The seminar is organised by the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) and will take place on May 12th at 16:00 at City St Georges, Univrsity or London. Kelving Knight from Metropolitan University will give a talk, title and abstract below. The event is open and free.
MacIntyre contra MacIntyre: On “the Politics of the Modern State
MacIntyre’s politics were catastrophist and prefigurative, in 2016 as in 1981. Such a politics were, and are, consistent with his ethical and cultural critique of capitalist modernity. Time will tell how realistic was his “pessimistic” assessment of the prospects of modern “social order”. This paper accepts much of his ethical, historical and social critique without committing to his catastrophist political “presupposition”. It therefore addresses the question of what is to be done in pursuit of a “politics of the common good” under contemporary conditions. Its partial answer is in disagreement with MacIntyre’s critiques (in 1981 and 2011) of the case made by Jacques Maritain, under the then-potentially catastrophic political conditions of the 1940s, for “human rights”. In so doing, it agrees with MacIntyre in his Collingwoodian identification of philosophy with history, in his claim that Aristotelian ethics articulates those of historically situated (most specifically, Midwestern American populists of the 1890s and 1930s) “plain persons”, and in his 1981 analysis of modern social order. In these respects, the paper’s disagreement with MacIntyre’s politics is intended to be both politically realistic and philosophically “MacIntyrean”.
