level Barry’s critique draws on the point that Macintyre doesn’t provide a compelling
argument for even attempting to build such societies for Macintyre doesn’t convincingly
prove why the liberal secularist tradition is indeed rationally inferior vis-à-vis his own
neo-Thomist one. Indeed Macintyre muses about the need to engage rival traditions on
their terms
yet far from “visiting” other traditions he constructs a series of debates
epistemologically stacked in favor of his neo-Thomist tradition.
This criticism is valid. Yet Macintyre also advances a more modest agenda that is
often overlooked by his critics, liberal secularist or otherwise. First, is his conclusion that
what he is in fact shown in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is that the rationality of
the Thomism tradition has been confirmed (not judged superior to) in debates with other
traditions though members of the genealogical and liberal secularist ones will find it
difficult to understand this even in their own terms.
This neo-Thomistic voice is also
one that as he appeals for at the conclusion of Three Rival Versions as simply needing to
be de-marginalized in the liberal university and not necessarily embraced.
Moreover as
the appeal to bring Thomism alive inside the walls of the liberal academy alludes to
“Macintyre’s critique of modernity,” as Terry Pinkard rightly points out, is “a critique
from within modernity itself, even though it is often clothed as a rejection of the modern
world, a call for a lost medieval and Thomist past.”
For Macintyre, as both a philosopher
and social critic has primarily spent his time diagnosing the inabilities of modern
philosophy and politics to live up to its moral ideals, a “disability” that is exacerbated by
modernity’s radical break with previous Christian epistemological foundations for these
moral ideals. Read weakly, not as someone to tolerate on a small level and resist on a
larger substantive one, but as a rational party a liberal secularist (or anyone for that
4
Alasdair Macintyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1990) p. 49.
5
Alasdair Macintyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,
1988) p. 403
6
Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry p. 236.
7
“Macintyre’s Critique of Modernity” p. 198.
4
Convention