In contrast to the liberal focus on the delineation of norms of tolerance, and/or
reasonableness the secularisms advanced by Taylor and Connolly offer a model for
engagement with contrasting comprehensive perspectives like Macintyre’s. Working
through their means of doing so, it becomes evident that, like Macintyre and the liberals
they define themselves against, both Taylor and Connolly suffer from a myriad of
problems from relying upon a rather limiting ontology of potential modern moral sources
(Taylor) to underemphasizing the hold of comprehensive doctrines (Connolly).
Nevertheless these critical encounters of Taylor’s and Connolly’s models with
Macintyre’s concerns do provide a rather vivid collection of insights into how one might
develop a secularist model of public reason that steps a little outside contemporary
liberalism.
I. Engaging a Modern Thomism
In his review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Brian Barry notes that,
Although liberalism does presuppose a theory of the good, it is one in which
freedom plays a central role, and this includes the freedom to create a community
based on nonliberal principles. But the step from Thomism as the basis for a
voluntary community to Thomism as the basis for a whole society is an immense
one. The possibility of the first tells us nothing about the practicability of the
second. It seems to me that, starting with the societies we actually have now,
Macintyre’s Thomistic alternative to liberalism is a nonstarter.
Barry’s criticism is directed on one level at the infeasibleness of creating the
small scale worlds of Independent Practical Reasoners, Macintyre alludes to his 1980’s
works, After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of
Moral Inquiry, and then later detailed in his, Dependent Rational Animals. On a deeper
3
Brian Barry, “Review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” Ethics Vol. 100, no.1, p. 168. Other well
articulated versions of this critique can be found in Mark Colby, “Moral Traditions, Macintyre and
Historicist Practical Reason,” Philosophy & Social Criticism vol.21, no.3 (1995) pp. 53-78, Terry Pinkard,
“Macintyre’s Critique of Modernity” in Alasdair Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) p.
195. Similar critiques about the practicality or intellectual superiority of Macintyre can be found in the
essays by Susan Mendus and John Horton, Robert Wolker, Robert Stern, Stephen Mulhall, Andrew Mason
and David Miller in John Horton and Susan Mendus Eds. After Macintyre: Critical Perspectives on the
Work of Alasdair Macintyre (South Bend, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
3
Convention