at all costs. As Max Weber famously noted, ideological commitments belong out on the street corner and not in the research laboratory or university lecture halls. This creates the naturalist ideal of the social scientist as a disengaged spectator above the moral and ideological fray. But does this ideal of disengagement hold once an interpretive critique of naturalism has been internalized and understood? In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Taylor and MacIntyre have respectively provided some key insights into a new way forward in the social sciences, one that overcomes the long-standing dichotomy between facts and 75

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values. Of course, as is well known, they are not alone in having misgivings about this naturalist assumption. Recently researchers in disciplines such as political science have been increasingly uneasy with the doctrine of value-neutrality.1 Unfortunately, in practice, these same researchers have done little to disentangle their work from this presupposition.2 Also, despite some high-profile attacks on the fact-value dichotomy, the particular insights of Taylor and MacIntyre on this question have not yet been absorbed by mainstream social science, philosophy, and political theory.3 Thus, the social sciences find themselves in a very peculiar situation: on the one hand, there is widespread discomfort with doctrinaire value-neutrality, but on the other, there is very little clarity as to what an alternative approach would look like. In the midst of this muddle, the old naturalist habits of mind continue to prevail almost by default.4 I will try to bring clarity to this vexed issue in the next two chapters: first, by arguing that Taylor and MacIntyre have provided a philosophical framework for overcoming value-neutrality and second, by showing how they have actually put this ethically engaged form of inquiry into practice in their later works. The task of this chapter is to establish the basic philosophical framework needed for all those who wish to transcend the naturalist dogma of value-neutrality. Such an understanding can be achieved (as has been my approach all along) through a historical form of analysis that situates Taylor and MacIntyre within their proper historical contexts. In Taylor’s case, this means seeing his arguments in light of midcentury logical positivism and in MacIntyre’s in terms of a prolonged disagreement with the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch. According to Taylor and MacIntyre, social science and political theory should be engaged both empirically and normatively. There simply is no absolute philosophical barrier between these two activities. Indeed, if their arguments are valid, the tendency to divide labor between those who carry out empirical inquiries (social scientists) and those whose concerns are values or normative claims (political theorists and philosophers) is misguided. Interpretive social science, rightly understood, entails a synthesis between empirical and normative inquiry. The philosophical basis for this subtle synthesis is the insight that explanation in the social sciences assumes a view of human agency in the form of a

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norm for rational and legitimate human action. In this respect, the argument concerning value-neutrality rests in part on the ontological claims about the human person treated in the prior chapter. As I will show below, Taylor and MacIntyre do not offer a radical postmodern skepticism according to which all facts are colored by value. There are still vast and important domains of social science research that involve facts that can be accepted by individuals regardless of their ideological commitments. In this sense, talk of value-neutrality still has a role, albeit a much more limited one than that professed by naturalism.

taylor’s critique of the fact-value divide

Perhaps the most powerful philosophical defense of the fact-value divide to occur during the twentieth century was that offered by the logical positivists who preceded Taylor at Oxford. Although already waning in their influence by the time Taylor arrived, logical positivists like Ayer remained the primary philosophical authorities behind this doctrine in the english-speaking world, even as it became a more diffusely held doctrine among analytic philosophers more generally. The logical positivist defense of this doctrine was summarized in the opening chapters. However, a brief recapitulation of Ayer’s version of the fact-value dichotomy will help clarify Taylor’s own philosophical strategy for rejecting this doctrine.5 The reader will recall that Ayer’s overarching philosophical goal was to reassert the British empiricist tradition. empiricists like David Hume had claimed that from factual premises no evaluative conclusions could be deduced. Facts were devoid of an evaluative dimension and argumentative deduction from factual premises could add nothing to the conclusion that was not part of the premises. Hence the Humean-inspired maxim so popular in analytic and social science circles up to the present: no “ought” can be derived from an “is.” As discussed earlier, Ayer’s updating of Hume’s argument drew on Vienna Circle philosophy and began from the assertion that all meaningful propositions must be one of two kinds. either propositions could be analytic, a priori tautologies that were true by definition (e.g., logic and

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mathematics) or they could be synthetic, empirical hypotheses, whose truth rested on verification (e.g., the natural sciences). Propositions that could neither be verified by science nor validated by a priori definition were “metaphysical,” and thus “neither true nor false but literally senseless.”6 Values were thus cast out of the blessed realm of all science and rational inquiry, for they neither had objective observable status nor were true a priori by definition. Rather, values (like theology and aesthetics) must be shut out of true scientific research. This philosophically sophisticated defense of the fact-value dichotomy might easily lead one to presume that the main way to refute this doctrine would be to show how one could in fact arrive at an evaluative conclusion from a factual premise. Indeed, something like this strategy was famously taken up by John Searle (a contemporary of Taylor’s at Oxford and fellow Rhodes scholar) in his critique of the fact-value dichotomy in his famous 1964 essay “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is.’” Yet what is interesting about Taylor’s approach to rebutting the fact-value dichotomy is precisely how it differs from Searle’s. This is because Taylor did not start from the logical doctrine that no statement of fact entails a judgment of value. Instead, his 1967 essay “Neutrality in Political Science” did two things to shift the debate over value-neutrality.7 First, Taylor rejected the typical analytic framing of the problem in terms of whether values could be deduced from atomistic statements or propositions of fact. Taylor believed this way of discussing value-neutrality was misleading because it skewed the case in favor of the traditional Humean position from the outset. Second, Taylor rejected the typical starting point of the debate (as a supposed truth of logic), moving instead into the arena of actual research programs in social science. That is, he looked to what working social scientists were actually doing in their attempts to build value-neutral frameworks. He then posed the question of whether or not value-neutrality could be actualized in this domain of activity. What he discovered was that value-neutrality in the social sciences was not foremost a question of individual facts in relationships of logical equivalence with one another but rather a question of competing frameworks of explanation. Thus, for Taylor, values do not derive deductively from atomistic statements of fact. Instead, they subtly pervade larger ontological and explanatory frameworks.

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As Taylor put it, dividing our language into “descriptive” versus “evaluative” meaning is “seriously misleading,” for it implies that the meaning of our concepts “can be ‘unpacked’ in statements of logical equivalence.”8 Moreover, when this epistemological assumption is made a priori (as a truth of analytic logic), the way that values pervade frameworks becomes largely invisible. The traditional Humean formulation of the issue therefore has something of a bewitching effect. Defenders of the fact-value dichotomy fail to see how explanation in the social sciences is actually carried out. Clearly there is still a role for value-neutrality in Taylor’s philosophy. But what Taylor saw was that strict value-neutrality is limited to facts that are explanatorily trivial—that is, facts that do no work to explain political and social reality. explanatorily trivial does not mean unimportant. To the contrary, massively important and extensive areas of social science research can be treated as value neutral and accepted by people hailing from rival ideological or advocacy perspectives (for example, statistics about the composition and numbers of voter turnout in the last election or a country’s rate of return on capital versus rate of growth in the economy in a given year consist, in principle, of some ideologically neutral facts). In this way, Taylor’s position differs sharply from a postmodern skepticism, which sees all knowledge as pervaded by values, power, or ideology. Perhaps Foucault’s famous and thought-provoking slogan that “everything is dangerous” expresses this postmodern stance—that no knowledge is free of ideological taint or some stratagem of power.9 In contrast to this, Taylor allowed for a vast and important array of valueneutral facts. What then is wrong with the naturalist claim to strict and absolute value-neutrality? Taylor’s main thesis was that values subtly and inescapably enter into play whenever social science researchers employ theoretical frameworks that attempt to explain human action. This is because to do so they must “contain some, even implicit, conception of human needs, wants, and purposes” and therefore support a particular view of what is normal, rational action for human beings.10 Thus, although Taylor conceded that many of the theoretical frameworks of modern political science did not establish outright the validity of a set of values, they nevertheless implicitly promoted them so that “establishing a given

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framework restricts the range of value positions which can be defensibly adopted” and shifts “the onus of argument” in favor of certain values.11 Taylor dubbed this built-in support of certain values and outcomes (which is part of all frameworks of political explanation) their “valueslope.” The language of a slope is important because it metaphorically evokes the way a given framework pushes evaluative judgments in a certain direction even while it does not establish those values outright. Social scientists must become aware of the subtle and complex relationship between values and their explanatory frameworks. Much later, Taylor reformulated this basic line of argument, but he did so in terms of evaluative judgments of truth and reality that one makes when explaining human actions and motives. As Taylor put it, “There can’t be explanation without a judgment of truth,” and therefore “one’s own language of explanation” must confront that of “one’s subjects’ self-understanding.”12 In other words, when we are trying to explain a man’s actions in a way that he “would have found strange . . . we are ipso facto challenging his picture of things and putting our own in its place.”13 In this way, all social and political explanation is inescapably evaluative. That is, it involves assessments as to the truth and reasonableness of the given beliefs and actions of those persons that a social scientific theory is seeking to explain. Again, evaluation occurs because social explanation requires some (even implicit) judgment as to what counts or doesn’t count as reasonable or at least legitimate human agency. A norm of human agency is always operative. Taylor illustrated this latter point with the vivid example of a man who is frantically waving his hands to fend off a swarm of flies. We might assume the explanation for this man’s actions is obvious and terminates with his own self-understanding. But suppose we observed that there were no flies swarming around the man’s head and yet when we asked him why he was waving his hands, he replied, “Because of those damned flies!” Suddenly we would be pressed to seek a new explanation for the man’s actions. According to Taylor, this example illustrates a basic feature of social scientific explanation. Namely, if an agent’s self-understandings are found to be incompatible with our notion of what is real or valid, we turn to explanations “in terms of illusion; and we identify something else to explain.”14 By the same reasoning, if the researcher’s notion of

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reality coincides with the self-understandings of those in question, then the researcher’s explanations will terminate with an ideal articulation of this self-understanding. This means that the more seriously a social scientist takes the validity of someone’s beliefs and actions, the more likely he or she is to accept them as explanatory on their own terms. It also follows that social and political explanations must involve (either implicitly or explicitly) some evaluation of agents and their actions with respect to what is rational, reasonable, illusory, ideological, and so on. In other words, in Taylor’s account, social scientists cannot avoid the normative task of ideological critique. And this again is because all explanation either implicitly or explicitly involves an evaluation as to the reasonableness of the agents in question. We can perhaps clarify how this argument works by constructing an example out of Taylor’s own recent social scientific work in A Secular Age (a work I return to in greater detail in the final chapter). In this book, Taylor took issue with reductive accounts of religious belief—that is, accounts of religious belief that make it a function of some supposedly more real, underlying motive or desire that is not religious in nature. This view of religious belief as being driven by some other, underlying motive is often tied to the mainline secularization thesis in sociology. This thesis holds that religion will increasingly diminish in relevance in modern, rational societies as people recognize the real underlying motive that their religious belief is intended to address. In A Secular Age, Taylor took particular issue with a version of this secularization thesis that was defended by the sociologist of religion Steve Bruce, who argued that religious belief on its own terms was not a true motivating or explanatory force in the modern world. The question then emerges, how does a social scientist like Bruce explain the fact that religious belief remained a widespread phenomenon in a country as paradigmatically modern as the United States was during the twentieth century? (Remember that Taylor’s argument allows for value-neutral facts: for instance, here the high rates of religious belief in America throughout the twentieth century are an example of such a value-neutral item.) Bruce’s explanation of the US anomaly was that religious belief was basically driven by a lower, more real motivating factor: specifically, the need for all humans to integrate their communities around some shared

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identity. Bruce’s basic intuition was that religious faith (although it could not be taken on its own terms) must be understood as one way that humans form and integrate a social identity. Because the United States has traditionally been an immigrant society, a stronger need for community integration has remained than in modern european nations that are not primarily composed of immigrants. Higher levels of religiosity in the United States could thus be explained by a stronger need for community formation among newly arrived immigrant populations. What Bruce did not accept as explanatory on its own terms was religion as explained by a real experience of the transcendent like, say, the Christian belief in Incarnation or the Buddhist belief in Nirvana. For example, Bruce would not be able to accept as an explanation that there were more religious communities in the United States because of a heightened awareness of the reality of Jesus Christ as savior of the world within certain groups that predominated in America.15 The evaluative slope of Bruce’s explanation should thus be clear. Bruce’s explanation incorporates a judgment as to the truth of religious believers’ own self-understandings. For him, an objective experience of the mystical or transcendent does not count as a reasonable explanation. Instead, for Bruce, people are responding to another need rooted in species biology and social dynamics—namely, group formation. In this way, judgments and evaluations about what counts as real or legitimate are integral to any social explanation. Indeed, the more social scientists take Bruce’s explanation to be exhaustive of religious belief in the United States, the more strongly evaluative it becomes. Yet just as Taylor warns, the relationship between values and explanatory frameworks is subtle, creating a slope tending in a particular direction but not absolutely binding one to a particular advocacy position. Note, for instance, that a religious person might endorse Bruce’s explanation of the American case but wish to localize it only to bad or defective reasons for holding religious faith within a particular cultural milieu. Yet the more one pushes the scope of Bruce’s account of modern religious belief, the more any faith is treated as epiphenomenal to the purportedly more real drive of a need for social cohesion. We should not at all be surprised to discover that Bruce thus believes secularism would mean that social actors would increasingly understand the “real” driver

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behind their actions is a need for group solidarity. They would thus shed religious faith to the point at which it would become largely irrelevant. Bruce, in other words, has used his social science explanation to help fortify his advocacy of the marginalization of religious faith more generally within modern life. The point of all of this is not to decide whether Taylor or Bruce is right in the debate over the relevant motives and desires that drive religious belief (settling that question is far beyond the scope of the present inquiry). The point is to see the way that facts and values relate in the social sciences. The above debate sheds light on Taylor’s use of slope as a metaphor to evoke the way explanatory frameworks in the social sciences push in certain directions without utterly determining or fixing adherence to those values. Social science explanations shape the argumentative onus of those who take them up and “secrete” values in such a way that the “connection between factual base and valuation is built in” without being utterly fixed.16 This is a key subtlety. For neglect of the distinction between the suggestiveness and determinateness of frameworks is perhaps mainly at the root of the spread of the idea of a fact-value dichotomy in the social sciences. Note that Bruce’s framework does not insist that logic or deductive argument requires social scientists view religion as subrational. Nevertheless, once someone accepts Bruce’s description, there is an evaluative press or slope toward viewing religious beliefs and practices in a certain way. This complexity was echoed by Taylor in his hugely influential essay on the liberal-communitarian debate, in which he made his famous distinction between “ontology” (which runs parallel to what I have been calling explanatory issues) and “advocacy.” When discussing this distinction, Taylor noted that the relationship between these two areas is “complex” because “taking a position on one doesn’t force your hand on the other”; nonetheless, “they are not completely independent, in that the stand you take on the ontological level can be part of the essential background of the view you advocate.”17 What an ontology of human agency does do is “structure the field of possibilities” in such a way that “taking an ontological position doesn’t amount to advocating something; but at the same time, the ontological does help to define the options it is meaningful to support by advocacy” so that “ontological theses” are “far from innocent.”18

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explanations of human agency in the social sciences are thus not as simplistically independent of the advocacy of certain values as naturalism would have it. Rather, which explanations of the world one is likely to accept will limit or expand the range of ethical sources one is willing to affirm as legitimate. Likewise, ethical and normative commitments can have an effect on the range of explanatory theories one is likely to adopt (for example, a Christian might not accept Social Darwinism as a social theory because its value-slope looks to them to be prima facie false since it is immoral). Normative and social theories are interactive in this way because they share a basic grounding within a view of human ontology or what Taylor calls philosophical anthropology. So, for example, Taylor’s clear statement of his own anthropological commitment to the human being as a “homo religiosus” with an “ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life” pushes in a much different direction than Bruce’s explanation of the modern social phenomenon of secularization.19 Indeed, this view of the human person has generated a completely different sociology of religion in A Secular Age. Assumptions about human ontology are in this way the overlapping points between empirical social science research and normative, moral, and political theorizing. The upshot of Taylor’s argument is that the work of thinking through plausible normative and social scientific theories is not dichotomous. Rather, both ends will influence one another. What does choosing between two such normatively engaged social scientific theories look like? Much more needs to be said about establishing objectivity between two rival social theories with value-slopes. I will return to this at greater length (and in light of another feature of the Taylor-Bruce debate) in the next chapter, where I provide readers with examples of how such controversies might be arbitrated. At present, the key point is that Taylor has established a new, antinaturalist conception of the role of values in the social sciences. Value-neutrality still has an important role in the social sciences, but it can no longer be simplistically treated as absolute. A subtle awareness of value-dimensions must be cultivated by social scientists and political theorists when considering the implicit norm of human motives, reasons, and desires that are evoked in social science explanation.

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Macintyre’s critique of “descriptivism”

Taylor’s analogy about a man waving his hands at flies that don’t exist is meant to suggest that social science explanation, because it must incorporate judgments as to the reality or illusion of the reasons motivating agents, is inevitably colored by evaluation. But consider the following objection: social scientists can remain agnostic as to the reality or illusoriness of the reasons motivating agents. For instance, a social scientist who observes a man waving his hands because the latter believes “there are small flies” swarming around his head might simply state that the explanation for the action lies in the man’s belief that there are small flies harassing him. In this way, the social scientist might remain agnostic as to whether or not the flies really exist (after all, flies are rather small). The social scientist would escape the necessity of judging the motives for the action as either reasonable or unreasonable, real or illusory, legitimate or illegitimate, and so on, and would simply stop at the self-understandings of the agent involved and thus remain value neutral. I will call this latter position “descriptivism,” and although I think Taylor’s position is defensible against it, I will instead focus on how MacIntyre’s debate with the philosopher Peter Winch clearly rebuts such an escape route back into absolute value-neutrality. Understanding MacIntyre’s views on the matter is greatly aided by seeing how they arose out of the context of a debate with Winch. Winch’s seminal 1958 book The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy joined a long tradition of verstehen theorists, who argued that social science knowledge reached its goal by reconstructing an ideally articulate insider view of a culture. As MacIntyre expressed it, “According to Winch the successful sociologist has simply learned all that the ideal native informant could tell him” by rendering the “implicit and partial” knowledge that members of a society possess “explicit and complete.”20 This turn toward a social science centered on the interpretation of meanings was of tremendous importance to MacIntyre, and he acknowledged that Winch had identified the “true starting point” of all social inquiry.21 However, MacIntyre also believed Winch had made a grave error in turning this true starting point into the end point of social inquiry as well. For doing so stranded social research in value-neutral descriptions

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of the self-understandings of those it studied. Under Winch’s conception, there simply was no theoretical basis for the social researcher to challenge a culture’s self-understandings. The webs of meaning of a particular culture had to be described on their own terms. And this had the effect of barring deeper normative criticism from the social sciences. Social science became about the description of beliefs and actions, free of evaluation as to whether or not they were reasonable. Some background on this debate is in order before this objection can be tackled. MacIntyre’s full response to the complex ramifications of Winch’s descriptivism took years to develop. But early on he drew a key distinction between rational and irrational beliefs and actions. The problem, according to MacIntyre, lay in Winch’s particular conception of the social sciences. For Winch had grounded the difference between the natural and social sciences in the view that understanding the specific meanings of human beliefs and actions was something utterly different than citing general causal laws.22 Moreover, in the style of analytic philosophy, Winch had advanced this claim as if it were an a priori, logical truth about the concepts appropriate to the social versus natural sciences. Yet, MacIntyre noted, even on Winch’s own terms there was no compelling, a priori reason why causal explanations should be incompatible with the interpretation of meanings. After all, individuals might possess a reason regarding a state of affairs that was identifiable independently of a given action, so that the “possession of a reason by an agent” might be “an item of a suitable type to figure as a cause.”23 This suggests that it was at least possible to ask, without a conceptual error being committed, whether a specific action had in fact been caused for the reason cited by the agent or if perhaps there had been some hidden source, whether ideological, pathological, or otherwise. Winch’s a priori conceptual arguments simply begged this question. In this regard, Winch’s mistake had been to assume that causal explanations were limited to the necessary, law-like generalizations typical of the natural sciences. Such a law-like conception of cause was indeed incompatible with explaining human beliefs and actions in terms of contingent reasons. But the concept of cause, MacIntyre noted, did not need to be thought of in monolithic terms. Instead, a cause could be thought of as anything that “makes any outcome different from what it

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would otherwise have been.”24 So the causal bonds typical of the natural sciences might very well be necessary and law-like, while the causes of human beliefs and meanings might instead be contingent and contextual. There was no way to philosophically legislate the case beforehand. Ironically, considering he was a follower of Wittgenstein, Winch had failed to notice that causality was a pluralistic concept such that “the notion of causality has application independently of the notion of necessary condition.”25 MacIntyre’s more pluralistic conception of cause allowed him to view social inquiry in light of a basic distinction between rational and irrational beliefs and actions. Rational beliefs and actions were those caused by “an antecedent process of reasoning and could only be generated as the outcome of such a process.”26 For example, T. S. eliot’s writing the poem Four Quartets might be considered an action whose explanation requires engaging with a contingent formation of beliefs in context. This is in contrast to irrational beliefs and actions in which “some antecedent condition” might be “sufficient to produce a belief, irrespective of the reasoning appropriately to be invoked.”27 In this vein, MacIntyre cited a number of possible candidates for irrationality from the social research of that time (including research on posthypnotic behavior as well as erving Goffman’s work on the effect of preexistent social roles on patients in asylums).28 But perhaps less problematic examples of this kind of causality might be the paranoia of a schizophrenic or the hallucinations of a drugged patient. MacIntyre’s point was not to vindicate any one particular example but rather to insist that in the case of irrational beliefs and actions, a social scientist’s explanation must trump native self-understandings in ways that Winch had neglected. Because human beings could either succeed or fail with respect to their actions and whether or not the beliefs they hold are rational, social theorists would need to be sensitive to all the myriad ways that distortion might occur.29 Indeed, this was why grasping native selfunderstandings formed the true starting point of social inquiry. For as MacIntyre put it, “We cannot begin to evaluate the rationality of procedures until we know what is being said on the relevant occasions, and we cannot know what is being said until we know into what genres the utterances of a given culture may be classified.”30

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This part of MacIntyre’s argument was similar to Taylor’s: social scientists were faced with the inescapable evaluative task of assessing whether particular beliefs and actions could be taken on their own terms or were instead irrational or distorted in some sense. There was an “asymmetry” in the kinds of explanation appropriate to rational versus irrational beliefs and actions.31 This asymmetry essentially meant that in cases of rational beliefs, the self-understandings of the subject of study should be charitably reconstructed in order to form explanations, while in cases of irrational beliefs the language of self-understanding needed to be challenged and perhaps even supplanted. So there was at least a convincing “preliminary case for holding that not all beliefs are to be explained in the same way,” and the “form of explanation appropriate to rational beliefs” was not always the same as “the form of explanation appropriate to irrational beliefs.”32 In this way, making the distinction between rational and irrational beliefs and actions was an initial effort by MacIntyre to argue that there was a perpetual, inescapable contestability between the social scientist and the subject of study. This was because when a social scientist determined that a particular belief, action, or practice was somehow distorted or irrational, he was also evaluating it. The social scientist could not remain entirely neutral on the question of the actions of or beliefs held by the groups, institutions, and individuals he studied. Nor, MacIntyre noted, was the evaluation an added component to a purely descriptive one: to call beliefs rational or irrational, correct or fallacious, was always “at once to describe and to evaluate” them.33 It was therefore ironic that the dogma of naturalism was often considered to follow from a “truth of logic, when logic is itself the science in which the coincidence of description and evaluation is most obvious.”34 So far, MacIntyre’s account runs parallel to Taylor’s, without necessarily responding to the skeptic, who rejects the need to classify beliefs as either rational or irrational but simply insists that explanation consists in reporting that “agent X performed action A because he believed Y to be true.” Such a stance would be radically agnostic as to the rationality or irrationality of agents. Social science would simply accept the selfunderstanding of agents as explanatory. One major problem with holding this view is that it seems to imply a radical form of relativism in the social sciences. Social scientists don’t

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judge, for instance, whether burning witches is a rational or irrational action; they simply report self-understandings and take them to be explanatory on their own terms. That X believes Y is reason enough to explain the action, and evaluations of beliefs as distorted, deluded, erroneous, or irrational are banned from the social sciences. Value-neutrality has been won but at the severe cost of a radical relativism. Already, prima facie, such relativism would likely make this model of social science unacceptable to many social scientists. Foregoing such basic judgments concerning the rationality versus irrationality of actors would seem a revocation of rationality itself. But what of the social scientist or philosopher who is willing to take on board the problematic features of a radical relativism? Can anything be said to such a social scientist or philosopher? Again, returning to MacIntyre’s debate with Winch is illuminating as Winch was just such a philosopher. There is a deeper philosophical inconsistency in this descriptivist stance. Like the above skeptic, Winch had excluded normative evaluation from social science in a key way by arguing that the concepts of rationality and truth (upon which any normative judgment of rational versus irrational rests) were themselves completely relative to particular cultures. They had, therefore, no critical purchase outside their home context. This type of relativism was famously proposed in the paper “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in which Winch made the claim that modern scientific knowledge was in no way more rational than the witchcraft of peoples like the African Azande and thus could not be used by social scientists to evaluate the reasonableness of beliefs about witches. According to Winch, this was because all rationality and concepts of truth were dependent on the context of the particular framework of rules that informed them.35 It followed that there were no universal epistemological foundations that might provide neutral criteria for arbitrating between radically incommensurable frameworks. And, although Winch allowed that there were clear and binding standards of truth and rationality within a given framework or system of beliefs, the problem of relativism was inescapable between radically incommensurable paradigms.36 Indeed, in such cases all the social scientist could do to switch from one competing paradigm to another was to make an irrational leap of faith. The job of the social scientist was thus

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simply to report or describe what rival communities of people believed, not to evaluate those beliefs. These assumptions brought Winch to the dramatic conclusion that in the face of radically incommensurable frameworks it was “illegitimate” to say a given “concept of reality is the correct one.”37 That is, modern scientific knowledge could not be deemed one bit more rational than the primitive, witch-believing system of the Azande. This meant that modern social scientists could not criticize the Azande for their witchcraft but could only describe their given rationality and way of life. MacIntyre summed up Winch’s position as follows: “[In Winch’s view] we cannot ask which system of beliefs is the superior in respect of rationality and truth; for this would be to invoke criteria which can be understood independently of any particular way of life, and on Winch’s view there are no such criteria.”38 Social science could explain Azande witchcraft by citing certain beliefs, but it could not offer evaluative or normative judgments about those beliefs. In this way, neutrality in the social sciences was purchased at the cost of relativism. Yet the problem with Winch’s view was not merely his relativism about truth and rationality (both of which MacIntyre rejected).39 The problem was also that Winch had missed the way in which theories held by the social scientists could not remain agnostic about (and must often challenge) the theories held by those they sought to explain. This is because to hold a theory about how to best explain human agency necessarily entails judgments about the reasonableness of rival conceptualizations. The rationality guiding social science is thus normative of the rationality guiding actual social actors in the world. The foregoing point may be clarified by an example. Consider, in this vein, Winch’s claim that social research consists simply of describing an ideal, insider perspective, with no form of outsider social criticism available. The problem is that Winch’s own conceptual language (that of the reconstruction of beliefs held by agents) is fundamentally at odds with some of the conceptual languages that guide people in the world. So, for example, some Russian Bolshevists in 1923 believed on the basis of structural, causal laws governing human history, their regime would soon be bolstered by inevitable revolutions in Berlin and London.40 Insofar as these expectations relied on purported causal laws

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determining historical events, they were fundamentally incompatible with the interpretive assumptions that guided Winch’s social research: namely, that human beliefs and actions cannot be explained by such laws. But this means that Winch’s position entailed an evaluation of the comparative rationality of all those forms of political action and authority that appeal to laws governing social events. Indeed, the rationality guiding Winch’s idea of social science must imply that the Bolshevists of 1923 were deluded in terms of the beliefs that guided their hopes and actions. And a similar point could be raised today about all the contemporary forms of political authority that evoke causal laws—from technocratic economics to neo-Darwinist “memes.”41 But, of course, this normative dimension to antinaturalism is something I have been arguing all along. Winch’s very approach to description is inherently evaluative. Because his account of what qualifies as a good explanatory description must be guided by some concept of rationality, it is in turn normative of all those social and political agents in the world who construct their lives according to rival theories. Winch’s very concepts challenge the language of self-understanding of those he studied, and in some cases had to displace it. So Winch’s social science cannot accept the explanation offered by the Bolshevists of 1923 on their own terms for the simple reason that this would involve switching into an entirely different form of social explanation (that of structural Marxism). Rather, Winch must implicitly recode the language of explanatory causal laws into the language of intentional belief formation within a cultural context. Far from escaping the need to assess rational versus irrational beliefs, Winch had simply hidden the way in which it is an inescapable feature of his own theories about social explanation. even to say that an actor performed an action only because he or she “believed Y to be true” involves a norm for reasonable human agency: namely, one in which actions are the result of individual belief. Of course, as was the case with Taylor above, MacIntyre’s position does not exclude the possibility that there may very well be overlapping agreement between two particular rival frameworks. Nor does it mean that politics is overdetermined by this relationship (the Marxism of e. P. Thompson and the New Left, for example, might be made

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compatible with Winch’s form of social explanation). Rather, explanatory frameworks have a certain value-slope that structures the available positions for advocacy. The point once again is that the naturalist claim to an absolute division between facts and values is misplaced. The confrontation between the self-understandings of the social researcher and the self-understandings of the subject cannot simply be swept away.42 And this underscores the basic distinction between the natural and social sciences. For only in the social sciences are the subjects of study themselves potentially guided by the very social theories that are deployed in order to study them. This self-reflective dimension of human agency means that the adoption of a particular theory is never fully separable from moral and political questions about what counts or does not count as a defensible form of human agency. Thus, like Taylor, MacIntyre showed that the relationship between facts and values in the social sciences is much more complex and subtle than naturalism allows. Value-neutrality still has an important role in large swaths of social scientific research, but it can no longer be treated as an absolute doctrine that covers all inquiry. If the above arguments hold, social scientists must continually reckon with the way that their own theories involve some implicit conception of which things count as rational versus irrational (or legitimate versus illegitimate) reasons for action. The consequence of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s arguments for social researchers is that they must remain aware of how their own guiding explanatory theories exude a normative verdict on rival forms. Indeed, Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s arguments imply that there is a two-way street between explanatory frameworks and normative assessments. This is because to have a normative theory is to exclude certain forms of social explanation, while to adhere to a given social explanation is to change the range of available normative theories. The tables have thus been turned on naturalism. For where naturalism often presents itself as a strictly scientific endeavor, an interpretive approach instead sees it as being used to fortify a particular politics—one that justifies the authority of experts over and against the supposedly unscientific value commitments of nonexperts.43 So while naturalists claim that theirs is a scientifically privileged, value-neutral standpoint, interpretivists call attention to more humanistic approaches to the study of

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politics, ethics, and society. Interpretive philosophy thus generates a critique of the technocratic hierarchies of modernity. Likewise, it implies a critique of all schools of ethics that rely on naturalism. Indeed, this deeply important line of thought informs MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s more famous criticisms of utilitarianism and Kantian formalism as types of naturalism. In all these arenas, interpretive theory makes clear that naturalism is not just disembodied and intellectual but a living form of selfhood and power. Again, Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s analyses return to an original New Left theme but one now greatly enriched by phenomenological and Aristotelian traditions of reflection on human ontology. But this entire line of thought invites a series of crucial questions: How do social scientists actually decide between rival theories that have value-slopes? How can such interpretive disputes be rationally resolved? And what would an interpretive social science that is normatively engaged in this complex way actually look like? Among the tasks of the next chapter is to sketch an answer to these questions by engaging with Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s latest period of work.

C H A P T e R

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th e g r e At r e u n i f i c Ati o n An Antinaturalist Social Science

My account up to now has predominantly focused on Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s intellectual development through the 1970s—a period that furnishes the philosophical resources for a devastating critique of naturalism and the basis for a humanistic and interpretive social science. This amounts to nothing less than a dramatic alternative to the naturalism that has saturated extensive areas of contemporary intellectual life. But what would it look like to actually carry out an antinaturalist and interpretive research program? Although only time and the ingenuity of future scholars can fully answer this question, I would like to conclude by suggesting the beginnings of an answer. Once again, Taylor and MacIntyre are valuable guides on the road away from naturalism, for neither philosopher’s work stopped in the 1970s with mere philosophical exposition. To the contrary, both men are actually far more famous for the philosophical and historical sociologies they launched in the 1980s and continued into the early 2000s. The very success of this later work has ironically somewhat obscured the nature of the earlier accomplishments. A brief analysis will show the way these two periods are interlinked. Specifically, Taylor and MacIntyre put the interpretive philosophical principles developed in their early work into practice in their later years. This chapter thus not only completes 94

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the narrative arc of each philosopher’s intellectual development but also makes clear through substantive examples how naturalism can be overcome. In addition, I use work from this period to show how objectivity can be established between rival accounts with value-slopes. My hope is that this chapter will be a point of inspiration for social scientists and political theorists who wish to develop an antinaturalist body of research that unifies empirical and normative dimensions. In what follows, examples are drawn from each philosopher’s historical sociologies. Taylor has launched a massively influential social science research agenda that centers on the nature of modern identity, illuminating related topics such as nationalist violence, cultural pluralism, and secularism. Meanwhile MacIntyre has focused on the moral culture of late capitalism and the problem of rival practices and traditions. However, before looking at such examples, I wish to very briefly stipulate some of the basic theoretical concepts that have emerged in the preceding chapters. These can be thought of as some of the fundamental philosophical features of an antinaturalist, interpretive social science that both philosophers subsequently put into practice.

Basics of an interpretive Approach to social science research

The following principles by no means constitute an exhaustive list but are general philosophical maxims for conducting interpretive research. Students of politics, sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, and the social sciences more generally might use this list to help orient their own inquiries philosophically. The first principle, as argued at length in earlier chapters, is that causality in the case of human actions is contingent (not necessary or mechanistic). In the thrall of the hard sciences, naturalists often assume that causal mechanisms are impersonal, necessarily linking some antecedent state of affairs to a consequent state. By contrast, Taylor and MacIntyre both argued that human beliefs and actions are the result of creative, contingent reasoning processes and not impersonal, mechanistic triggers. The search for the latter, which consumes so much of contemporary social science, is ultimately a fool’s errand.

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Second, because causality with respect to human agency is contingent, the explanatory form appropriate to the social sciences is storytelling or narrative and not general causal laws. This is very difficult for modern people to understand because our intuitions have become so thoroughly naturalist that we are certain storytelling is the stuff of the premodern past. Yet as the prior arguments have shown, the true job of social scientists is to find the correct story about a given slice of social and political reality (be it a macrolevel analysis of entire societies or microlevel examination of particular individuals). This means that the social sciences are dealing with the same explanatory form as history and even literature. The social sciences are one of the humanities. Social scientists should try to tell the best stories they can about the political and social worlds, not try to discover how correlated sets of facts might yield causal generalizations. An important caveat must be emphasized here. Namely, the shift to narrative in no way excludes the use of mass surveys, statistics, and other quantitative methods. Narratives can employ numbers and statistics. As MacIntyre bluntly puts it, “The last thing that I want to deny is the essential part played by statistics and other branches of mathematics in all inquiry (I myself would be quite prepared to make the passing of examinations in statistics . . . a prerequisite for graduate study in any social science.)”1 Part of what we can learn from Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies is that the whole debate over methods is in some ways irrelevant to the naturalist versus antinaturalist controversy. Methods (whether quantitative statistics and mass surveys or qualitative ethnographies) are ways of generating information about the world and can be put at the service of either naturalist or antinaturalist ends. This means multiple methods can reign supreme in the social sciences. However, researchers must be careful to put their methods at the service of interpretive insights and not subordinate them to naturalism. Third, the fact that interpretive social science is narrative does not mean it is nonrational, subjective, or otherwise lacking in objectivity. The move toward interpretive narratives does not toll the bell for a radically skeptical postmodernism. The naturalist mistake here is to assume that objectivity consists only in foundational, brute data. Without absolute foundations, naturalists fear, objectivity is impossible. But as we saw Taylor argue, objectivity in the social sciences is the result of comparing

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overall coherence between rival interpretations and “error-correction in relation to an earlier view.”2 Objectivity can be generated by considering which of two competing theories is more fruitful, better at resolving certain dilemmas, or more able to subject its rival to an effective immanent critique (I will illustrate this process with examples below). As Taylor puts it, objectivity in the social sciences is achieved by constructing the “most comprehensive” narrative possible.3 This is a point that Taylor has further philosophically elaborated in his recent co-authored book, where he and Hubert Dreyfus argue that such comparisons are possible due to a shared background of embodied coping in the world.4 MacIntyre arguably was one of the first to apply this notion of comparative objectivity to the human sciences through his engagement with Kuhn and Lakatos. Thus, interpretive social science is an objective science provided we have a wider conception of objectivity and science than that offered by naturalism. Finally, an interpretive, antinaturalist social science should be thought of as normatively engaged and not absolutely value free. This conclusion follows from the line of argument established in the prior chapter: namely, the explanation of human behavior always implies some evaluative norm of rational versus irrational or legitimate versus illegitimate action. In this way a value-slope enters social science research at the level of explanation. Value-neutrality still serves an important role in the social sciences, but the high naturalist wall between facts and values has tumbled. In sum, an interpretive social science gives narrative explanations of contingent causality, employs a comparative form of objectivity, and promotes awareness of the subtle and complex role of values in social science research. In other words, social science is always on some level ethically engaged. I will now try to show how these features can be put into practice substantively by looking at examples from Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s work. This will include showing how objectivity can be established between social theories with value-slopes.

taylor on Modernity, nationalism, and secularism

The chief accomplishment of Taylor’s late work has been the development of a grand historical narrative or sociology of modernity.5 Hegel

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is a key influence for the development of this sociology.6 What Taylor learned from Hegel is that if human beings are indeed interpretive animals, then deciphering what Hegel called the “Sittlichkeit” or cultural and ethical life of a community becomes indispensable to sociological inquiry. This is because a human being cannot simply be conceived of as “a living organism” but must be seen as a linguistic creature situated within a particular “cultural world we call his identity” in such a way that “what we are as human beings we are only in a cultural community.”7 The point of contrast in this for Taylor is once more naturalism. Where naturalism seeks to subtract down to invariant structures and causal laws, an interpretive social science attempts to construct a narrative “account of the historical denseness of the present.”8 The search for a narrative of the Sittlichkeit to define modern human identity (what Taylor would later call the “modern social imaginary”) has become the central nexus of Taylor’s diverse social scientific interests, joining what are otherwise divergent interests in nationalism, multiculturalism, liberalism, and secularism. This sociology of the present was inaugurated in Sources of the Self (1989), in which Taylor sought to “articulate and write a history of the modern identity” as the “starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity.”9 I will look at only one very small piece of this complex sociology in order to illustrate how interpretive principles were and can be put to work. In Sources of the Self, Taylor argued that modern identity was shaped by “two big and many-sided cultural transformations”: the naturalism of the enlightenment and the “expressivist revolution” of european Romanticism.10 The former has already been discussed at length in my own account of naturalism, but little has been said about Romanticism’s expressivist revolution. According to Taylor, the expressivist revolution gave modern individuals their strong sense of the search for a unique and original way of being oneself. Unlike humans in prior epochs, moderns are often engaged in quests for personal authenticity. Taylor would go on to develop this theme at length in The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), but what is crucial for our purposes is the way that situating modern identity within a tradition of Romantic ethics of authenticity serves as an example of how interpretive explanation can be used to critique and challenge naturalist social science theories. I will look at only two topics,

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which have won Taylor much attention, to which he applies this narrative thread—nationalism and secularism. First let’s consider nationalism. Taylor has used his narrative of the emergence of an ethics of authenticity to criticize certain naturalist theories of nationalism. These naturalist theories conceive of nationalism as a return to tribal or even biologically primordial drives. In doing so, they miss the fact that nationalism is a “quintessentially modern” phenomenon and “can’t be understood as an atavistic reaction.”11 Indeed, according to Taylor, nationalism is part of the contingent meanings composing the modern Sittlichkeit. Specifically, nationalism is made possible by the ethics of authenticity and the assumption that each human group has a unique and authentic way of life and self-expression (a view Taylor traces back to German Romanticism and Herder’s conception of a Volk).12 Because nationalism is a contingent, modern phenomenon, social theorists who attempt to account for nationalist-motivated actions in terms of a throwback to primordial or perennial biological drives are bound to misunderstand it. So, for example, Taylor sharply criticizes sociobiological theories that try to explain ethnic cleansing and other such nationalist violence by arguing that they are the function of a primordial, biological human need for clan or group survival.13 Taylor questions how much such functional explanations of nationalist violence in fact explain. Specifically, he believes that functionalist theories of this sort cannot account for “why people are susceptible to certain meanings” and forms of violence over others.14 The functional account seems to be unable to explain the actual particular episodes of nationalist violence that social scientists seek to understand—that is, why this group, at this time, with these particular meanings and animosities? The ethics of authenticity, by contrast, point us toward a further analysis of the specific meanings of a particular nationalist movement that is motivated by a unique sense of self; historical narrative; and account of adversity, enemies, and so on. In this way, Taylor argues that his interpretive account is better able to resolve dilemmas and questions than a rival social science theory. For example, can a primordial biological drive really explain why Germans after World War I developed self-understandings centered around anti-Semitism rather than some other prejudice? What about the recent conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda? Taylor thinks in all

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such cases the functional account of primordial drives fails to account for the meanings actually motivating particular actions. Of course, the point for present purposes is not to decide whether Taylor or sociobiologists are right (a debate that extends far beyond the scope of this study). The point is rather to see how Taylor’s social theorizing puts into practice the interpretive principles articulated above. I have already noted that what Taylor gives is a narrative account of the rise of nationalism as a feature of modern identity. In doing so he brings attention to the contingent reasons why particular actors inherited certain beliefs and not others. What he does not seek to do is lay bare the ahistorical causal mechanisms (e.g., the sociobiological drives) behind all group or clan violence. Moreover, Taylor’s way of establishing the objective strength of his theory is to compare it with rival claimants to truth. His theory of nationalism, he argues, solves dilemmas, such as drawing attention to the unique meanings that motivate particular acts of nationalist violence, that the functional, sociobiological account is unable to address. In other words, objectivity is treated by Taylor as comparative and not foundationalist. Thus, three of the above four principles of interpretive social science are clearly being used by Taylor in his foray into the social science of nationalism. But what about the role of values in interpretive inquiry? Taylor believes that sociobiological explanations of nationalism are not only theoretically false but also politically “dangerous.”15 This is because these explanations give us a false picture of what motivates human agency and potentially point toward false, self-defeating solutions. Whereas sociobiology sees nationalist politics as the return of primordial, evolutionary passions that need to be somehow quelled or overcome, it is in fact “a species of identity politics.”16 Taylor’s work here is clearly linked to his seminal arguments on preventing violence between differing cultural groups in “The Politics of Recognition.” Prior to an age of authenticity, identities were often fixed by custom and tradition and enjoyed a kind of a priori recognition. However, once we pass over into an age where individuals and groups seek to express authentic senses of self, there is no guarantee that the identity developed will receive recognition from others (Taylor often refers here to the examples of race, postcolonialism, feminism, or gender

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politics). If part of what motivates modern selves is a search for authenticity and recognition for their specific way of being human, then “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence” so that “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being.”17 Taylor thus has spent a considerable amount of energy advocating for a brand of multiculturalism that responds to the deep modern need for recognition. Sociobiological explanations are dangerous because they elide the need modern peoples have developed for group and cultural recognition. At worst, sociobiology’s casting of nationalism as a kind of biological drive may even lead to reinforcement of nonrecognition, thus exacerbating the problem. The point is that the two theories of nationalist violence—sociobiological and an interpretive account of the ethics of authenticity—are suggestive of very different responses. Neither theory is tied by logical chains to a particular normative stance. But once we assume a norm of human desire or motivation, there is a press or slope in a particular direction. If we really are these kinds of modern selves and have a need for recognition, how we cope with violence is likely going to be very different than if the problem were that we are driven by an atavistic, premodern impulse toward primordial group identity. Taylor’s point is that there are value-dimensions to explanations in the social sciences that are suggestive without being absolutely determinative. The way we decide between these two views will again be by the comparative modes of objectivity adumbrated above. Because the normative is linked to empirical social scientific claims, the latter can be used to help arbitrate between rival normative theories as well. The same interpretive principles can be seen operating in Taylor’s most famous work to date, A Secular Age (2007), which was discussed very briefly in the prior chapter. Although there is no way to come even close to adequately summarizing this seminal research, the theme of authenticity can be used again as a proxy for illustrating how interpretive principles might be put into practice. Specifically, Taylor argues that an “age of authenticity” helps foster an “expressive individualism” in which spiritual and moral life are viewed as personal quests for fulfillment and are no longer necessarily linked to inherited social or political identities.18

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Individuals cultivate their own authentic senses of self in economic, moral, sexual, political, and even spiritual terms. This expressive individualism presents a massive challenge to traditional religion. However, Taylor also insists that an age of authenticity doesn’t mean the breakdown of human spiritual life but instead the spread of a vast array of options. New Age spiritualties (what Taylor calls “novas”) abound, but there are also returns to orthodox sources of religious faith. The modern age is therefore not primarily defined by Taylor as nonreligious but as pluralistic. Secularization is not a story about inevitable, growing disbelief but of exploding numbers of moral and spiritual possibilities. A secular age is one in which belief in God is only “one option among others.”19 This amounts to Taylor’s by now famous rejection of the standard secularization thesis that has dominated the sociology of religion and which maintains that modern societies are on track for mass scale unbelief. Max Weber offers the classic version of the secularization thesis, but Taylor focuses much of his attention on the more recent version defended by Steve Bruce (discussed briefly in the prior chapter). As in the case of nationalism, Taylor’s strategy for achieving scientific objectivity when confronting versions of the standard secularization thesis is comparative and not foundationalist. He seeks to show how his narrative can resolve dilemmas that representatives of the standard secularization thesis are unable to resolve. In the last chapter, I discussed the value-dimensions of Taylor’s versus Bruce’s theories, but I now want to return briefly to their debate in order to consider how objectivity might be achieved in this controversy. The basic approach is comparative and involves pointing out dilemmas that a rival’s theory is unable to account for and one’s own preferred theory resolves. According to Taylor, one of the biggest dilemmas facing the standard secularization thesis is that it cannot explain the actual religious landscape of the modern world. For instance, it cannot explain why religion never really went away in highly modern societies like the United States.20 We saw that Bruce attempts to resolve this latter dilemma by arguing that religion only persists in the modern world insofar as it serves the more basic function of creating social cohesion. Bruce thus contends that because the United States is a society of immigrants, it has retained a greater need for the “integrating function” of religion that serves as a

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kind of “cultural defense.”21 If Bruce is right, the United States has only retained a high level of religious belief because of a heightened need for social cohesion among minority, immigrant groups. This is in contrast to european societies, which are not primarily made up of immigrants and have for this reason seen steeper declines in religious faith and practice. The problem with Bruce’s attempt to rescue the standard secularization thesis, according to Taylor, is that it remains unclear whether his functionalist account of the persistence of religious faith in fact explains key differences in human belief and action. Taylor notes that Bruce’s theory cannot explain why some groups in the modern world have gravitated toward religious language for social cohesion (e.g., Polish and Irish rural laborers), while others have not (e.g., Spanish and French rural laborers).22 This criticism points back to Taylor’s earlier work in the philosophy of social science and to a problem with functionalist explanations more generally. As Taylor put it in an essay from 1983, Let us say there is some truth in the claim that religions generally contribute to social integration; and that we can establish this. The question still arises of the significance of this finding. How much can we explain of the actual shape of the religious practice in this society by this functional theory? It could be, for instance, that although religions are generally integrative, a very large number of possible religious practices could have done the job equally well in this society. In this case, our functional theory would do nothing to explain the kind of religion we see here. . . . In short, most of what we want to explain in a given society may lie outside the scope of the explanation.23

Likewise, as with the debates over nationalism, such a functionalist explanation does nothing to explain why certain people adopt religious beliefs and practices as opposed to other frameworks of belief (like a secularized variant of nationalism) that also help promote social cohesion. In other words, Taylor believes that functionalist explanations like Bruce’s in fact rest on a banality (i.e., a system of beliefs like religion helps create social cohesion) but are incapable of explaining why particular people adopt the beliefs that they do, religious or otherwise. In a late essay entitled “Religious Mobilizations,” Taylor takes this line of criticism one step further. Unlike his essay from 1983, Taylor doesn’t stop at pointing to the explanatory gap in functionalist theories

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of religion. Rather, he attempts to offer his own rival explanation by drawing on his narrative sociology of modernity. This is an important step in interpretive forms of objectivity. Namely, if objectivity is comparative, then it is not sufficient to point out a dilemma in a rival theory. One must also be able to offer an alternative capable of resolving that dilemma. So Taylor argues that the high level of religious belief and practice in the United States is the result of the fact that it never faced politically entrenched forms of the medieval world order. By contrast, countries in europe faced a long drawn out struggle with the medieval order that helped discredit religious belief and nurture the idea that religion itself was an obstacle to modernization.24 Taylor thus turns the standard secularization thesis on its head by implying that low levels of religious belief in europe are in fact a holdover effect from the medieval past, while relatively high levels in the United States are precisely because it underwent modernization free of the influence of an earlier order.25 The key point at present is to see how Taylor employs an interpretive, narrative form of explanation in an attempt to objectively best Bruce’s functionalist one. The value-dimensions of the Bruce-Taylor debate were discussed in the prior chapter. But now we can see that part of how we settle the value controversy between Bruce and Taylor is by assessing the rival sociological theories more generally. Since social scientific explanations imply value-slopes, those value-slopes can be rationally assessed in part by how valid we judge the competing theories to be. Again, the issue is not whether Taylor or Bruce is right about secularism (something that cannot possibly be settled here as it would require a much more detailed assessment of each of their theories). Instead, it is to help readers see how Taylor employed the basic principles of an interpretive approach to make watershed contributions to social science research.

Macintyre on the crisis of late capitalism and rival Moral traditions

I now turn to a brief treatment of MacIntyre’s later work in order to further clarify the potential of interpretive social science research while also completing the narrative arc of these two philosophers’ intellectual developments. Once again there is an interesting parallel between Taylor and

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MacIntyre, specifically, in the importance of Hegel for framing sociological inquiry. MacIntyre expressed the key insight he gained from Hegel in an essay from 1972: “[Because] our history constitutes us as what we are . . . history, informed by philosophical understanding, provides a more ultimate kind of knowledge of human beings than enquiries whose theoretical structure is modeled on that of the natural sciences.”26 MacIntyre thus realized that his interpretive commitments meant that social science must take the form of what “Hegel called philosophical history,” tracking the formation of cultural worlds (Sittlichkeit) and not the naturalist search for formal ahistorical laws.27 MacIntyre’s own sociology of modernity (which in some ways complements but in other ways contradicts Taylor’s) was first articulated in 1981’s breakthrough work, After Virtue. One of the central social scientific aims of After Virtue is to provide an explanation for the peculiar nature of the moral culture of late capitalism. MacIntyre had already written an influential summary of the history of ethics and numerous essays critically analyzing modernity. What he had not attempted was a sociological explanation for the particularly conflicted Sittlichkeit of modern society. MacIntyre’s starting point for this research was the description of a crisis he argued plagues modern moral life. Specifically, MacIntyre claimed that the “dominant moral culture of advanced modernity” is “one of unresolved and apparently unresolvable moral and other disagreements” in which there seems “to be no rational way of securing moral agreement.”28 The peculiar nature of this modern moral disorder, according to MacIntyre, is that this inability to achieve rational consensus is paired with various moral discourses that, when making moral judgments, claim to wield an objectivity akin to the natural sciences. So we moderns often purport to have “impersonal rational arguments” backing our moral positions at the same time that we draw from incommensurable premises and rival schools of moral thought (e.g., natural rights, deontology, utilitarianism).29 This leads to the widespread and creeping sense that perhaps all morality is arbitrary. Subjectivism and emotivism haunt modern moral culture, periodically breaking out into the open. We thus have MacIntyre’s famous description of the dual moral culture that dominates late-capitalist societies: on the one side are rival

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claims to foundational, quasi-scientific moral objective certainty and on the other are subjectivist philosophies that reduce all morality to emotive preferences. The modern phenomenon of the protest dramatically embodies this duality, with groups across the ideological spectrum mobilizing to shout at one another about how obviously reasonable their side is.30 Of course, MacIntyre’s narrative of the emergence of this impasse is impossible to do justice to here as it encompasses nearly a decade of work and three books: After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990).31 But fortunately the present aim is not to provide a comprehensive exposition but to show how interpretive theoretical principles from early in MacIntyre’s career were put into social scientific practice later on. As in our discussion of Taylor, picking out just a few elements of MacIntyre’s narrative will help illuminate how this might be achieved. According to MacIntyre, a key component for understanding modern moral culture is to situate it within the larger historical tradition of enlightenment naturalism. This tradition developed a series of rival naturalist standards for resolving moral disagreement meant to permanently replace the role of traditional religion and inherited custom. Inspired by the natural science revolution, enlightenment intellectuals sought to develop moral systems whose justifications were purged of any traditional, customary, or inherited elements. Reason alone would secure moral foundations and, like those of the sciences, these theories would be evident to any rational agent of good will. As in astrophysics or Newtonian mechanics, a universal consensus would gradually form around an objective theory, and unified progress would be made. In this regard, moral reasoning would finally be made akin to research in the natural sciences. MacIntyre argues at considerable length that the crisis of morality within late capitalism is generated by the ongoing failure of this naturalist project. As he puts it, the “breakdown” of the “project of an independent rational justification of morality” creates “the background against which the predicaments of our own culture can become intelligible.”32 What MacIntyre’s trilogy of books furnishes is a rich narrative of enlightenment fragmentation—of how a movement, whose goal was a single, objective framework for moral consensus akin to the rational consensus created around the natural sciences, has in fact resulted in rival

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enlightenments. According to MacIntyre, various competing strains of utilitarianism, natural rights theory, deontology, rival Marxisms, and so on all laid claim to universal rational status. As a consequence, the expectation of the enlightenment has not been borne out. Instead, a postmodern fragmentation has emerged. Nietzschean subjectivism has been the result of this failure: a soft relativism and moral skepticism. The two paradoxical components of our contemporary moral crisis (overblown claims to rationalism and extreme moral skepticism) are in fact simply two sides of the same enlightenment inheritance. MacIntyre’s analysis goes on to suggest that the resources of a neglected moral tradition— Aristotelianism—can resolve these dilemmas. Clearly, MacIntyre’s explanation of modern moral culture enacts two of the four basic interpretive principles expounded above. First, MacIntyre’s analysis points toward the contingent formation of particular beliefs that explain the background to moral and political decision making within contemporary society. Second, the explanatory form employed to capture these contingent causal links is narrative rather than mechanistic and invariant laws. But how does MacIntyre’s inquiry engage the subtle value-dimensions that enter into social scientific research or employ a comparative form of objectivity? Both of these require a little further analysis. Consider first the value-dimensions within MacIntyre’s inquiry. One of the most interesting theses of MacIntyre’s sociology of modernity is that the enlightenment project has generated its own cast of social types, which serve as modern moral authorities. Much of After Virtue is concerned with this sociology of social types that preside over the crisis of moral consensus in late-capitalist societies. This cast includes corporate managers, bureaucratic technocrats, and certain kinds of therapists, who claim authority based on knowledge of a naturalist science of human behavior capable of predicting social, political, and moral outcomes.33 The sociological analysis of this cast of naturalist characters is meant by MacIntyre to be both explanatory and descriptive of certain features of late capitalism, but there is also a very clear value-slope or slant to this analysis. How so? MacIntyre’s entire line of argument here returns us to the opening chapters of the present book and the following insight: If interpretive philosophy shows naturalism to be false, then all those who currently

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claim authority on the basis of a naturalist knowledge of society are in fact conducting an elaborate masquerade. Interpretive philosophy unmasks naturalism as a form of power—that is, naturalism as embodied in institutional forms of power with certain representatives at its fore. As already noted in the preceding chapters, interpretive philosophy conceives of human action as a form of creative, rational agency. This is philosophically incompatible with various forms of naturalist social theory, which reduce human action to impersonal causal mechanisms. Yet the naturalist “methodology of the social sciences” is a key factor in sustaining managerial, therapeutic, and bureaucratic authority.34 Interpretive commitments in philosophy and social science thus generate a critique of some of the central institutions of power of late modernity. The explanatory theory is subtly and complexly suggestive of values. Finally, MacIntyre’s social theory employs a comparative form of objectivity and does not claim brute verification or foundational certainty. Note that MacIntyre’s narrative of modernity is clearly in conflict with naturalism’s own self-understanding. In this vein, MacIntyre often contrasts his sociology of modernity with that of Max Weber, who argued that the emergence of bureaucratic institutions, formed on the basis of a naturalist social science, marked the increasing rationalization of society. MacIntyre instead inverts Weber’s theory. Far from being a process of rationalization, the institutionalization of naturalist bureaucratic authority in both governments and private corporations constitutes a “deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry” of such rationality.35 How objectivity can be decided between these two competing theories will depend on comparative modes of judgment. For instance, MacIntyre believes the Weberian account of rising rationalism cannot make sense of the ongoing failure of naturalist social science to make good on the promise of predictive power. Rational “managerial expertise requires for its vindication” a “stock of law-like generalizations with strong predictive power” and yet the “salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations whatsoever.”36 As in my discussion of Taylor, the point here is not whether MacIntyre or Weber is right about the major institutions of modernity. Rather, it is to illustrate how the interpretive view that epistemic superiority or objectivity is a function of comparison between rival theories

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can be put into practice. MacIntyre’s approach is to identify insoluble dilemmas internal to a rival social theory that his own preferred theory is purportedly able to resolve.37 From here, the debate then continues (and needs to continue) at length, though enough of MacIntyre’s views on this matter have been expounded for present purposes. Curiously, MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s substantive sociologies (although in deep agreement at the level of interpretive philosophical commitments) are clearly in conflict in terms of their assessments of modernity. Whereas Taylor’s age-of-authenticity narrative explains modern pluralism as on the whole a healthy or virtuous development, MacIntyre’s analysis of the failure of late-capitalist moral culture as a form of fragmentation and incoherence has a considerably more negative view of modernity. These philosophers are both aware of the disagreement between them. Indeed, MacIntyre’s breakthrough in After Virtue helped inspire Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which was partly motivated by his dissatisfaction with views of modernity that were either too upbeat or too negative and “show[ed] a picture of decline, of loss, of forgetfulness” (Taylor identifies MacIntyre with the latter).38 Who is right about modernity and how is this disagreement to be arbitrated? In answering this second question, both philosophers are in profound agreement: comparative forms of objectivity are the best arbiters between rival theories in the social sciences. Of course, much more could be said about this debate and about MacIntyre’s sociology of modernity more generally, including his critique of modern practices, his analysis of the economy, and his attendant sociology of religion. For now it is important to see how MacIntyre’s theory of modernity illustrates the four basic principles of interpretive philosophy delineated above: a focus on contingent and not mechanistic causality; employment of a narrative explanatory form; engagement with the subtle value-dimensions involved in social scientific theorizing; and an appeal to a comparative form of objectivity. In this way, both philosophers have not only articulated a philosophical basis for antinaturalism and interpretive social science but also put these principles into practice, modeling how this development marks nothing less than the inauguration of a new research program in the study of politics.

co n c lu s i o n Future Projects and a Renewed Humanism

At stake in the debate between naturalism and interpretivism is much more than simply an academic tiff over how to do research. Rather, Taylor and MacIntyre have compellingly shown that what hangs in the balance are our views of the human person, of policy, and of power. As we saw, this notion of a thick politics intrinsic to the philosophical commitments of naturalism was an insight both MacIntyre and Taylor inherited from the British New Left. Naturalism is consequently of interest as both an intellectual and political force. Social science only appears to be solely of academic interest. In reality, the social sciences are one site for a struggle over how to frame the problem of politics. But naturalism is an embodied social, cultural, and political form that has seeped into many of the most prestigious and authoritative institutions of modernity. None of this is to say that the ramifications of naturalism for good social research are insignificant. To the contrary, if Taylor and MacIntyre are right, the various forms of naturalism that now dominate the social sciences are tangled up in a series of conceptual confusions that mar otherwise good faith research efforts. This is because naturalist forms of explanation are ultimately self-defeating. Thus, we saw that both Taylor and MacIntyre drew on analytic ordinary language philosophy to show that specific naturalist research programs were caught in internal conceptual 110

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contradictions and were unable to disentangle themselves from concepts that are incompatible with their own assumptions. Specifically, we saw that naturalists have been unable to eliminate the need for significance, meanings, and webs of belief in order to give a full account of human social and political action. This means that naturalism is conducted only against a repressed form of background knowledge that is interpretive in character. The social sciences are, in fact, inescapably interpretive modes of understanding. The quest for laws, strong prediction, mechanistic causation, and fixed behavioral triggers is, like the quest for el Dorado, an illusion. Our remarkable ability to sustain this illusion, moreover, requires that we orient ourselves within actual social spaces by relying on our interpretive grasp of the world around us. The naturalist scholar of voter behavior can seek out strongly correlated bits of brute data only because he or she relies on an interpretive sense of what is going on with democratic practices in the first place. An interpretive social science can easily do without naturalism—but the reverse is not true. We saw that the reasons for this are at the most basic level ontological. The interpretive turn is motivated by the insight that human beings are different in the order of things. Their actions, practices, gestures, institutions, and social worlds are expressive of meanings. Their flesh and bones are enmeshed in actions that signify encoded meanings within particular historical and cultural horizons. Here the insights of an ontological philosophy of human nature (the traditions of Heidegger and Aristotle) become absolutely central. Taylor and MacIntyre both drew on these traditions in order to ground the notion that the study of politics must be interpretive—that is, it must involve deciphering the meanings of beliefs, actions, and practices. explanation becomes narrative and history (not physics or biology) becomes the paradigmatic approach to the social sciences. Social scientists are in search of the right story or narrative—not the invariant formal law or strongly linked set of correlated variables. One of the major consequences of such a turn, I have argued, is a new approach to the study of politics—one that is antinaturalist in a number of key respects. First, there is no hard wall dividing the study of facts from those of values. The reality is much more complex and subtle than naturalism allows. Value-neutrality still has an important role, but it

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can no longer separate empirical social science from normative political theory. Instead, Taylor and MacIntyre show the way to a reunification of empirical and normative concerns, and researchers in the social sciences must continually reckon with the way that their own theories involve some implicit conception of what counts as rational versus irrational (or legitimate versus illegitimate) reasons for action. The study of politics is not and cannot remain innocent of the question of what is normal human agency. Philosophical anthropology is at the center of the study of the human sciences in both its empirical and normative dimensions. The new, antinaturalist study of politics and social science is one in which empirical and theoretical questions are treated as being subtly in tandem. What is at stake is our interpretation of the human condition from both a grand historical, sociological perspective as well as through the use of fine-grained analysis. The study of politics becomes interpretively and normatively engaged. At this point, the big division of labor between our present-day professional social scientists and political theorists breaks down. It is no longer true that theorists interpret texts while social scientists verify and correlate data. It is no longer true that theorists care primarily about values and social scientists about facts. It is no longer true that theorists care about the history of political thought and social scientists about the urgent present. An interpretive approach to the study of politics dissolves all of these old naturalist dichotomies. That this approach is a fruitful option for research is evident in MacIntyre’s and Taylor’s last decades of work. An interpretive approach can make what are at once empirical and normative contributions to debates over nationalism, secularism, and the moral nature of modernity. Indeed, this is an approach that can be applied to any topic whatsoever in the social sciences. Consider, for example, the pioneering ethnographies of Bali by Clifford Geertz, the sociologies of civil religion by Robert Bellah, the economic histories of capitalism by Karl Polanyi, or the studies of public religion by José Casanova, to name only a few.1 Interpretive research into social reality has come nowhere close to being exhausted. And that Taylor and MacIntyre represent the state of the art in interpretive philosophy does not mean they have ever been alone. Of course, some of this future interpretive research might even be advanced to substantively critique or repeal aspects of Taylor’s and

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MacIntyre’s own claims about nationalism, secularism, or the morality of late capitalism. Interpretive philosophy is not logically tied to any particular substantive sociology of these topics, though it is inherently and irreconcilably critical of naturalism. Indeed, the inadequacy of naturalism and the emergence of an interpretive alternative have been the central themes of the foregoing philosophical narrative. Yet even here, Taylor and MacIntyre have never been entirely alone, although they are indispensable guides in the renewal of interpretive philosophy. This has been shown in my narrative by their rich inheritances from thinkers like Hegel, e. P. Thompson, Heidegger, Gadamer, Aristotle, and each of their present-day acolytes. The interpretive turn is very much a tradition and not a work reducible to two philosophers, no matter how important. One of the profoundest ironies of the modern age is that the natural science revolution—the source of so much that is good, admirable, useful, and authoritative—has helped inspire illusion amid the social sciences. What naturalism misses is the deep disjuncture between human beings, who are creative, rational, self-interpreting agents, and the other objects that compose the universe. The renewed call to humanism voiced by Taylor and MacIntyre requires carefully distinguishing human beings from other sorts of objects. For science, no less than religion or ideology, can be distorted and turned into a form of superstition. In this regard, the interpretive tradition is a precious resource for resistance against the increasing naturalism that dominates our technocratic age. For every day this distorting power advances, stripping humanity of its dignity and replacing it with the levers and gears of a deadened machine.

notes

Introduction 1. For a critical discussion of physiognomy, see MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces.” 2. Comte, Positive Philosophy, 1–18. 3. See, for example, Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. 4. This view appears in the reception of Rawls by those who had discussed the death of political philosophy: for example, Laslett and Fiskin, Philosophy, Politics, and Society, 1–5. It also appears in more general accounts of the history of contemporary political thought: for example, Tuck, “Contribution of History.” It also remains tacit among many historians and philosophers: for example, Skinner et al., “Political Philosophy.” 5. For a powerful, pioneering overview of this development, see Bernstein, Restructuring. For other important collections on the interpretive turn, see Rabinow and Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science; and Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman, Interpretive Turn. 6. This trend is evident in a number of the more influential writers on methodology in the discipline. See, for example, King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, 38–39; Box-Steffensmeier, Brady, and Collier, “Political Science Methodology,” 29–30; and Gerring, Social Science Methodology.

Chapter One 1. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 2; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 81–85. Taylor routinely uses the term naturalism, while MacIntyre often prefers the term positivism to refer to the same set of assumptions. See, for example, Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 2; and MacIntyre, “Ideology,” 321—42. 2. Turner, “Cause, Teleology and Method,” 57–70. 3. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 2.

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4. Bernstein has articulated an especially keen version of this warning in part 1 of Restructuring. 5. For an account of idealism and the rise of analytic philosophy, see Hylton, Russell. 6. Moore, “Nature of Judgment.” 7. Russell, “Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” 129. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 31. 10. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 108. Charles Stevenson’s emotivism in Ethics and Language improves on Ayer’s account in various ways. 11. For histories of the emergence of the modern human and social sciences, see: Porter and Ross, Modern Social Sciences; Ross, Origins; and Smith, Norton History. 12. For the historical details of this narrative I am indebted to the work of the following scholars: Adcock, “emergence of Political Science”; Adcock, Bevir, and Stimson, Modern Political Science; Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative”; and Farr, “Political Science.” 13. Gunnell, Descent of Political Theory, 55, 77; and Ford, Natural History, 1. 14. Adcock notes that such change, while marking a definite shift, was not monolithic. See “emergence of Political Science,” 495–500. 15. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics, 82–83. 16. Karl, Charles Merriam, viii-ix, chap. 8. 17. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics, 35–38. 18. Herbst, “Polling in Politics,” 577–88. 19. Farr, “Political Science,” 315. 20. See Gigerenzer et al., Empire of Chance, 235–37; and Porter, Trust in Numbers. 21. See Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative,” 592. 22. Gunnell, Philosophy, 60–67. 23. See Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative,” 592–93. 24. See Porter and Ross, Modern Social Sciences. 25. For a brief history of this discipline, see Morgan, “economics,” 275–305. 26. Gilboa, Rational Choice, 39–40. 27. For an important critique of rational choice’s pretensions toward universalism, see Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice, 54. 28. For a recent professional economist’s attempt to popularize such naturalist ambitions, see Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics. 29. In what follows I draw heavily on the historical work of Porter and Ross, Modern Social Sciences, Bevir, Democratic Governance; Wagner et al., Social Sciences; and Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock, Rise. 30. Bevir, Democratic Governance, chap. 1.

116 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Notes to pages 20–27 Ibid., 33–37. See, for example, Porter, Trust in Numbers. Cf., for example, Ross, Origins. Ross, “Changing Contours,” 219–20. Wagner, “Social Science,” 595; and Ross, “Changing Contours,” 220. Wagner, “Uses,” 544–46. See: Gigerenzer et al., Empire of Chance, 235. Morgan, “economics,” 275–305. Ross, “Changing Contours,” 230. Wagner et al., “Social Science,” 602–6. Ross, “Changing Contours,” 227. Ibid., 223.

Chapter Two 1. None of the otherwise rich discussions of Marxism’s influence on Taylor and MacIntyre focuses on the key intersection between philosophy of social science and a humanist politics. See Caldwell, “Charles Taylor”; Fraser, “Charles Taylor”; Smith, Charles Taylor, 173–83; Blackledge and Davidson, Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement; and Blackledge and Knight, Virtue and Politics. 2. The best works on the first British New Left are Kenny, First New Left; and Dworkin, Cultural Marxism. 3. Taylor, “On Identity,” 181. This runs against the view advanced recently that Taylor’s key philosophical inheritance lies within the “liberal humanist” tradition of Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire (see Choi, “The Post-analytic Roots”). Though the latter undoubtedly played a role, Taylor’s early philosophical formation is much closer to the New Left’s social democratic inclinations, which kept philosophical liberalism as well as communism at a critical distance. 4. Caldwell, “Charles Taylor,” 354. For the nuances of MacIntyre’s shifting relationship to the New Left, see Blackledge and Davidson, Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement, xiii–l. 5. MacIntyre, “‘New Left,’” 88; and MacIntyre, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 232. 6. Taylor, “Malaise of Modernity”; and MacIntyre, “Interview with Giovanna Borradori,” 255–58. 7. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 15, 30. 8. Ibid., 20–21. 9. Kenny, First New Left, 4–6; and Hall, “Life and Times.” 10. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism.” 11. Thompson, “Long Revolution,” 33.

Notes to pages 27–38

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12. For the background context here, see Hall, “Life and Times,” 188; and Caldwell, “Charles Taylor.” 13. Taylor, “Marxism and Humanism,” 94. 14. Ibid., 92–98. 15. Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Capitalism?,” 11. 16. MacIntyre, “Notes,” 36. 17. MacIntyre, “Breaking the Chains,” 145–46. 18. MacIntyre, “Determinism,” 29. 19. Hall, “Life and Times,” 189, 195. 20. MacIntyre, “Prediction and Politics,” 249–61. 21. MacIntyre, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 232. 22. MacIntyre, “Prediction and Politics.” 23. MacIntyre, “Prediction and Politics,” 255. Curiously, the young MacIntyre himself had retained a voluntarist commitment to Marxism at the end of this piece, though increasingly, his sense of the failure of Marxist social theory would be built on these grounds. 24. Cf. Caldwell, “Charles Taylor,” 354–63. 25. See Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” 50–53; and Taylor, “Marxism and empiricism,” 242–45. 26. Taylor, “Marxist Philosophy,” 49–50. 27. See Taylor, “Marxism and empiricism,” 237; and Taylor, “Review of Karl Marx’s Theory,” 327–34. 28. Taylor’s growing preference for Romantic humanism over Marxism can be seen in various essays, especially “Socialism and Weltanschauung.” 29. Taylor, “Marxism and Socialist Humanism,” 63. 30. This unanimous view of freedom inspired by Rousseau’s general will contrasts with agonistic notions of political society. Taylor even came to find Marxism’s expressive humanism wanting, arguing that it was vacuous and that it gave no positive content to free action beyond the rejection of past orders. Taylor contrasted this to a form of expressivism that was open to transcendent spiritual sources. See Taylor, “Marxism and Socialist Humanism,” 63–69. 31. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 261. This is a point MacIntyre returned to at various points throughout his career with growing force. See also MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, 125–39; and MacIntyre, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 233. 32. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 262.

Chapter Three 1. For the details of Taylor’s early education, see Caldwell, “Charles Taylor.” 2. Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology.”

118

Notes to pages 39–50

3. MacIntyre has recently affirmed his early debt to Ryle, in particular, as is evidenced not only in his antidualism but also in his adoption of conceptual analytic critique. See, for example, the new preface as well as the original subtitle to his book on Freud: The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. For Wittgenstein’s early influence, see MacIntyre, “On Not Misrepresenting Philosophy.” 4. Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology,” 105. 5. Taylor, for example, wrote, “When I belatedly began to study philosophy I was disappointed by the limits of the then dominant empiricist version of analytical philosophy at Oxford, by its closure towards what I naively considered to be the essential questions of philosophy.” Ibid., 104. 6. Ryle, “Ordinary Language,” 306. 7. Ryle, Concept of Mind, 8. 8. Austin, How to Do Things. 9. MacIntyre, “Conversations with Philosophers,” 236–37. 10. For example, MacIntyre, “Determinism” and “Notes.” 11. Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology,” 105. 12. Skinner, “B. F. Skinner,” 431. 13. Ibid., 430. 14. Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour, 3. 15. Ibid., 26–27, 38–45, 100–106. 16. Ibid., 138. 17. Ibid., 139. 18. MacIntyre, “Notes,” 41. MacIntyre pursues a similar line of argument in other essays from this time, including “Mistake about Causality,” 56–66. 19. MacIntyre, “Breaking the Chains,” 147. See also MacIntyre, “Antecedents of Action,” 198; and MacIntyre, “Behaviorism,” 112. 20. MacIntyre, “Breaking the Chains,” 147. 21. Ibid. 22. MacIntyre, “emotion, Behavior, and Belief,” 230–31. 23. Ibid., 235. 24. Nor, MacIntyre argued, could behaviorists salvage the argument by claiming that holding beliefs was a type of observable action. Ibid., 235. 25. Skinner, “B. F. Skinner,” 431. 26. Ironically, Hempel didn’t intend his model as a guide for how scientific practice ought to be carried out but simply as an idealized logic of science. Yet the behavioralists were right to see that Hempel did believe that scientific explanation entailed predictive power. See Hempel, “Function of General Laws,” 234. For an account of the uses and abuses of Hempel by behavioralists, see Gunnell, Philosophy, 60–96. 27. Hempel, “Function of General Laws,” 240.

Notes to pages 50–58

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28. Hempel and Oppenheim, “Studies.” 29. Hempel, “Function of General Laws,” 231–33. See also Hempel and Oppenheim, “Studies,” 142. 30. Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, 307–15. 31. MacIntyre, “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?,” 262. 32. Ibid., 263. 33. Ibid., 262. 34. MacIntyre, “Social Science Methodology,” 57. See also MacIntyre, “essential Contestability,” 3. 35. This distinction is drawn by MacIntyre in a different argumentative context in “essential Contestability,” 4–5. 36. This was a point MacIntyre also made in a 1972 essay on Hegel, which argued that the events that constitute social reality are best conceptualized as being the result of unique histories of internal reference. MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces,” 81. 37. MacIntyre, “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?,” 269. 38. MacIntyre, “Ideology,” 332. 39. Present-day behavioralism has largely changed its position on whether facts are verifiable free of any theoretical standpoint. See Sanders, “Behavioralism.” 40. Taylor, “Interpretation,” 28. 41. Ibid., 15–18. 42. Ibid., 23. 43. Ibid., 26. 44. Ibid., 48. 45. Ibid., 56. 46. Ibid., 57. 47. See Jeffries, “Quest for Truth.” 48. An example is his 1971 critique of behaviorism, in which MacIntyre declared that his conceptual analysis held for “anything that it would be worth calling behaviorism” because it showed that “the notion of belief turns out to be ineliminable.” MacIntyre, “emotion, Behavior, and Belief,” 230; and “Rationality,” 254. See also MacIntyre, “Predictability and explanation,” 8–9. 49. MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images, vii. 50. Ibid., ix. 51. Ibid., viii. In MacIntyre’s case, this error, a crucial development I return to in the next chapter, was only corrected after he reflected on the famous debate between Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. 52. Taylor, “Ontology.” 53. Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour, 100.

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Notes to pages 62–70

Chapter Four 1. MacIntyre, Tasks of Philosophy, viii. 2. Cf. MacIntyre, “epistemological Crises,” 16–23. 3. MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images, ix. 4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 265–380. 5. This essay was published, tellingly, at the very time of the After Virtue breakthrough. MacIntyre, “Contexts of Interpretation,” 177–78. See also MacIntyre, “On Not Having the Last Word,” 158. 6. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 83. 7. MacIntyre, “epistemological Crises,” 4. MacIntyre devotes considerable space in After Virtue to identifying four systematic sources of unpredictability in social and political reality that had appeared in earlier, more analytic essays. Specifically, in 1973’s “Ideology,” MacIntyre presents the four reasons he cites in After Virtue. 8. See Heidegger’s seminal articulation, Being and Time, 292–304. 9. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216, 211–12. 10. Ibid., 90–91. 11. Ibid., 91. 12. Taylor, “explanation and Practical Reason.” 13. Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology,” 105; Taylor and Kullmann, “Pre-objective World”; and Taylor and Ayer, “Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis.” 14. Abbey, Introduction, 3; Abbey, Charles Taylor, 58–62; Choi, “Defending Anti-naturalism,” 709; and Smith “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” 31. 15. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 59. 16. Abbey, Introduction, 3; Smith, “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” 31. 17. Heidegger, Being and Time, 134. 18. Ibid., 126–28. 19. Ibid., 129–130, 134. 20. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 76. 21. Ibid., 48. Taylor’s use of emotions is clearly more capacious than many other uses of this term. 22. Ibid., 72. 23. Ibid., 49, 72. 24. Ibid., 48. 25. My discussion of strong evaluation is indebted to Abbey, Charles Taylor, 17–26; and Smith, Charles Taylor, 89–97. Smith makes the distinction between

Notes to pages 70–76

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evaluation (as conscious, rational activity) and strong values (as tacit, implicitly present distinctions of worth). I accept Smith’s argument, but for the sake of simplicity here I follow Taylor in using evaluation to cover both cases. 26. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 60. 27. Ibid., 66; and Taylor, “Concept of a Person,” 102–3. 28. Smith, Charles Taylor, 90, 94–95. 29. See Abbey, Charles Taylor, 17–26; and Smith, Charles Taylor, 89–97. 30. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27. 31. Taylor has argued that coherent, strong evaluation is an inescapable feature of healthy human identity formation and undamaged personhood. See Sources of the Self, 33, 27. 32. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 63. 33. Ibid., 72. 34. Ibid., 72. 35. Ibid., 63, 72. 36. Ibid., 63–64. 37. Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?,” 36–37. 38. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 34. 39. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 55. 40. Ibid., 75. I have thus arrived, by way of a Heideggerian phenomenology of moods, at Taylor’s famous “double hermeneutic.” Compare this with Abbey’s insightful discussion in Charles Taylor, 58–62, 153–54.

Chapter Five 1. See, for example, Gerring and Yesnowitz, “Normative Turn.” 2. For an account of the continual pervasiveness of value-neutrality within both the social sciences and political theory, see Blakely, “Forgotten Alasdair MacIntyre.” 3. The chief among these high-profile attacks can be found in Putnam, Collapse. 4. The dominance of value-neutrality in political science departments extends at least as far back as the behavioral revolution. And claims to valueneutrality are also found among seminal figures within qualitative methods (notably, Giovanni Sartori). Value-neutrality has even been defended in political theory by Quentin Skinner, who inspired the Cambridge School approach. See Farr, “Remembering the Revolution,” 203, 205. For Sartori, see Bevir and Kedar, “Concept Formation.” Gerring and Yesnowitz cite earl Babbie’s widely used methods book, The Practice of Social Research. For Skinner’s endorsement

122

Notes to pages 77–87

of value-neutrality, see Skinner, “Quentin Skinner in Context,” and “Quentin Skinner on encountering the Past,” 54. 5. Taylor, then a graduate student, and Ayer, a world-famous philosopher, were in debate at this time. See Taylor and Ayer, “Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis.” 6. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 31. 7. Taylor made one initial, philosophically unsatisfactory foray into questioning the fact-value dichotomy while he was still a student at Oxford: Taylor, “Can Political Philosophy Be Neutral?” 8. Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” 88n. 9. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of ethics,” 231. 10. Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” 89–90. 11. Ibid., 90. 12. Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 153; and Taylor, “Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 226. 13. Taylor, “Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 220. 14. Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 153. 15. For Taylor’s full analysis of this, see Secular Age, 433, 522–23. 16. Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” 75–76. 17. Taylor, “Cross-Purposes,” 182. 18. Ibid., 183. 19. Taylor, “Iris Murdoch,” 20, 22. 20. MacIntyre, “Idea of a Social Science,” 212. See also Winch, Idea of a Social Science, 88. 21. MacIntyre, “Idea of a Social Science,” 222–23. 22. Winch, Idea of a Social Science, 117. Tellingly, Winch later criticized his own work on similar grounds. See Winch, Idea of a Social Science, xii. Likewise, Winch later amended his position, citing MacIntyre and arguing that the “concept of causal influence is by no means monolithic” and so might have application in both the natural and social sciences. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” 320. 23. MacIntyre, “Idea of a Social Science,” 216. 24. MacIntyre, “Causality and History,” 137–58. 25. Ibid., 146. 26. MacIntyre, “Rationality,” 246. See also MacIntyre, After Virtue, 207–8. 27. MacIntyre, “Rationality,” 246. 28. MacIntyre, “Idea of a Social Science,” 216, 219. 29. Whereas Winch tended to overly dichotomize the natural and social sciences, MacIntyre made clearer the role of natural scientific explanation in

Notes to pages 87–97

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establishing the physiological conditions (e.g., in cases like injury, disease, diet, age, and so on) for healthy human reasoning. These conditions for the flourishing of rational human agency became a central concern of MacIntyre’s late moral philosophy: MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals. 30. MacIntyre, “Rationality,” 251. 31. Ibid., 255. 32. Ibid., 246. 33. Ibid., 258. 34. Ibid., 258. 35. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” 308–12. 36. Ibid., 309–10. 37. Ibid., 313. 38. MacIntyre, “Idea of a Social Science,” 228. 39. As will be explored through concrete examples in the next chapter, MacIntyre and Taylor both believe that disputes between rival paradigms may be assessed not in absolute, theory-neutral terms but rather in comparative terms, based on whether the experience of transitioning from one position to the other presents an epistemological gain or loss for the individuals involved. See MacIntyre, “epistemological Crises.” MacIntyre’s line of argument here has been a major influence on Taylor. See Taylor, “explanation and Practical Reason,” 54. 40. See Conquest, Great Terror, 16. 41. As we saw earlier, MacIntyre advanced an antitechnocratic critique of modern politics precisely on the basis of an interpretive philosophy of social science. Cf. MacIntyre, After Virtue, chaps. 7–8. 42. Cf. Taylor, “Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 226. 43. MacIntyre, After Virtue, chaps. 7–8; and MacIntyre, “Social Science Methodology,” 53–68.

Chapter Six 1. MacIntyre, “Social Science Methodology,” 61. 2. Taylor, “History,” 3. 3. Taylor, “Understanding the Other,” 32. 4. For an extensive development of this line of argument, see Taylor and Dreyfus, Retrieving Realism, 106–7. 5. This can be seen in incipient form as early as Sources of the Self, but it gradually takes more complete form in later works like Modern Social Imaginaries and, especially, A Secular Age.

124

Notes to pages 98–108

6. Taylor has admitted that “Hegel helped” enact a key “evolution” in his thought (see Taylor, “Spiritual Gains”). Taylor will also likely be remembered as one of the most important modern commentators on Hegel’s work; see his Hegel and Hegel and Modern Society. 7. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 87. 8. Taylor, “From Philosophical Anthropology,” 111. 9. Taylor, Sources of the Self, ix. 10. Ibid., 393, 389. 11. Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity,” 93. 12. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 228–29. 13. Taylor, “Notes,” 188–213. 14. Ibid., 190. 15. Ibid., 190. 16. Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity,” 97. 17. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 225. 18. Taylor, “Future of the Religious Past,” 239–41. 19. Taylor, Secular Age, 3. 20. Taylor, “Religious Mobilizations,” 158–160. 21. Ibid., 157. 22. Ibid., 157. 23. Taylor, “Understanding and ethnocentricity,” 122. 24. Taylor, “Religious Mobilizations,” 158–60. 25. Taylor rejects the idea that science and religion are opposed. Instead he maintains, “The obstacles to belief in Western modernity are primarily moral and spiritual, rather than epistemic.” Taylor, “Iris Murdoch,” 20. This argument parallels Taylor’s critique of naturalism as spiritually and not epistemically driven. Taylor, Introduction, 5–8. 26. MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces,” 85. 27. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3. 28. Ibid., ix, 6. 29. Ibid., 8. 30. Ibid., 71. 31. Fortunately others have taken up this task of exposition. See especially Blackledge and Knight, Virtue and Politics. 32. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 39. 33. Ibid., 30, 74–77, 85, 106–7. 34. MacIntyre, “Social Science Methodology,” 53. 35. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 85–86. 36. Ibid., 88.

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37. The question of how to establish a nonnaturalist form of objectivity as a way of advancing moral debate in a rational manner is one of MacIntyre’s central philosophical concerns in both Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. 38. Taylor, Sources of the Self, ix.

Conclusion 1. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures; Bellah, Habits of the Heart; Polanyi, Great Transformation; and Casanova, Public Religions. For examples of the sheer variety of possible topics for interpretive inquiry in political science alone, see Bevir, Interpretive Political Science.

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index

Abbey, Ruth, 67–68 actions. See human behavior Adcock, Robert, 116n14 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 29, 62, 64–65, 105–9, 121n5, 121n7 Against the Self-Images of the Age (MacIntyre), 58 agency. See human agency Almond, Gabriel, 17, 50–51 American Political Science Association, 16, 23 analytic philosophy and antinaturalism, 49 dominance of, 39–40 influence of, 38–39, 119n3, 119n5 limitations of, 57–59, 63 naturalism in, 10–13 See also ordinary language philosophy analytic propositions, 12, 77–78 Anscombe, elizabeth, 38 antifoundationalism, 62–64, 67 antinaturalism Aristotelian philosophy as basis for, 65–67 and Gadamer’s traditions concept, 64 methodology debates, 15, 96

and ordinary language analysis, 41, 43–44, 49, 57–59 role of human agency in, 59, 60–61 See also New Left movement a priorism, 57–58, 60, 63, 77–78 Aristotelian philosophy, 7–8, 64–67, 107 atomism, 10–11, 15–17, 50–52 Austin, J. L., 38, 40, 41–43 authenticity, ethics of, 98–102 axiomatization process, 17–18 Ayer, A. J., 11–13, 38, 77–78 behavior. See human behavior behavioralism (political), 16–17, 50–55, 119n26, 120n36, 120n39 behaviorism (psychological), 44–49 MacIntyre’s critique of, 47–49, 119n18, 119n24, 120n48 Taylor’s critique of, 45–47 behavior modification, 28–29, 32, 44–45 Being and Time (Heidegger), 68 Berlin, Isaiah, 38, 117n3 Bradley, F. H., 10 Bruce, Steve, 81–84, 102–4 brute data, 52–54, 62–63, 96–97 See also facts

135

136

Index

bureaucracies, 19–23, 26 See also power capitalism, 28–29, 31–35, 105–7 causality contingency of, 95–96 in deductive-nomological theory, 50 naturalistic approaches to, 73–74 as a pluralistic concept, 66, 86–87 in political behavioralism, 51–52 in psychological behaviorism, 45–49 in Stalinism, 26 Winch’s conception of, 86, 123n22 Choi, Naomi, 67 Civic Culture, The (Almond and Verba), 50–51 Collingwood, R. G., 58 communism (Soviet), 24–28 comparative objectivity, 97, 100, 102–4, 108–9, 124n39 Comte, Auguste, 2, 8 Dahl, Robert, 17, 50, 52 decision theory, 17–18 deductive-nomological approach, 17, 50 democracies, 24–25, 28–29, 31–35 descriptivism, 85–92 double hermeneutic, 122n40 Dreyfus, Hubert, 97 easton, David, 17, 50 economics (neoclassical), 17–18 emotions, 48–49, 68–73, 121n21 emotivism, 13, 105–6, 116n10 empiricism, 10–11, 77 engels, Friedrich, 27, 31, 34 enlightenment naturalism, 8, 33, 106–7

ethics critique on Marxist theories of, 34–36 impacts of naturalism on, 29 in MacIntyre’s sociology of modernity, 105–7 in naturalism, 75–76 ethics of authenticity, 98–102 Ethics of Authenticity, The (Taylor), 98 evaluations in bureaucracies, 20 in descriptivism, 85–92 distinctions in, 122n25 and identity formation, 122n31 strong emotional mode, 70–73 value-slopes in, 80–84 Explanation of Behavior, The (Taylor), 43, 45, 58 expressivist revolution (Romanticism), 98 facts in behavioralism, 52–54 and objectivity, 96–97 in politics, 14–15, 21–23 in rival theory arbitration, 62–63 role in narratives, 96 See also value-neutrality fact-value dichotomy interpretivism’s overcoming of, 75–77, 92 in logical positivism, 3–4, 13, 77–78 in naturalism, 8, 92 in politics, 3–4, 20 in social science, 3–4 Taylor’s critique of, 78–84, 123n7 See also value-neutrality

Index First World War, 21 functionalist theories, 99, 103–4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4, 61, 64 Green, T. H., 10 Hall, Stuart, 24, 31 Hampshire, Stuart, 117n3 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 58, 97–98, 105, 120n36, 125n6 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 61, 62, 67–69 Hempel, Carl, 17, 50, 119n26 hermeneutical circle, 53–54 history Marxist theories of, 32 of politics, 14–16, 54 role of philosophy in, 105 human agency and evaluations, 80–81, 83–84 MacIntyre’s conceptual development of, 29–30, 61–67, 121n5, 123n29 in Marxist theories, 27–29, 31–34 needed development of, 37 in the New Left movement, 24–25, 27, 30 and ordinary language analysis, 40–41, 52 in political behavioralism, 52, 55 in politics, 111–12 in psychological behaviorism, 45–49 role in antinaturalism, 58–59, 60–61 self-reflective dimension of, 92 in Stalinist social theory, 27–29 Taylor’s conceptual development of, 29–30, 60–61, 67–74, 121n21, 122n31

137

and value-neutrality, 76–77, 83–84 human behavior and contingent causality, 95–96 in descriptivism, 86–91 evaluations of, 79–80 in narrative structures, 65 naturalistic explanations for, 7–8 in neoclassical economic models, 17–18 in political behavioralism, 54 in psychological behaviorism, 44–49 role of emotions in, 68–74 human beliefs and contingent causality, 95–96 in descriptivism, 86–91 in Kuhn’s paradigm concept, 62–63 in narrative structures, 65 in naturalism, 8 in political behavioralism, 50–52 in psychological behaviorism, 44, 45, 47–49 reductive accounts of, 81–84 humanism critique on Marxist theories of, 33–37, 118n30 See also New Left movement Hume, David, 77–78 idealism, 10–11 immediate emotions, 69, 71–72 import (significance) emotions, 69–70, 71–72 institutional power. See power interpretivism as an alternative framework, 4–5, 94–95 basic theoretical concepts in, 95–97

138

Index

interpretivism (continued) challenging naturalism, 92–93, 98–104, 106–9 empirical-normative synthesis in, 3–5, 76–77, 112 human agency in, 47–48, 72–74 meanings in, 66–67 narrative structures in, 65 relevance of, 110–13 Krushchev, Nikita, 26–27 Kuhn, Thomas, 61, 62–64 Lakatos, Imre, 61, 62, 63–64 Language, Truth and Logic (Ayer), 12 linguistic analysis. See analytic philosophy Lipset, Seymour, 52 logical atomism, 11 logical positivism, 3–4, 11–13, 38, 77–78 MacIntyre, Alasdair After Virtue, 29, 62, 64–65, 105–9, 121n5, 121n7 Against the Self-Images of the Age, 58 a priorism in critiques of, 57–58 critique of behavioralism, 50–52, 120n36 critique of behaviorism, 47–49, 119n18, 119n24, 120n48 critique of descriptivism, 85–92 critique of Marxism, 28–33, 35–37, 118n23 critique of modern politics, 124n41 debate with Winch, 85–87, 89–91, 123n29 development of human agency concept, 60–67, 121n5, 123n29

impact of, 2–5 influence of analytic philosophy on, 38–41, 119n3 and the New Left movement, 24, 25, 30, 36–37 on objectivity, 97 ordinary language approach used by, 43, 56–57 parallels to Taylor, 5–6, 104–5 A Short History of Ethics, 58 sociology of modernity, 105–9 on statistics, 96 The Unconscious, 29 Marx, Karl, 14, 27 Marxism failure of, 30–37 MacIntyre’s critique of, 28–33, 35–37, 118n23 New Left movement’s version of, 24, 25–26 problems inherent in, 25 Stalin’s version of, 26–28 Taylor’s critique of, 27–28, 118n30 meaning (concept) contextual nature of, 50–51, 53–54 and emotions, 68–74 and hermeneutical circles, 53–54 in interpretivism, 66–67 in logical positivism, 12–13 in naturalism, 8, 53 See also self-understanding Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 40, 47, 61, 67 Merriam, Charles, 14–15, 23 modernity MacIntyre’s sociology of, 105–9 Taylor’s sociology of, 97–104, 109, 124n5, 125n6, 125n25

Index moods, 48–49, 68–73, 121n21 Moore, G. e., 10–11 moral culture (modern), 105–7 See also ethics narratives as explanatory form, 74, 96 in political study, 14 structuring human agency, 65–67 See also interpretivism nationalism, 99–101 nation-state (political unit), 19–23 See also power naturalism alternate terms for, 115n1 definitions of, 7, 8–9, 13 development of, 7–8, 9–10 fact-value dichotomy in, 8, 92 as form of power, 18–23, 30, 108 interpretivism as alternative to, 67, 92–93, 94–95, 98, 113 interpretivism used to challenge, 98–104, 107–8 in Marxist theories, 26–28, 31–34 methodology debates, 96 and modern moral culture, 106–7 New Left movement’s critique of, 24, 26–30 and objectivity, 96–97 and ordinary language analysis, 40–41, 48–49, 57–59 pervasiveness of, 6, 7 in philosophy, 10–14 in political science, 14–18 research ramifications of, 110–11 role of human agency in, 60–61, 73–74 Stalinism as form of, 26–28 value-neutrality ideal in, 75–76, 79

139

natural sciences differences between social sciences and, 51–52, 66, 73, 92 impact on philosophy, 10–13 impact on social science, 7–8 impacts on politics, 14–17 overstepping boundaries in, 1–2, 113 value-neutrality in, 75–76 neoclassical economics, 17–18 “Neutrality in Political Science” (Taylor), 78 New Left movement and Aristotelian philosophy, 65–66 critique of naturalism, 25–30 formation of, 26 influence of, 24–25, 117n3 limitations of, 25, 30–33, 36–37 New Left Review (journal), 24 New Reasoner (journal), 25 objectivity antifoundationalist mode of, 63 comparative approach, 97, 100, 102–4, 108–9 within interpretive disciplines, 53–54 in interpretivism, 96–97, 108–9 in modern moral culture, 105–7 See also fact-value dichotomy; value-neutrality ordinary language philosophy appeal of, 39–41 conceptual logics analysis in, 40, 42–43, 46–48, 52, 55, 57–58 critiquing political behavioralism, 50–55 critiquing psychological behaviorism, 45–49

140

Index

ordinary language philosophy (continued) development of, 41–43 influence of, 38–39, 41, 43–44, 55–56 limitations of, 56–59 Oxford University, 38, 67 See also ordinary language philosophy paradigms (Kuhn’s), 62–64 performance evaluations, 20 personal authenticity, 98–102 phenomenology, 47, 61, 67–73, 122n40 philosophical anthropology, 84, 112 philosophy of Aristotle, 65–67 naturalism in, 10–14 role in language in, 42, 55 See also analytic philosophy; interpretivism; ordinary language philosophy physiognomy, 2 policy making in democratic societies, 21 interpretive approach to, 5 political science’s relevance to, 16 views of the individual in, 19 political behavior (brute data form), 53–54 political history, 14–16, 54 political science behavioralism in, 16–17, 49–55, 119n26, 120n36, 120n39 conceptual problems in, 55 founding of, 14–16 naturalism in, 14–18 value-neutrality in, 79–80

political theory fact-value dichotomy in, 3–4 impact of naturalism on, 2 value-neutrality in, 122n4 politics approaches to study of, 14 conceptual problems in, 55 impact of naturalism on, 110–11 interpretive approach to, 5, 111–12, 124n41 in Marxism, 26–28, 35–36 naturalism in, 19–23 in Stalinism, 26–28 polling, 15, 22 positivism. See naturalism power institutional, 16, 19–23, 26, 108 in Marxist theories, 26, 35–36 naturalism as form of, 18–23, 30, 108 and ordinary language analysis, 52 political science’s relevance to, 16 in Stalinism, 26 pseudosciences, 2 psychology naturalism in, 13, 29 psychological behaviorism, 44–40, 119n18, 119n24, 119n48 rational choice (decision) theory, 17–18 rationality, 86–91, 97, 106–7, 108 Rawls, John, 3–4 redescription, 72–73 relativism, 88–90 religion, 81–84, 101–4 See also human beliefs “Religious Mobilizations” (Taylor), 103–4

Index research funding for naturalistic, 22–23 interpretive approach, 95–97 ramifications of naturalism on, 110–11 Rockefeller Foundation, 23 Romanticism, 34–35, 98, 118n28 Ross, Dorothy, 21 Russell, Bertrand, 10–11, 42 Ryle, Gilbert, 38, 39, 41–42, 58, 119n3 Sartori, Giovanni, 122n4 Searle, John, 78 Secular Age, A (Taylor), 54–55, 81–84, 101–4, 124n5 secularism, 101–4 secularization thesis, 81–84, 102–4 self-understanding in descriptivism, 85–92 and emotions, 68–73 and value-slopes, 80–83 Short History of Ethics, A (MacIntyre), 58 significance (import) of emotions, 69–70, 71–72 Skinner, B. F., 13, 44–45, 49 Skinner, Quentin, 122n4 Smith, Nicholas, 67–68, 70, 121n25 social engineering, 28–29, 32, 44–45 Social Science Research Council, 23 social sciences descriptivism in, 85–92 development of naturalism in, 7–10, 13–14 differences between natural sciences and, 66, 73, 92 fact-value dichotomy in, 3–4, 8

141

funding for naturalistic research in, 22–23 and human agency, 47–48, 73–74 impact of naturalism on, 2, 17–18, 110–11 interpretivism as framework for, 4–5, 47–48, 95–97 in Stalinism, 26–28 value-neutrality in, 75–76, 78–84, 92 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 98, 109, 124n5 speech acts, 42 Stalinism, 26–28 state (political unit), 19–23 See also power statistics, 14–15, 21–23, 79, 96 Stevenson, Charles, 13, 116n10 stimulus-response theories, 45–47 storytelling. See narratives strong evaluation mode, 70–73, 121n25, 122n31 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 62 subjectivity, 105–7 See also fact-value dichotomy; value-neutrality surveys, 15, 96 synthetic propositions, 12, 78 Taylor, Charles critique of behavioralism, 52–55 critique of behaviorism, 45–47 critique of fact-value dichotomy, 78–84, 123n7 critique of Marxism, 27–28, 33–35, 118n28, 118n30 debate with Bruce, 81–84, 102–4

142

Index

Taylor, Charles (continued) development of human agency concept, 60–61, 67–74, 121n21, 122n31 double hermeneutic of, 122n40 The Ethics of Authenticity, 98 The Explanation of Behavior, 43, 45, 58 impact of, 2–5 influence of analytic philosophy on, 38–41, 58–59, 119n5 “Neutrality in Political Science,” 78 and the New Left movement, 24–25, 27–28, 30, 36–37, 117n3 on objectivity, 97 ordinary language approach used by, 43 at Oxford University, 38, 61, 67, 119n5 parallels to MacIntyre, 5–6, 104–5 “Religious Mobilizations,” 103–4 A Secular Age, 54–55, 81–84, 101–4, 124n5 sociology of modernity, 97–104, 109, 124n5, 125n6, 125n25 Sources of the Self, 98, 109, 124n5 teleology, 7–8 theories (Kuhn’s), 62–64

Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 3–4 Thompson, e. P., 4, 24, 27 traditions (Gadamer’s), 64 Unconscious, The (MacIntyre), 29 Universities and Left Review (journal), 24 value-neutrality and descriptivism, 85–92 naturalist assumption of, 75–76, 78–79 in politics, 20, 122n4 role in social science, 92, 97 Taylor’s critique of, 78–84 See also fact-value dichotomy value-slopes, 80–84, 92, 97, 101, 104, 107–8 Verba, Sidney, 50–51 verification principle of meaning, 12–13 Vienna Circle, 12, 77 voluntarism, 36 Weber, Max, 75, 102, 108 Williams, Bernard, 57 Winch, Peter, 4, 76, 85–87, 89–91, 123n22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 12, 38, 39, 41–42

Jason Blakely is assistant professor of political science at Pepperdine University.