The forgotten Alasdair Macintyre: Beyond value neutrality in the social sciences

Polity

Volumn 45, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 445-463

  Blakely, Jason ^a  

^a PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Alasdair MacIntyre; interpretive social science; Michel Foucault; Peter Winch; Quentin Skinner; value neutrality

Indexed keywords

EID: 84882289596     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/pol.2013.13     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. For more on the "hermeneutics of suspicion" versus those of "recovery" (which derive from Paul Ricoeur's philosophy), see: Michael Gibbons, "Introduction" in Interpreting Politics, ed. Gibbons (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
2. This split is also often cast in terms of the disagreement between Gadamer (advocating recovery) and Habermas (advocating suspicion): Bjørn Ramberg and Kristin Gjesdal, "Hermeneutics," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/hermeneutics/ (accessed 13 May 2012).
3. Here my argument dovetails with recent scholars who have advanced important explorations of MacIntyres continuing relevance to an Aristotelian conception of politics. See, for example: Kelvin Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
4. MacIntyre is largely excluded from collections on the interpretive turn. For example: Mark Bevir, ed., Interpretive Political Science, 4 vols. (London: Sage, 2010)
5. Gibbons, Interpreting Politics; David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
6. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
7. Ramberg and Gjesdal, "Hermeneutics" Joan Scott and Debra Keates, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
8. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 40, 108.
9. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 72.
10. Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," in his Against the Self Images of the Age (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 212.
11. See also: Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 88.
12. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," 222-23.
13. Richard Bernstein has articulated a powerful critique of Winch in this regard: The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 63-74.
14. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 117. Tellingly, Winch later criticized his own work on similar grounds. See "Preface to the Second Edition," of The 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. Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 320.
15. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," 216.
16. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Causality and History," in his Essays on Explanation and Understanding, ed. Juha Manninen and Raimo Tuomela (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976), 149-50.
17. MacIntyre, "Causality and History," 146.
18. MacIntyre, "Rationality and the Explanation of Action," in Against the Self Images of the Age, 246.
19. See also, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 207-208.
20. MacIntyre, "Rationality and the Explanation of Action," 246.
21. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," 216, 219.
22. Cf., MacIntyre, After Virtue, 207.
23. MacIntyres own analysis of rational versus irrational beliefs, although successfully moving past Winch's descriptivism is not without flaws. MacIntyre often ichotomizes rational explanations and "impersonal," naturalist causes in such a way that neglects a more nuanced analysis of repressed and distorted beliefs. Critics like Mark Bevir have rightly noted that the causal links in distorted beliefs might still be volitional (as opposed to naturalistic) without being either conscious or rational. See: Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 265-308, at 299.
24. Compare: Alasdair MacIntyre, "Positivism, Sociology and Practical Reasoning: Notes on Durkheim's Suicide," in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, ed. Alan Donagan, Anthony Perovich, and Michael Wedin (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1986), 99, 100-103.
25. For a more defensible (though still incomplete) analysis of how volitional desires might distort beliefs, see MacIntyres reassessment of his early work on Freud in The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, Revised Edition (London: Routledge, 2004), 2-5.
26. Where Winch tended to overly dichotomize natural and social science, MacIntyre made clearer the role of natural scientific explanation in establishing the physiological conditions for healthy human reasoning (e.g., in cases like injury, disease, diet, age, and so on). These conditions for the flourishing of rational human agency became a central theme of MacIntyres later moral philosophy: Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).
27. MacIntyre, "Rationality and the Explanation of Action," 251.
28. Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," 308-312.
29. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," 228.
30. The key essay here casts Thomas Kuhn as caught in a Winchean form of relativism and so can be read as part of an ongoing response to Winch. See: Alasdair MacIntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science," in his The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
31. MacIntyre, "Epistemological Crises," 7.
32. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," 228.
33. Winch accepted the open-ended nature of systems of thought, arguing that the rules governing a way of life were "limited by what we have hitherto accepted" without being "uniquely determined" by them. He also considered the possibility of bridging incompatible languages by what he called a "realignment of our categories" into a third, shared language. Nevertheless, because he didn't resolve this problem theoretically, he was still forced to defend the thesis of radical incommensurability and relativism. Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," 317-18.
34. MacIntyre, "Epistemological Crises," 20.
35. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 359.
36. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution," Comparative Politics 5 (April, 1973): 325.
37. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216, 211, 208.
38. MacIntyres line of argument here has been a major influence on Charles Taylor's hermeneutics; see: Taylor, "Explanation and Practical Reason," in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 34-60, 54.
39. MacIntyre, "Epistemological Crises," 18.
40. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 361-62.
41. See: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16.
42. MacIntyre has advanced an anti-technocratic critique of modern politics precisely on the basis of an interpretive philosophy of social science. Cf., After Virtue, chs. 7-8.
43. Cf., Charles Taylor, "The Hermeneutics of Conflict," in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 226.
44. For a succinct account of the behavioral revolution's relationship to the doctrine of value neutrality, see James Farr, "Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science," in Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, ed. James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 203, 205.
45. On Sartoris commitment to descriptive neutrality, see Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar, "Concept Formation in Political Science: An Anti-Naturalist Critique of Qualitative Methodology," Perspectives on Politics 6 (September 2008): 503-17.
46. See also Earl Babbies widely used methods book, The Practice of Social Research (New York: Wadsworth, 1983).
47. John Gerring and Joshua Yesnowitz, "A Normative Turn in Political Science?" Polity 38 (January 2006): 101-33.
48. See also: John Gerring, Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 249-52.
49. Gerring and Yesnowitz, "A Normative Turn in Political Science?" 120.
50. This line of argument is echoed in Gerring's most recent book, Social Science: A Unified Framework (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 69-73.
51. Gary King, Robert Keohane, Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 14-19.
52. Gerring goes so far as to warn his fellow political scientists that "nothing could be more damaging to [their] discipline than an inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish between normative and empirical arguments." Gerring and Yesnowitz, "A Normative Turn in Political Science?" 121.
53. "Quentin Skinner in Context," interview by Teresa Bejan, The Art of Theory: A Political Philosophy Quarterly, www.artoftheory.com/quentin- skinner-in-context/ (accessed May 4, 2012).
54. Skinner has echoed this sentiment in other recent interviews, confessing that: "moral and political motivations have always affected my choice of subjects for research [but] I very much hope that they have not affected the way in which I then approach and treat those subjects." "Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past," by Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrjämäki, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6: 34-63 at 54.
55. Skinner has spoken at length about this as the dilemma of "either becoming too purely instrumental or too purely antiquarian." Faced with this dilemma, he argues that the historian's "choice of what to study should be motivated by our sense of what matters here and now. We should select the subjects we study in light of their having some kind of general social significance. But having selected them, we should be as rigorous in our scholarship as we can possibly manage to be." "Intellectual History, Liberty and Republicanism: An Interview with Quentin Skinner," by Javier Fernández Sebastián, Contributions to the History of Concepts 3 (2007): 118-19.
56. Skinner, "Intellectual History, Liberty and Republicanism," 118-19.
57. Nancy Fraser, "Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions," Praxis International 1 (1981): 272-87
58. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 182.
59. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 140
60. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 118.
61. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 215.
62. MacIntyre, After Virtue, chs. 7-8
63. "Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority," in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 53-68.
64. This politics is precisely what MacIntyre has attempted to develop within his revival of the Aristotelian tradition. See: MacIntyre, After Virtue.