Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”

20 Years of In Medias Res

Remember this image? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially those of us who had already been blogging for years (in my case, five of them) by the time it appeared in February 2008.

Like millions of other American bloggers, I'd been reading blogs--though I don't recall if I called them that--for years (all through graduate school in the late 1990s, specifically) before the Iraq War tipped me over into actually publishing one myself. It's easy to reconstruct my blogging career, such as it is, partly in reference to the content of my writing way back then; I've done it before, and the details haven't changed, though obviously my assessment of it all has. Talk about being wrong! All those posts during my first month of blogging, in March of 2003--"liberal internationalism," "the Anglosphere," Blair, Bush, blah, blah, blah. There are intellectual elements to the way I was drawn into tentative but nonetheless undeniable support of America's utterly unwarranted and overwhelmingly ruinous invasion of Iraq that I can, and sometimes still do, reconstruct into a more theoretically nuanced and therefore defensible political posture towards nationality and sovereignty and all the rest, but that doesn't excuse being wrong about the question of the moment. And it wasn't the only time, for certain; over the past two decades of blogging, I've had to eat crow over stuff as momentous as same-sex marriage, stuff as unimportant as Deathly Hallows, and lots of stuff in between. But this is getting me into talking about content, which I didn't want to do. Rather, I feel like I should say something about why I'm still typing away, however rarely these days, on this here blog--yes, still using Blogger!--because maybe that will say something that I need to hear myself say about where I stand and where I'm going, looking forward towards the last third of my life.

That sounds terribly pretentious, I suppose (also not a new thing for me). But I'm 55, and I've been wondering on and off all summer what sort of aims and intentions should shape the remaining 15 or 20--or less, or more--intellectually and professionally productive years I have left. And just as the the medium is the message, I suppose to one degree or another, the platform is the person--or the publicly thinking and writing persona, at least.

When I started that first blog in March 2003, I was less than two years out of graduate school and still had aspirations to publish my dissertation as a book; I was going to the sort of political theorist who thought and wrote heavily about the sort of issues and ideas--identity, recognition, revelation, community, language, truth--that the German Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, and the particular sort of communitarianism which I saw deeply indebted to it, put front and center. Hence the name of my first blog: "Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg," a phrase of my own invention (though heavily indebted to Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder) that basically meant something like "the twisted, wooded path through philosophy." Yes, it was terrible. And by the summer of 2004, I knew that. By then I also knew that the way I'd leaned hard into thinking about global politics in light of all the aforementioned issues and ideas was, while not worthless by any means, part and parcel to how I'd convinced myself of something that was very, very wrong. So I had this idea: I needed to back away from my heady, grad-school-inspired approach to framing what I saw as my own intellectual contributions to online discourse, and get more humble. (My inability to follow through on my plans to turn my dissertation into a book was pretty humbling too.) I spelled out some of this in my final post on that old blog, and then 20 years ago today, on August 13, 2004, I started this baby, In Medias Res, "in the midst of things," complete with a tagline stolen from a comment my dissertation advisor once made on one of my papers, with two posts: one, a reflection about my life at the time as a visiting assistant professor at Arkansas State University (a position I'd hold for one more year, before the most stressful year of my professional life, which ended with my surprising job offer here at Friends University), and two, a celebration of Melissa's and my 11th wedding anniversary (31st this year!). And, well, here I still am.

Over the past two decades I've thought dozens of times--as the position of blogging in the media ecosystems around us radically changed, as the technology our homes and my offices upgraded, and, I think most importantly, as smart phones undermined, sucked up, and/or re-wired nearly all of the discursive habits that had made the blogsophere a thing in the first place--of dumping IMR. Or revamping it through Wordpress, or moving it to Reclaim Hosting, or any number of other strategies. After moving here to Wichita, KS, and beginning teaching at Friends, and landing on the idea of taking my intellectual interests in community and turning that towards a consideration of the urban and rural divide, and of the politics and economy and physical environment of urban communities of a middling size--like Wichita--I continued to experiment. Once I launched a different blog, then later a substack (now called Wichita and the Mittelpolitan; you can read my justification for that effort here) to replace that second blog. I moved posts from In Medias Res over to the first one and then later to the second one, all in the hopes of eventually finding, through the architecture of how I was arranging and thereby thinking about my own engagements with both my scholarly interests as well as the constant flow of information all around me, some way to make my contributions more constructive (and maybe even write a book!). It hasn't happened yet, and now I wonder if it ever will. 

And would that be so bad? In the grand scheme things--especially since I, thankfully, landed at an institution that prioritizes teaching and different types of service, both to the school and to the community, over pure research (though of course we're supposed to be doing that as well)--maybe not. And yet, I haven't taken down the substack, have I? Nor this blog. So apparently I still have some sort of aspiration to keep my thinking and writing, if not truly organized and intentional, than it least occupying a space, and possessing a direction. I may not understand myself and my own limited grasping of the world as the hacking through of philosophical thickets any longer, but I do still believe, or at least aspire to believe, that in the midst of things, some constructive pattern can be drawn out. Ideally by me! But, maybe not? I'm not sure. Melissa always says that over the past 20 years on this blog, I've written hundreds of thousands of words; a large portion of that has been about family and local politics and pop music and philosophical tributes and movies and geek culture, true, but surely at least some of it could be shaped into some kind of genuine scholarly work, right? Sometimes I can see a way to do that; other times I can't. But as long as I think there might be some value to all these ruminations, whether or not that value manifests in the form of some goal I can aim to make the final third (more more) of my professional add up to, I figure it's a good thing I never got rid of In Medias Res and all that has spun off from it. Being thrown into the midst of things means finding some kind of stability in the midst of the flow; maybe this blog, whether I use it much or not, and however my thinking about that use has changed (and will likely continue to change) over time, has been mine. And given my unwillingness to pull the trigger after two decades, presumably will remain so until Blogger goes bankrupt (knock on wood!).

My primary guide--and sometimes primary goad--throughout all of this has been the wonderfully meandering musings of Alan Jacobs, a scholar I've never met in person, but whom I've read productively and sometimes engaged with for over 15 years. He not only planted the seed which inspired my original--more than a decade old!--vision of engaging with what I later named "mittelpolitan" places, but his whole, always evolving, always self-reflecting, presence on the internet--his main blog, his micro-blog, his Buy Me a Coffee community--continually inspires (as well as intimidates) me. I've never been, and likely never will be, either disciplined enough or productive enough--or just plain write quickly enough--to make habitual any of the practices which I see his own experimentation as pointing out options for, but I love imagining finding some version of them in my own online writing nonetheless. He recently commented:

[A] blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission...[even though] a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

Suits me too. (And, if you're one of the, I suppose, 14 occasional readers of this blog, maybe you as well!)

Thoughts on Dallmayr and a Different Post-Liberalism

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic. Also, a blog note: it's been over 10 years since I last used this space to think at length about a philosopher or theorist or theologian that helped shape my thinking, and a lot has changed in that time, to say nothing about how much has changed in the 20+ years since I started blogging at a stage of my life that was much nearer to the heady intellectual life of graduate school. Still, old internet traditions never entirely die. Anyway, if you're interested in how I used to present these kinds of reflections, follow the links to see my comments upon the passing of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Richard Neuhaus, and Jean Elshtain, great and important thinkers, all.]

Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate has put “postliberalism” back in the news, assuming it had ever left. Vance’s embrace of postliberalism and the Trumpist cause of “national conservatism” will no doubt continue to get a great deal of play over the next three months (and, assuming he and Trump succeed in November--either electorally or through the legal challenges and/or mob actions that may well arise in case they appear to have lost—beyond). But I’m not particularly interested in whatever postliberal policies or plans Vance might be able to use his position as Vice President of the United States to promote; he himself has said that he sees his role as that of being a “corrective,” “explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime” voice in America’s possible postliberal future, not as someone tasked with trying to “concoct” what that voice actually, specifically has to say.

That’s not because I don’t think he could articulate something interesting. He’s an obviously intelligent man, and even if his conversion from the complicated, Trump-suspicious, sort-of-libertarianism of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 to his ferocious commitment to Trump-as-defender-of-the-American-homeland today was a mixture of political opportunism and genuine conviction, that’s hardly a reason not to recognize the value of his observations. No, the main reason I’m not too enthused by the prospect of hearing much about Vance’s own postliberal potentiality is simply that I think that what he says is bound to be tied up with the wrong sort of postliberalism.

It would be easy to say that this is just because I disagree with the political particulars towards which his postliberalism points, and that’s certainly true, insofar as it goes. The elites that Vance sees his voice as opposing are, from what I can tell, mostly progressive university professors and Silicon Valley moguls (at least those not associated with Peter Thiel); the regime that he presents himself as challenging is made up of, very likely, mostly just race-conscious bureaucrats and lawyers in the Department of Education and the FBI. I actually do have significant gripes with much of the above, believe it or not--but no, as a democratic socialist and liberal Christian, I don’t see them as constituting that regime of elites which any person, like myself, who values local community most needs to worry about. The postliberal concerns relevant to my way of understanding of the world are rooted in philosophical arguments, rather than partisan ones.

Earlier this summer the political theorist Fred Dallmayr, a scholar I greatly respect, passed away. I think it’s a small tragedy that Vance never had the opportunity, when choosing which currents of philosophical critique to be swept along by, to learn from Fred’s version of postliberalism--because he definitely had one. It wasn’t a conservative version, to be sure. Rather, it was a version that--even it if brought him to some arguably similar civic or communitarian or populist or social democratic conclusions as those we can see defenders of liberalism worrying about--started from very different philosophical premises that are common among other American postliberal thinkers.

For example, the postliberal vision of Patrick Deneen—a close friend of Vance's and an oft-cited (by both friends and foes) influence on his thinking—involved (as I’ve argued) a questioning and ultimately a complete dismissing of the egalitarian foundations of pluralistic democracy. Deneen’s attitude towards the liberal elites who supposedly shape so much of America’s political culture and discourse is just as contemptuous as Vance’s, but he would see them replaced with a new set of elites, ones that would, as the theorist Adam Smith put it, “instantiate the values that ‘the people’ already hold” by protecting them from “any of its members who want to ‘impose rights’ in ways that vitiate those values,” by means of a revived ancient constitutionalism wherein the virtuous few would conserve, on behalf of “the many,” the cultural stability they purportedly long for. Dallmayr’s postliberalism, by contrast, is far more friendly to democratic egalitarianism. Which probably means that a conservative like Vance—whose concern with concentrated corporate power is enough to lead him to co-sponsor legislation in the Senate with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, but not enough for him to support directly egalitarian policies like Medicare for All—wouldn’t have been inclined to give it much attention, if he’d been aware of it. That’s his loss.

A brief aside here about Fred, who died at age 95, and was simply a tremendous scholar by any measure, even if--and I don't think he would have denied this in the least--his scholarship in his later decades tended more towards cultural breadth than philosophical depth. Born in 1928, he was an adolescent during WWII (his older brother died in 1943 on the Russian front), and he wrote in his autobiography On the Boundary: A Life Remembered that he “cannot exaggerate the importance of these war years,” his experiences of fear, confusion, deprivation, and oppression, for both his “persistent opposition to war and violence,” as well as, perhaps perversely, his “trust in the better side of humanity” (p. 10). Trained in law and comparative politics, he later became an expert in continental philosophy, eventually finding a permanent home at the University of Notre Dame in 1978. In the 1980s and 1990s, several fortuitous circumstances enabled him to begin a deep study of the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian classics and philosophers, and soon he was a pioneering figure in what came to be (usually) called “comparative political theory,” short-hand for the effort (one shared by multiple other academic disciplines in the 1990s) to rethink longstanding political arguments in light of contributions which could be drawn from thinkers and writings outside of the Western canon.

Fred was the person I most wanted to study with when I decided academia was my calling, and I still sometimes wonder, 30 years on, what might have become of me if I’d gone to graduate school at Notre Dame and had Fred as my dissertation advisor. We first corresponded—by typewritten, snail-mail letters--when I was still an MA student with Eric Hyer at Brigham Young University, trying to bring together my interests in political philosophy and my fascination with the assumptions at work in East Asian political cultures, assumptions that had first captivated me turning my two years as a missionary in South Korea. My shot for a place at Notre Dame missed, but Fred remained a cheerleader for me; as the years passed, he happily referred to himself my "doktorvatervater" as I wrote my dissertation under his former student Stephen Schneck at Catholic University of America; opened the door to my first academic publication through an issue of The Review of Politics he guest-edited; was always generous with his time and advice (and letters of recommendation!) as I made my way into the academic job market; took me out to lunch at conferences and made me a part of multiple early comparative political theory programs and organizing meetings; and introduced me to scholars that were (and still are, today) decades beyond me in both age and accomplishment. He was to me, as I'm sure he was to many hundreds of others, a friend, and his death this past June, though we had not interacted in more than a decade, gave me a sorrowful pause.

And now, in the context of the political news of the day, a reflective one. Because in looking back through Dallmayr’s oeuvre—much of which may seem irrelevant to contemporary debates in political theory or practice, instead dealing with such matters as phenomenology, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and more—I see a direct challenge to Vance, Deneen, and others who want to replace liberalism with something better. Because Fred did too, and his approach has, on my reading, a coherence and an open-mindedness that needs to be learned from.

As should be clear from my reference to Deneen’s appeal to ancient constitutionalism above, for writers like himself—as well as Edward Feser, Adrian Vermule, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari, C.C. Pecknold, and more—the problems of liberalism are overwhelmingly rooted in what are seen as the enduring truths (both normative and explicitly anthropological, and thus, for these Catholic thinkers, incarnational) of “classical and Christian premodernity” (Deneen, Why Liberalisms Failed, p. 23). Philosophical liberalism, according to their arguments, was always doomed to fail as the grounding for a social order, no matter what freedom it allowed for human beings to build communities and cultivate virtue independent of the supervisory order of the Great Chain of Being (as instantiated through the traditions or teachings of family, church, and state). This is because liberal freedom was conceived as a privileging of individual voluntary action against nature’s mastery, and thus, lacking any kind of guiding framework to reify humanity’s own social character, invariably becomes self-interested and atomizing, relativizing the very idea of virtue and undermining whatever communities might incidentally be built.

These are complaints which parallel those that can be found in a dozen different communitarian critiques of liberalism—socialist, Jeffersonian, civic republican, syndicalist, Laschian, communalist, Confucian, and more—but the explicitly Aristotelian orientation of American postliberal thinkers is notable. Their particular critique of liberalism’s assumptions is, for the most part, one I am mostly in sympathy with (and I think Fred was too). But their's is also not, insofar as I can tell, an immanent critique, one that works from within our own modern subjectivity, instead presenting itself as a reactionary call to upset the modern apple cart. (Deneen implicitly acknowledges this dependence upon outside critiques by allowing that his preferred premodern philosophy “relied extensively on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could uphold…self-reinforcing virtuous cycles”—WLF, p. 24). So thorough is their apparent conviction that an abrupt re-orientation towards premodern assumptions about human sociality is the best alternative to the breakdowns of the day that their recognition of the complete absence—for technological, socio-economic, and historical reasons—of the sort of demos which they believe would readily embrace the reconstruction of the rule by a virtuous elite doesn’t give them much pause. Instead, it simply means that, as Deneen put it, that “Machiavellian means [must be employed] to achieve Aristotelian ends” (Regime Change, p. 185)—a phrase which perhaps puts a different spin on Vance’s past statements (likely currently being quietly walked back or scrubbed) that Trump, upon his election, should simply reconstitute the entire administrative state and employ it directly for his own ideological ends. Burning down bad institutions so as to build good ones has a long history, after all.

Dallmayr’s approach never involved any burning. In a series of books he wrote towards the end of his life (particularly Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis, Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World, and Truth and Politics: Towards a Post-Secular Community), Dallmayr’s complaints with modern liberalism, while echoing many of the concerns that can be found in the postliberal literature, were profoundly immanent—that is, his philosophical framing of the problem which faces humankind was always underscored by a sense of historical unfolding, of hermeneutic interpretation, of “letting be” (the title which my advisor Stephen Schneck gave to a festschrift he edited for his former teacher). Anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy can probably discern the Heideggerian echoes in that title, and that discernment would be correct. Dallmayr was a serious scholar of Martin Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s work post-Kehre, after his intellectually important “turn” towards the poetic in in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond, as opposed to his pre-Kehre work, including the monumental Being and Time. Dallmayr described his approach to Heidegger’s writings in On the Boundary as “slow and difficult…as an emigrant from Germany I did not know how to surmount the barrier erected by some of Heidegger’s actions and pronouncements in 1933 and the early period of the Nazi regime” (OB, p. 43). But once he began to seriously read the philosopher’s work, he found in Heidegger a way to formulate his theoretical discontent with the modern prioritization of the rational, individualistic, acting subject. (Dallmayr’s deep attachment to and his highly constructive uses of Heidegger’s formulations are not, in my opinion, compromised by recent further revelations on Heidegger’s Nazi past, particularly the translation of his notorious Black Notebooks, but to be fair it’s true Dallmayr never published any comments on these developments, even though they preceded his death by a decade. I talk about my own idiosyncratic—and, perhaps not coincidentally, Dallmayr-compatible—approach to Hediegger’s challenging ideas here; for his part, Deneen presents Heidegger as the inspiration for postmodern theories that “placed primacy on the liberation of the will,” which I think is a reductive reading at best—WLF, p. 120.)

Crucial to these formulations was Dallmayr’s appreciation of the way Heidegger worked out his understanding of the relationship between language and our awareness of and experience of the receptivity and solicitude which characterizes the fact of our being-in-the-world (Dasein). Such phenomenological and existential expressions may seem the furthest thing from political, but for Dallmayr the implications of these philosophical observations—understanding ourselves in terms of a world that gives, that positions us as entities who stand out and receive (linguistically, culturally, historically) that which opens itself up to us—were profoundly important for thinking about democracy, justice, peace, and religious faith. For Dallmayr, moving beyond liberalism meant, most centrally, an “individual decentering,” which he saw as even more radical than the practical judgment which Aristotle made central to the cultivation of political virtue. Drawing upon Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dallmayr argued that “the crux of Aristotelian ethics” actually lies in “the careful mediation between…[our] finite existence and the infinite horizon of ethical goodness” which informs our world (Post-Liberalism, pp. xii, 64).

If this sounds like some postmodern version of Christian notions of grace or immanence, Dallmayr would not deny it—though he would also be quick to point to parallel versions which could be (re)constructed out of Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist concepts as well. His intention in doing so would not be to promulgate some kind of weak and relativistic civil religion—Dallmayr regularly made clear his deep attachment to a pious though philosophically non-doctrinaire Christianity, taking holy men like Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, or Pope Francis himself as his spiritual guides, and he carried that attachment into his active, church-attending faith life. Rather, his aim was that to insist that any human sociality, any enduring community with languages and traditions and texts that can be reflected upon, has within it evidence of humanity’s engagement with, and responses to, the ethical conditions—or, in Heidegger’s terms, the sense of “care” (Sorge)--which characterize our phenomenological existence in the world. In a reflection that relies heavily on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (a massive work that itself reflects at important points a deeply Heideggerian sensibility about language and moral evaluation), Dallmayr makes both a religious and an explicitly political point about what it means to understand worldly engagement in terms of hopeful reception, as opposed to a constant fear of the breakdown of virtue (to say nothing of a paranoia over the violation of rights):

The basis of [all] these religions is rather found in Deuteronomy 6:4-6 in the famous “Shema Israel.” What does shema here mean? It is an invocation to the listeners to open their ears, not to harden their hearts, or to become “buffered selves.” What are they to hear? Only this: that the Lord God is one and that “you should love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” and that this please should dwell “upon your heart”…

What this and similar biblical passages suggest is a slow maturation or seasoning, a willing turn of people toward social justice and truth without doctrinal inculcation or creedal manifestoes. Such a process does not lend itself to political platforms or ideological proclamations, and certainly cannot rely on coercion or make common cause with “top-down” interruption or disruption. In our time, this process can no longer be restricted to one locality, one society, or one nation but must extend to humanity seen as a global community of interactive and ethically engaged people. In this manner, the contours of a “post-secular” cosmopolis come into view…neither a super state nor a military-industrial complex but only the emblem of a hope or promise sustaining ordinary human lives: the promise of the “city of peace” (Truth and Politics, pp. 16, 21).

Dallmayr’s belief was that the reflective, interpretive, and linguistic engagements of human beings--when properly, democratically understood--will reveal paths beyond what he calls the “minimalism” of modern liberal philosophy, without “top-down” (and thus invariably culture-specific) “doctrinal inculcation or creedal manifestoes.” This kind of hope, admittedly, probably holds little appeal for those who crave specific policy recommendations. But then, Dallmayr never saw himself as engaged in the kind of “epic theory” which animates conservative postliberalism, the conviction that, since liberalism has failed, a project of classic and Christian “recovery and reinvention” (RC, p. xiii) must be directly undertaken, without much patience for what might immanently emerge from those local democratic projects which continue all round us. Dallmayr imagines a respectful, peaceful attendance upon what those communities will do; again, the ideal of politically “letting be.” That is not a call to quietism or inaction, but rather a resistance to those whose first response to the actions and decisions of fellow members of their polity is reactionary. He prefers what he calls an “apophatic” democracy, a deliberative democracy that is “receptively generous,” open to “new possibilities, new paradigms and horizons of thought,” recognizing that human deliberation “always occurs in a…linguistic framework which is historically and culturally sedimented,” and which takes seriously “the humanizing Gandhian principles of ahisma [non-violence] and satyagraha [the peaceful pursuit of truth], but also Montesquieu’s stress on the needed spirit of democracy: the “love of equality” (Democracy to Come, pp. 40-41). He further adds:

Here the radical quality of the democratic love for equality comes into view: that equality can no longer be a purely domestic concern, but has to be the “spirit” governing relations among all peoples and societies in the world. This means that democracy has to be nurtured by different societies and cultures from within, with their own resources. These resources and likely to be philosophical, religious, cultural, pedagogical, and many other kinds. What is important is that these recourses or traditions are rethought and re-energized from within in a democratic spirit (DC, p. 151).

Again, to try to be fair, one might ask if Dallmayr anywhere at least acknowledges that the resources for collective social nurturing he calls for—the patient, receptive engagement with one’s one tradition, similar to what Charles Taylor called “strong evaluation”—might be absent, or at least face institutional or structural opposition that would stand in the way of communities extending themselves and their own truths into emergent understandings? In a word, yes—which is why he sees some kind of “socialist democracy” (or, as he wrote in connection with the theologian Paul Tillich, “a moderate democratic religious socialism”) as that participatory, egalitarian, socio-economic and political arrangement which could move us closest to the “democracy to come” that constitutes his central political aspiration. Guided by his own experience in postwar Germany, as well as the thinking of scholars and activists like John Dewey, Alex Honneth, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he insists that the socialism necessary for the proper, non-individualistic, egalitarian empowering of human communities cannot be statist, and indeed must shun all “central determinism.” (PL, pp. 82, 86-87, 95). The point is, as always, to attend to the kind of receptivity and local experimentation which judicially-minded liberal rights-mongering has long tended to distrust. But Dallmayr trusted that taking democracy seriously would enable postliberal formulations of virtue, equality, and community to emerge; considering the language of Vance at least, one wonders if American postliberals, as much as they genuinely want to rebuild communitarian trust, have any trust at all that the demos will actually do it the way they’re convinced the demos actually wants or needs it to be done.

The postliberal ideological formulation, like conservatism itself, has a different range of valences in the British and broader European context. Speaking from that context, the theorist Adrian Pabst, long associated with John Milbank’s “radical orthodoxy” movement (which itself aims to demonstrate the affinity between postmodern and phenomenological treatments of language, society, and economy with the Christian tradition), sees the postliberal movement of the moment as taking three distinct forms: national conservatism, Catholic integralism, and communitarian pluralism. Perhaps that fits Dallmayr's always somewhat European perspective, though he himself was far too cosmopolitan in his outlook, far too convinced that the respectful treatment of (and the socio-economic support for) of diverse democratic expressions would allow for human beings everywhere to engage in an ongoing articulation of both human and godly truths, to be content with the communitarian label and its necessary implications of particularlity. Yet no one who reads the breadth of his work could deny that his most fervent intellectual convictions were those that revolved around a peaceful and pluralistic attendance to that which looking beyond secular modernity's cheap universalism, and looking instead towards the communal and democratic formulations that can challenge and inform and make more civic the liberal capitalist presumptions of the West, might reveal. That sort of patience would never manifest in a political platform one could run for political office on, of course. But as a student of politics who learned a good deal from Fred, and who now expects to hear about postliberalism pretty much daily between now and November, I can only wish.

Requiescat in pace, Herr Doktor Dallmayr. I hope you’ve finally been able meet Gustav Mahler in person at last.