What Alasdair MacIntyre Knows (And Doesn’t Seem to Know)

Thaddeus Kozinski, Ph.D.

What Alasdair MacIntyre knows, for has been the master teacher of it to all of us for decades, is
that the secularist, pluralistic, liberal, contractarian nation-state cannot do anything truly good
for its citizens. MacIntyre has argued consistently and forcefully that the modern nation-state,
since its essential foundation, notwithstanding those good classical and medieval elements of
political order it the Founders’ inherited and adopted, is the anti-Aristotelian, Lockean
privatization of the Good, is not a functional political authority. On the national level, it is best
described as an alliance, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, which is by definition sub-
political, for it aims only at preserving life and natural liberty (and property, if you like), but not
the truly good life and moral liberty. The latter two are to be enabled by sub-state agencies and
institutions, like the family, various voluntary associations, and churches. In short, the modern
state’s political authority is not, deliberately and intentionally, ordered to a common good, but
only to the private interests of its citizens; it is a “public-interest” organization, as MacIntyre has
called it, more like a utility company than a city. We do sometimes benefit from the modern
state's purported largess, but it is accidental to, and many times in spite of, its intentional
motives and actions, as MacIntyre suggests here:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable

institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and
services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for
money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time
invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. As I have remarked elsewhere, it is like
being asked to die for the telephone company .

At its best, the liberal-contractarian, centralized, bureaucratic, managerial nation-state provides

some space and some resources for the obtaining of material goods; it can secure some
protection from foreign enemies, fraud, and violence; and it can establish a tolerable public
order, though always, it seems, at the expense of, and on the backs of, the poor and politically
powerless, not to mention those who accept God’s law as higher than the state’s, such as, say,
non-liberalized Catholics and, well, Kim Davis. But whatever it does for us, it always seems to
place obstacles to its citizens' moral and spiritual flourishing as the inevitable accompaniment of
its blandishments.

At its worst, the modern state, when we take it in its pure liberal, truth-and-good phobic form,
is an ideological, tyrannical, duplicitous monster that serves morally and intellectually and
spiritually to lobotomize its dupes and slaves. MacIntyre:

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 Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged
domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and
to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through state
power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own
good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for
the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to
discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to
be embodied.

So, I would think that Alasdair MacIntyre would be the first to doubt the American nation-
state's coercive apparatus’, and any other contemporary nation-state' coercive apparatus’,
capacity and willingness consistently to tell the truth and do the good for its citizens. MacIntyre
teaches us to suspect that anything mandated “for our own good” by a contemporary nation-
state that has also mandated, say, same-sex marriage, would be bound up in some way with
the forces of mammon and ideology, not moral order and virtue. Indeed, MacIntyre has
repeatedly criticized the contemporary practice of capitalism, the idiocy and amorality of the
gigantic, centralized, bureaucratic nation-state, and their infernal union in today’s politics, what
Sheldon Wolin has ominously deemed “inverted totalitarianism.”

Yet, when it comes to present-day health, education, military service, and free speech, and the
relation of all these to the contemporary nation-state, what MacIntyre doesn’t appear to know
is both surprising and disconcerting. For MacIntyre has recently publicly endorsed state
coercion to enforce the first three, and to restrict with severe penalties the fourth. In his plenary
lecture, “Justification of Coercion and Constraint,” given at the prestigious Notre Dame Ethics
and Culture Conference in 2015, MacIntyre called, not for some ideal, small-scale, polis-like,
rightly founded and structured, good willed, morally capable, natural-law friendly, and
otherwise fully legitimate and trustworthy political authority to be empowered to secure
certain goods and prevent certain evils through coercion and constraint, but for the presently
configured Federal Government of America to do so, that same nation-state that he has once
called a “dangerous and unmanageable institution.” And MacIntyre was not talking about local,
town-hall-meeting fines for naughty behavior here, but severe penalties for government
disapproved speech, exemptionless government-mandated vaccinations, forced military service,
and government prescribed curriculum in education. Again, it was clear from listening to his
entire speech that he was not calling for merely more local governmental authority and power
on these issues.

On mandatory vaccinations: Why did MacIntyre express not a whit of suspicion about what is
arguably, with regard to vaccines, profit-and-ideology driven science, corrupt Big Pharma, and

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(admitting, of course, that some vaccines have been very beneficial to humanity), the fact of
many harmful, sometimes fatal, vaccines conceived in the wedding of these two immoral
practices and institutions? Why did MacIntyre not only cast no doubt upon the claim that the
vaccine technology is based upon the "best science available," but also insisted on the obvious
truth of that claim himself? Why was there hesitation in his support for the coercive medical
policy of a state in love with sodomy-rights and abortion and contraception and euthanasia and
drone attacks on civilians? Why no suspicion that the American government might not be
motivated to mandate a no-exemption vaccine policy for the true good of its citizens? How is it
that he wondered not if such a health policy might have more to do with the federal
government securing even more control over its citizens' thoughts and lives, with further
eroding subsidiarity and the rights of the family and religion, with more obscene profits for Big
Pharma?

Of course, if some vaccines do actually prevent harmful diseases, and if the risk of taking them
is a reasonable one in terms of the good they can be proven to do, then there is a good
argument to be made that they should be mandatory with the full backing of the coercive
power of the state, else the common good be compromised. Of course, some vaccines have
been proven to work in important cases, and have spared many lives. When they are relatively
harmless, and when they are actually the fruit of "the best science available," they should be
welcomed, even enforced when necessary. But there is a gigantic elephant in the room here
that MacIntyre about which, for some mysterious reason, revealed a serious blindness.

If I had attended his lecture, here’s what I would have asked MacIntyre: “Are we living under a
true and good political order that can be trusted to wield its coercive power for good, or are we
ruled by a veritable tyranny of mindless bureaucrats serving ideology and power and money,
whose authority and power should be restricted and enervated as much as possible, distributed
to those local governments and mediating institutions that can actually know, embody, and
promote common good, as the great Robert Nisbet—not to mention Catholic Social Teaching—
has called for? Do we even have a true political order on the federal level, one that can actually
embody and secure a common good and promote the personal goods of its citizens? Or is what
we have now is more like what James Kalb has described in these pages, a technocracy, a
technologically sophisticated, crime syndicate/surveillance state that rules on behalf of the good
of elite rulers, agencies, and corporations to exploit the ruled, as St. Augustine described,
mutatis mutandis, the City of Man of his day?

Regarding coercion by the state in the realm of education: It quite hard to believe, but
MacIntyre, the great foe of sophistry and ideology in education, actually advocated that the
contemporary nation-state, one based upon the “privatization of the good” (the title of his
inaugural lecture as Chair of Philosophy at Notre Dame in 1990), as well as the reduction of

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moral truth to mere emotivist preference, should use its coercive power to mandate not only
education in general, but the content of curriculum, including inculcation in those virtues that
can empower students to make moral choices. Which virtues would these be? Which choices
would a Brave New Worldish state desire to habituate young people to make? As I have written
elsewhere, the liberal state cannot possibly educate itself:

Secular pluralism, because it has rejected both supernatural faith and metaphysical
reason as politically relevant desiderata and authoritative communal guides, and
because it has subjectivized and privatized the good and the true, cannot possibly
educate itself. But because it still pretends to be, and actually is in a highly attenuated
and perverted fashion, a political community, it unfortunately acts as a powerful
educational agent. Of course, it makes a mockery of both education and community,
seducing—when it is not demanding—citizens’ participation in defective practices
embodying counterfeit goods and transmitting an anti-tradition of, ultimately, self-and-
nothing worship. Secular liberalism’s communal telos is the aggrandizement of an elite
class of sophist- educators who teach their students to abandon the quest for their own
good and the common good for the pursuit of idiosyncratic ephemera, and to seek, not
the truth about God, the world, and man, along with the political and cultural
instantiation of these truths, but purely practical “knowledge” ordered to nothing but
the equal satisfaction of individual desires, as James Kalb puts it. Such serves only to
require and extend the hegemonic power of the state authoritatively to manage and
define this equality by preventing the existence and flourishing of genuine common-
good organizations ordered by and to the transcendental—by persecuting and
neutralizing true educational agents.

Regarding coercion by the state in enforcing military service, another thing MacIntyre insisted
on: Is the nation-state, and its globalist overseers such as NATO, the UN, and the sundry NGOs
that control military policy and the financial interests to which such policy is often wedded, in its
present power configuration capable of even waging a war in self-defense, let alone a just war?
All the evidence confirms that—and this is an evil beyond words—American soldiers have been
and are being used as cannon fodder for unjust “wars”—read: occupations, regime changes,
and “creative destruction”—waged on behalf of exceptionalist, nationalist, scapegoating
ideologies, the greed and blood lust of the military-intelligence-industrial complex, the
psychopathic plans of Deep State elites, the myriad forces of globalist hegemony, and, most
obviously, to gain ever more control over domestic populations through “crises” to protect them
against ever-increasing “terror.” Of course, citizens must defend their country against enemies,
foreign and domestic, and this sometimes requires coercion and restraints on certain freedoms,
but there’s that elephant again.

All of these coercive and restraining measures would be very appropriate for a genuine political
order and city with a robust conception of the common good and what human flourishing

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actually entails, but what we have now by all appearances is, and I hope I am wrong on this, the
tyrannical rule by a Deep State at war, morally and spiritually, with the Good in general, and its
own citizens in particular. I live in a small town where there are still hints of the “old America,”
the one de Tocqueville fell in love with, but when you leave small towns like mine and go out to
the state and federal level of things, what one finds, as a function of increasing size and scope, is
more and more rule by corruption, psychopathy, violence, and propaganda. I can understand
desiring to empower local governments and mediating institutions with more coercive authority
vis a vis the state, to have more authority over the present health-care racket, over protecting
one’s land and property against state confiscation and robbery, over true educational needs
over educratic insanities, and over reasonable limits of free speech (not the silencing of
whistleblowers and truth-tellers!)—but empowering small-scale authorities was not what
MacIntyre was calling for, it must be reiterated.

And what can we say about MacIntyre’s call for the state to severely limit free speech whenever
the government deems it “harmful or dishonest?” What this amounts to in practice (and of
course, MacIntyre would never want or endorse this, but it is the unintentional upshot of his
imprudent words and uncharacteristic lack of distinction making), in the present Orwellian
climate of mass propaganda (read Jacques Ellul on this), endless wars and rumors of wars (most
if not all based upon lies, like Iraq), is the empowerment of the state to punish more effectively
and ruthlessly all those who dare to question its mass propaganda and blatantly immoral
activities and agenda. Of course, MacIntyre stated explicitly that only manifestly dishonest and
harmful speech should be suppressed by legal and political force, but MacIntyre, Whose “lies”?
Which “harm”? The government of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984 was given such power with the
similar justifications.

It is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see that the contemporary practice, at the federal level
at least, of state-mandated education, war, medicine, and the policing of “free speech,” are, at
worst, abysmally corrupt, and at best, driven by a combination of financial and ideological
forces, along with some genuine health, knowledge, and safety concerns, but with these latter
becoming less and less influential and prioritized. And it is questionable, to say the least,
whether nation-states and globalist agencies that promotes freedom for sodomy, protect and
support the practice of exploitive usury, states and agencies that are controlled in many ways by
corporate interests and ideological insanities, not to mention the psychopaths who run the
Deep State, have our best interests in mind in any important area of life. But not a word of any
of this by the Professor.

Again, I’m certainly not against the use of true governmental power in securing the best public
education, waging defensive and manifestly just wars, providing harmless and disease-
preventing vaccines, and ensuring an honest and propaganda-free public square. But the

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government must actually be a government to do these things! As a Thomist and not a
libertarian, I see no problem with true political authority, one with a modest size, a consistent
theory and practice of subsidiarity, and a non-liberal, Aristotelian/Thomistic, natural-law and
common-good foundation, that is, a state actually capable of knowing and securing the
common good, using its beneficial power to promote and even enforce this good in the realms
of education, the military, medicine, and culture. But, again, only if it were truly to respect
subsidiarity, the antecedent and superior rights and privileges of the family, the superior moral
and spiritual, and, dare I say, superior political authority (but not, of course, political power) of
the Catholic Church on moral and spiritually relevant political issues, as well as all other
institutions and practices based upon immemorial custom and the natural and divine positive
laws. That is, when its coercive power were to be used on behalf of the true good of its citizens’
bodies and souls. But the liberal, social-contract, consent-absolutist, centralized, bureaucratic,
managerial, secularist, pluralist, technocratic (James Kalb) state, where a pluralism of
irreconcilable conceptions of the good is promoted and where equal preference satisfaction is
the absolute criterion of “good” government, cannot do this, and no one has argued more
persuasively for this conclusion than MacIntyre!

We still have remnants of real political authority on local levels, and there are good people
doing good things on all levels fo government, thank God, and this is what I still love about
America, its spirit of goodness, and its “don’t tread on me!” pride—but the federal, and now
even state governments (which, it would seem, have no real independent power anymore vis a
vis the Federal, although they might try asserting their power sometime and see what
happens!) is what is doing the worst treading! And MacIntyre himself has told us over and over
again that the size and scope and complexity of the nation-state prohibits it from actually
governing according to the Good.

What could possibly explain MacInyre’s incoherence? It is not dotage, for his thought is as
brilliant, nuanced, and complex as it ever was. And MacIntyre is no sell-out or court sophist! But
But let us consider: If Alasdair MacIntyre, a respected public Catholic intellectual, were to tell
the whole truth about the tyrannical, fraudulent, bankrupt nature of the actual states
Europeans and North Americans are now living under, that is, if he were to get down to brass
tacks and tell us what's really going on, on the ground, as in who is actually ruling us, how they
are doing it, and what their end game is, he would be relegated to the academic, social, and
political margins, at best, and he would certainly not be invited to give any more Notre Dame
plenary lectures. Perhaps this, or just an incredibly naive credulity towards mainstream
narratives and claims of the state and its various self-serving institutions and practices, such as
“science” and “medicine” (anyone who thinks that "the best science" actually even exists
nowadays without serious ideological and financial compromise, that the natural sciences are
really about pure, genuine, impartial knowledge and not the deliverances of ideology, the

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dictates of prestige, or the seductions of mammon, is incredibly naïve?) explains why
the otherwise brilliant and truth-telling MacIntyre, a man who has been for decades the
preeminent spokesman in academia of the illegitimacy and tyranny and duplicity of the
secularist, liberal nation state, would be willing to support—due to a very uncharacteristic
credulity—the corrupt, mendacious, and money-driven state “practice” of medical profit
making, educational sophistry, unjust war-making, and truthful speech policing, calling for the
American government, one that officially rejects the natural law and the logos (Casey,
Obergefell, etc.) as a basis of law and coercive power, to do good things it should be able to do
in theory, as a real political authority and power, but simply cannot do in practice, because it is
not one.

The institutionally-embedded, public intellectual, which MacIntyre is, due to his high public
status and notoriety (and his prestigious perch at Notre Dame), all of which he quite deserves
and perhaps the greatest living Cathooli philosopher, no matter how brilliant and truth-telling
he may be about the evils of the natural-law eschewing, good-neutering-and-lobotomizing
nation-state in theory, must, it seems, repudiate and ridicule any suspicion as to the good-will
and righteousness of its actual concrete practices and institutions when these are politically
correct (and we don’t just mean leftist pieties here) and state-protected-sponsored practices
and institutions, that is, practices and institutions that create lots of money for certain powerful
people, that increase and protect the prestige of elites in medicine, psychiatrity, academica,
education, law, and the military- surveillance-national-security-intelligence apparatus, and that
promote fanatical, self-serving ideology—when they are practices and instititions bound up with
what I have called the satanic sacred. The public intellectual must dismiss such suspicions as
nothing but the result of the pernicious influence of, say, mentally deranged “conspiracy
theorists” (or, perhaps, just radical Muslims and integral pro-lifers), an influence so
pernicious that it must be rigorously countered by respectable public Catholic intellectuals at big
conferences at Notre Dame.

It is a sad day when one of the greatest opponents of satanic, nihilistic liberalism is seen
fighting, unwittingly and with good will, no doubt, on behalf of the enemy.