Research On Mcintyre’s Thought About Community In The Vision Of Political Philosophy

MacIntyre is dissatisfied with the lack of the moral cultivation to citizens causedby the pluralism in the modern society, which expresses not only citizen’s indifferentto common life, but the state is considered as a legal state, and as a field providing forindividuals’ pursuit for their private interests, it loses the members’ loyalty, whichseriously hinders the create of socially common value about fairness and justice. Thecriteria of the MacIntyre’s judgment is community thoughts of pre modern society,they provide efficiently ideal modes. In these communities, the cultivation of the civicvirtue is a inner part of the construction of the political system. Basing on this,MacIntyre expresses his community thoughts to challenge the hegemony of liberaltheory and system. He emphasizes that importance should be attached to cultivatinggood citizens with public morality.This paper discusses the background of MacIntyre’s thought about virtuecommunity, examines the shift from classical republicanism tradition to modernliberalism in the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, and clarifies McIntyre’s critiqueto the moral crisis of modern western society with republicanism values andreconstruction of virtue community.This paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter analyzes thebackground of McIntyre community thought. In modern society guidanced by theexchange of commodities and market principle, Individual is regarded as the onlysubject, his right is the first. There is a relationship of mutual use between people, thecountry adopt a bureaucracy management mode basing on scientifical ration.Although the contemporary nation maintains its legitimacy with its welfare policy,but its dependent on the right causes social moral crisis, which manifests citizen’slack of moral obligation to the community and apathy to participate in public politicallife. Modern liberalism, especially Rawls’s theory of justice, tries to correct theutilitarianism of classical liberalism and combine liberty and equality; however, itdoes not change the concept of liberal right and rational autonomy. The second chapter explains the appearing of Hume Problem in the ScottishEnlightenment. In McIntyre’s view, the problem of modern society is derived fromthe disappear of classical tradition and the appearing of the liberalism during the timefrom the fifteenth century to the seventeenth century, the Scottish Enlightenmentshows the process of this transition. The reflection about national future of Scotlanddivides the theory of Scottish Enlightenment into distinct different theories. Fergusonadheres to the classical virtues and critiques the modern social civilization, whichshows loyalty to the Scottish tradition; while being aware of the moral questions ofmodern commercial society, like Hume, Smith believes that the Scotland shouldabandon the tradition and join into the modern world; Hume analysis the relationshipamong emotion, desire and ration of human, puts forward the problem about therelationship between fact and value, which reflect the liberal tendency in the form oftheory at the time, and thereby subverts the Aristotle tradition.The third chapter discusses the McIntyre’s criticism to dualistic opposition in themodern society continuing the enlightenment liberalism direction and exacerbatingthe opposition between tool rationality and value rationality, which expresses thebreak between self and community, rules and morality, human reason and dependenceand politics and moral. The modern state and the family lose the function of moralcultivation in the context of republicanism; consequently people feel spiritualemptiness and are lack of morality. With the Aristotle’s theory about polis community,Aquinas’s theory about the natural law and Machiavelli’s republicanism theory,McIntyre criticizes modern society, puts forward “practice” and “narrative self”concepts, attempts to restore the understanding of classical type about political, virtue,humanity and self, so as to reconstruct the respect to public good and the sense ofparticipation public life and regain the tradition abandoned by enlightenment andreconstruct virtue community destroyed by modern society. He calls the community“political”, because it involves a variety of practice and the pursuit for good inherentin practice. He believes that the peace and freedom of life depend on the design of thesystem and also on citizen’s virtue, and that virtue and freedom is mutuallysupportive.The fourth chapter clarifies characteristics of virtue community desired by McIntyre. It is different from modern country and family and bears classical features.Firstly, it is small, self-contained; secondly, it is similar to a kind of religious group,takes religious emotion as its link; thirdly, it takes political participation in the publiclife in republicanism as the standard with target to equally pursue community good;in the end, it establishes a public forum for debate through education to cultivateconsciousness of public morality for citizens and respect for tradition.The McIntyre’s critique to the modern society makes us have furtherunderstanding to theoretical disputes among republicanism, liberalism andcommunitarianism and moral crisis of contemporary capitalist society, however,McIntyre does not provide convincing guarantee for the existence of these smallcommunities in modern society and criticize the basic system of the capitalism.