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Today the ethical and normative concerns of everyday citizens are all too often sidelined from the study of political and social issues, driven out by an effort to create a more “scientific” study. This book offers a way for social scientists and political theorists to reintegrate the empirical and the normative, proposing a way out of the scientism that clouds our age. In Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, Jason Blakely argues that the resources for overcoming this divide are found in the respective intellectual developments of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Blakely examines their often parallel intellectual journeys, which led them to critically engage the British New Left, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, continental hermeneutics, and modern social science. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, Blakely claims they each present a new, revived humanism, one that insists on the creative agency of the human person against reductive, instrumental, technocratic, and scientistic ways of thinking. The recovery of certain key themes in these philosophers’ works generates a new political philosophy with which to face certain unprecedented problems of our age. Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research.

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Philosophie

Philosophie politique

Éthique et morale

Moral Philosophy

Political

POLITICAL SCIENCE

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophie et théologie

Politics

Ethics

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Publié par	University of Notre Dame Press
Date de parution	15 octobre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780268100674
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, CHARLES TAYLOR, AND THE DEMISE OF NATURALISM
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, CHARLES TAYLOR, AND THE DEMISE OF NATURALISM
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 9780268100674
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 ebooks@nd.edu .
To my first teachers-my parents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Problem of Superstition and the Divorce of Political Theory from Social Science
CHAPTER 1 The Deeper Sources of the Breakup: The Rise of Naturalism in Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics
CHAPTER 2 The First British New Left s Rebellion against Naturalism
CHAPTER 3 Analytic Philosophy as a Weapon for Attacking Naturalism
CHAPTER 4 Inspiring a New Social Science: Aristotle and Heidegger
CHAPTER 5 Overcoming Value-Neutrality in the Social Sciences
CHAPTER 6 The Great Reunification: An Antinaturalist Social Science
Conclusion: Future Projects and a Renewed Humanism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
INTRODUCTION
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 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, 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 social science and analytic philosophy. Partly for this reason, Anglophone political philosophy has been hugely attracted to th