
“Recently, however, James Lindsay has sparked a contentious debate on this topic by disparaging postliberals as ‘woke right.’ We will examine [Alasdair] MacIntyre in the context of this vibrant debate.”
“Right-wing postliberalism” refers to a growing tendency of social and political thought in the United States and the West more generally. This tendency is discernible in both ordinary citizens and professional philosophers and pundits.
In the former, it refers to the willingness of ordinary citizens to entertain and endorse thoughts and policy proposals that are judged illegitimate from the standpoint of certain liberal strictures of thought. It refers also to the diminishing influence of those strictures over the reactions and decisions of these citizens. Think, for example, of how the charge of “racism” has lost its bite as the belief grows that it has been overextended. Think also of the surging momentum of “nation” and “nationalism.”
Philosophers and pundits aligned with this right-wing postliberal tendency offer justifications for at least some of these transgressions. They begin their project by attempting to articulate explicitly the liberal framework these citizens are leaving behind. They then offer an alternate way to think about people, society, and politics. They critique the liberal framework from a standpoint rooted in their own rivalrous concepts. Insofar as ordinary postliberal citizens adopt them, these rival concepts can serve to guide their reactions and decisions and to arm them with justifications for their social and political activity when challenged by protagonists of the liberal regime.
One place to start with the postliberal critique is with the way liberalism conceives of human beings as individuals and how they relate to each other in society. From the postliberal point of view, however, the debate cannot be understood as one whereby each party understands itself as starting from a concept that the other party rejects. Instead, it appears to take the following form: Liberals uncritically begin their thought from particular and highly contestable concepts of the individual and the individual’s relation to others in society, as well as to the state. They do this “uncritically” in that they fail to recognize (or appreciate) the particular and highly contestable nature of their founding principles, treating them instead as absolute or incontestable facts. Postliberals seek to show liberals that the particular concept of the individual they assume is contestable, only to be misinterpreted as saying something else. This “something else” inevitably infringes on what liberals take to be the morally obligatory thoughts that ground or derive from the very concept of individuality in question.
To justify this view of things, I will draw from a philosopher inspiring the Left and the Right: Alasdair MacIntyre, who turned 96 this week. In his 1994 paper “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” (henceforth “Theses”), MacIntyredraws the contours of the liberal concept of individuality that he argues is particular and contestable. He then offers an alternative way of thinking. There are several public intellectuals we could examine to illustrate the liberal response to MacIntyre’s challenge, including Sam Harris, Andrew Sullivan, Brett Stevens, David French, David Brooks, and Konstantin Kisin. Recently, however, James Lindsay has sparked a contentious debate on this topic by disparaging postliberals as “woke right.” We will examine MacIntyre in the context of this vibrant debate.
It Is Not the End of History
The way Lindsay argues against postliberalism reveals his implicit commitment to the “end of history” thesis. This is the view that the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) a half-century after the defeat of fascism left liberalism as the last modern political system standing, so all that remains for “history” is for the world’s remaining recalcitrant nations to institute or consolidate this form. The rise of the “woke right” is problematic for Lindsay because it represents an erosion of the United States’ defining commitment to its liberal form. But his argument against the “woke right” assumes that there are only three possible political forms: liberal, communist, and fascist. Since the postliberal right is explicitly anti-liberal and anti-communist, it must be akin to fascism.
MacIntyre has been consistently opposed to liberalism since his teenage years. An anti-Stalinist Marxist for decades, he abandoned the Marxist standpoint entirely in the 1970s. He explains why as he arrives at his own mature standpoint with his 1981 book After Virtue. To arrive at “a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act,” we must reject the “ethos” that Marx shares with “liberal individualism”: the ethos of modernism. But while anti-liberal and anti-communist, MacIntyre is no fascist. To adopt a useful term from Aleksandr Dugin, MacIntyre’s mature philosophy must be understood as a search for a “fourth political theory” opposed to all three modern political theories. The standpoint of MacIntyre and the postliberal right that follows him, including that of his “popularizer” Patrick Deneen, cannot be understood within the limited space of possibilities allowed by the end-of-history thesis. Lindsay is correct that MacIntyre is “one of the patron saint philosophers of the woke right.” He is wrong to equate the movement to fascism.
In Theses, MacIntyre seeks help articulating his fourth political theory from Hegel, Feuerbach, and especially Marx and Aristotle. This does constitute a partial rehabilitation of Marx, but this should not trouble sensible anti-Marxist Americans. MacIntyre is well aware of “those moral inadequacies of Marxism which its twentieth-century history had disclosed.” He is guided in his long search for his own mature standpoint by the need to overcome them. The mature Marx thought he knew the sociological laws that would produce human flourishing, when applied. In power, Marx’s followers have used this knowledge claim to justify the tyranny they inflicted on their victims. MacIntyre’s extensive critique of “managerialism” denies that sociological knowledge takes the form Marxists and other managerial classes require it to take to justify their authority. His anti-modernism rejects the conceptions of nature and human nature that ground such knowledge claims. His politics does not aim to “seize ultimate power.” He aims instead to arm members of local non-liberal communities with the political concepts he offers so they can resist the violation of their ways of life by state and market power. In Theses, MacIntyre finds the early Marx arguing against those who conceive themselves as “potential legislators for and on behalf of others,” as the mature Marx and Marxists in power do. To call MacIntyrean politics a mask for the will to power as Lindsay does betrays ignorance of his view.
MacIntyre opens Theses, written shortly after the collapse of the USSR, by delineating his target: the end-of-history thesis. He seeks help from his historical figures to articulate a genuinely anti-communist, anti-fascist postliberalism. To connect with the terms of the historical debates, MacIntyre calls the liberal form, “the standpoint of civil society.” The newly post-communist countries are “struggling to attain or rather to reattain the standpoint of civil society,” while Western thinkers assert “that the standpoint of civil society cannot be transcended.” Feuerbach’s and Marx’s inquiries into how to transcend this standpoint now serve MacIntyre’s goal to transcend contemporary liberalism.
Liberalism’s Concept of the Individual
So what, fundamentally, is this liberal standpoint? “What was and is the standpoint of civil society?” It is the standpoint that begins by assuming a certain way of distinguishing individuals from the set of social, economic, and legal relationships in which they become involved. That set of relationships constitutes “the system of civil society.”
Three key thoughts are involved in making this distinction. First, it conceives of individuals as freely choosing to enter into these relationships. An individual may “find himself entangled in certain social relationships without having willed this to be the case. But that he continues in them is…his own doing.” Individuals freely enter into or remain in these relationships to use others as a means to their own ends. In doing so, they are used by others as means to their ends.
It is part of this assumption, secondly, that an individual’s desires and the ends that he seeks are what they are prior to and independently of the relationships he enters into. He is assumed to have a complete grasp of the goods he will seek throughout his life prior to his entry into that society. The sense of “prior” here is metaphysical rather than temporal: Liberals too, “characteristically without recognizing it,” have their own metaphysics, and it tends to exclude conceiving of people learning from each other about the goods they should seek through their community with one another. As MacIntyre writes in Theses, “In activities governed by the norms of civil society there are no ends except those which are understood to be the goals of some particular individual or individuals, dictated by the desires of those individuals, and no goods are recognized except those involved in the satisfaction of the wants and needs of individuals.”
This leads, thirdly, to the thought that grounds liberal ethics: All moral and political decision-making refers either to the rights individuals are said to possess as individuals abstracted from their social relationships, to the utility calculated by summing satisfactions of the desires individuals are thought to have so abstracted, or to the contracts such abstracted individuals are thought of as freely entering into. MacIntyre explains how liberalism’s way of distinguishing individuals from their social roles leads to its moral concerns:
“Among the needs generated by such a system therefore is one for the protection of individuals from being so used by others as a means that their pursuit of their own ends becomes frustrating rather than fulfilling. Hence appeals to moral and legal norms affording such protection have an important function within civil society. The central conceptions informing thought within civil society about human relationships are therefore those of utility, of contract and of individual rights. And the moral philosophy which gives expression to the standpoint of civil society consists of a continuing debate about those concepts and how they are to be applied.”
Four things must be noted about this account. First, we should recognize this “standpoint of civil society” as our contemporary moral and political world: the dominance of rights, utility, and contract talk; the absence of virtue, the human good, and flourishing talk. Lindsay is among those working to keep things that way. MacIntyre calls them “protagonists of the politics of the state and market economy.” Second, it must be stressed that this account of what grounds liberal thought articulates what is unthought by liberals themselves. They think those three key thoughts without recognizing them. Making explicit what implicitly grounds their thought, thirdly, is the first step toward revealing this starting point as particular and contestable. MacIntyre develops a rival view of an individual’s membership in groups and his relation to his social roles. The unearthed liberal assumptions are, then, criticized from this rival standpoint. But since the liberal does not recognize that what is targeted is his unthought thought, he tends to mischaracterize the argument. That these thoughts are unthought by those who subscribe to liberalism; that liberals see no possibility or necessity of transcending their standpoint; and that they happily affirm that we have arrived at the end of history are all one and the same fact. This fourth point brings us back to Lindsay. He remains trapped within the end-of-history space of possibilities because he assumes liberalism’s metaphysics of the individual is an absolute incontestable truth. It, thus, remains the only morally permissible view to him, and merely announcing the desire to transcend its standpoint smells to him like communism and fascism.
Woke Lite
Lindsay contends “woke right” describes those on the Right who take themselves to have “woken up” to the oppressive nature of liberal institutions. This is true of MacIntyrean postliberals, but MacIntyre’s account of what oppression consists in is diametrically opposed to the woke left’s conception. In After Virtue, he argues that premodern traditional societies enjoy ethical knowledge that we moderns lose. Premoderns ground their thought and practice on the idea that man possesses an objective telos he can succeed or fail to realize. They understand that ethical rules help us to acquire virtues necessary for a flourishing life. In abandoning teleology, moderns lose what justifies the ethical rules they inherit, and the various enlightenment projects searching for a new ground fail. MacIntyre’s project to recover our lost moral knowledge directly opposes the liberal view that celebrates:
“the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at its birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology.”
Postliberals think that wokeness derives from classical liberalism. MacIntyre has not remarked on wokeness specifically, but the 1960s and modern wokeness both shift into higher gear this celebration of the individual’s liberation from constraining social bonds and teleology. Recovering the teleological concept of man, MacIntyre insists that to know and achieve one’s good, he must submit to a demanding moral code. What, to him, is oppressive about the culture grounded in the liberal-to-woke liberationist view of history? It is that it systematically prevents us from learning about the demanding moral conditions we must satisfy to achieve our true good. MacIntyre writes in “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,”:
“What is always oppressive is any form of social relationship that denies to those who participate in it the possibility of the kind of learning from each other about the nature of their common good that can issue in socially transformative action.”
What MacIntyrean postliberals have “woken up” to, then, is how liberal-gone-woke institutions oppress us by directly opposing the demanding morality we must follow to actualize our essence as rational animals. This is not much like what woke leftists have woken up to. The demanding morality MacIntyre seeks to recover is for them the very definition of oppression. But not only for them. It also cannot appear as anything but oppression to moderns of the liberal stripe like Lindsay. Since he shares the liberationist view of history in common with the woke left and, thereby, shares their reason for resisting the “tyranny” of the postliberal right, it is fair to return serve and call Lindsay “woke light.”
The Postliberal Alternative
What does MacIntyre’s “critical consciousness” against liberal institutions consist of? What form of political practice does it recommend? MacIntyre draws a lesson about what is required to overcome liberalism from Marx’s critique of Feuerbach. The liberal standpoint is “not only a theoretical mistake. It is a mistake embodied in institutionalized social life.” The norms governing our social, economic, and legal practices are grounded in the three key thoughts constituting liberalism’s concept of the individual outlined above. “It is this conception of the individual which is actually embodied not just in the thought, but also in the activities characteristic of civil society,” MacIntyre writes in Theses. For this reason, liberalism will not be overcome by any merely theoretical critique. It must be overcome by a certain kind of practice along with the theory of that specific kind of practice.
What kind of practice? And how are liberalism’s three key thoughts mistakes? The answer to the first yields answers to the second.
A typical human life involves participating in practices that have goals of a certain nature. One can say what these goals are “independently of any characterization of the desires of the particular individuals who happen to engage in it.” Scientific and historical research aiming at scientific and historical truth are such practices but so are the practices of “fishing crews and farming cooperatives.” The goals of such practices are held in common by all who participate in them, and individuals learn about these goals only by engaging in these practices. As they do so, they learn the skills and acquire the virtues required to achieve those goals. This process involves “a transformation in the desires which they initially brought with them to the activity.”
There is obviously nothing metaphysically mysterious about participating in your community’s practices, coming to care for the goals of those practices and devoting part of your life to them, and developing your skills and virtues as required to achieve those goals. What is not obvious is what MacIntyre’s politics teaches: First, that according to the West’s greatest and longest-lasting moral and political tradition, the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, such goods of individual souls and common goods of communities—and more importantly threats to such goods—are of legitimate objective political concern. Practices of this nature define the ways of life of local communities; their politics consists in ordering these practices’ goods; and their members acquire virtues and actualize their essence by participating in them. To safeguard such objective goods, political debate must have recourse to talk of virtues, human goods, and flourishing—not only rights, utility, and contract. Second, that to perceive clearly the nature of these practices and the goods they aim at is to see their incompatibility with liberal assumptions. This is the insight Marx strove for but failed to attain. People acquire new goals and desires through participation in such practices: Their desires and ends are not complete prior to and independently of their community with others.
“These are the types of practice socially marginalized by the self-aggrandizing and self-protective attitudes and activities of developing capitalism, types of practice alien to the standpoint of civil society,” he writes in the Theses.
Conclusion
The assumptions defining the liberal standpoint do not define an absolute standpoint, true across all times and all cultures, as Lindsay dogmatically assumes. This “particular conception of the individual…belongs to the conceptual scheme of one particular type of social order,” MacIntyre writes. The norms it imposes on our social, economic, and legal practices serve the interests of those who favor a way of life and a conception of the human good best served by rights, utility, and contract talk. They systematically disfavor those whose way of life is more at home in virtue, human good, and flourishing talk. MacIntyrean postliberals are woke to the metaphysics of liberal individualism and the oppression of nonliberal moral communities it justifies. They did not choose this particular liberal order; they did not choose the norms governing the social world in which they must live—and they are starting to refuse them. “A rising spirit in haunting America” indeed. It is MacIntyre’s “revolutionary Aristotelianism” that offers concepts serving the needs of resistance.
Daniel Addison teaches philosophy at Mercy University in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He completed his PhD on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s theoretical philosophy under John McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh before teaching at Hunter College/CUNY from 2013-2024.