Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science

by Jason Blakely

Overview

Today the ethical and normative concerns of everyday citizens are all too often sidelined from the study of political and social issues, driven out by an effort to create a more “scientific” study. This book offers a way for social scientists and political theorists to reintegrate the empirical and the normative, proposing a way out of the scientism that clouds our age. In Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, Jason Blakely argues that the resources for overcoming this divide are found in the respective intellectual developments of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Blakely examines their often parallel intellectual journeys, which led them to critically engage the British New Left, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, continental hermeneutics, and modern social science. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, Blakely claims they each present a new, revived humanism, one that insists on the creative agency of the human person against reductive, instrumental, technocratic, and scientistic ways of thinking. The recovery of certain key themes in these philosophers’ works generates a new political philosophy with which to face certain unprecedented problems of our age. Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268100674
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	10/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jason Blakely is assistant professor of political science at Pepperdine University.

Read an Excerpt

My basic overarching assumption is that the story of how these two philosophers developed their views of social science generates a new approach to political inquiry that speaks to the concrete concerns of political theorists, social scientists, and policy makers. I will briefly elaborate its relevance to each of these three communities in turn.

First, Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophical formulations of a new social science give political theorists a clear way to overcome the view that science is concerned with hard, objective facts while political theory mucks around in the subjectivity of values. Political theorists are often told that social scientists are concerned with empirical analysis, while theorists must be constrained to purely normative claims of value. But a proper recovery of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s views of social science shows that empirical science and normative inquiry cannot be successfully dichotomized.

In overcoming this fact-value divide, this study offers political theorists and philosophers an alternative to approaches that have dominated Anglophone philosophy for over forty years. For example, one way of thinking of the late John Rawls’s massively influential project is as a vindication of political and normative philosophy after the challenges posed by the fact-value dichotomy. At midcentury, the logical positivists had famously declared political philosophy dead because its language was unverifiable and therefore essentially emotive (a discussion I return to in greater detail in later chapters). In other words, political theory was not a true form of knowledge because it dealt in subjective values and not in objective facts. In this context, Rawls’s project was received by many as a resuscitation of political and normative philosophy that showed such research could be established on rational grounds, largely free from questions of fact. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice can be read (and indeed was read by many) as an attempt to carve out a radically autonomous sphere for rational normative justification, separate from the empirical researches of the social sciences, thus not running afoul of the philosophical divi- sion between facts and values. Although interest in logical positivism has long since waned, the notion that there is a dichotomy between facts and values has continued to remain largely unquestioned within mainstream social science and analytic philosophy. Partly for this reason, Anglophone political philosophy has been hugely attracted to the Rawlsian paradigm.

By contrast, in rejecting a strong separation between normative and empirical research, Taylor and MacIntyre have opened new, non-Rawlsian routes out of the fact-value dichotomy. Recovering this aspect of their work thus debunks the myth that Anglophone political theory was made defunct by positivism until Rawls arrived on the scene and resuscitated the cadaver. Rather, the approaches to social science championed by Taylor and MacIntyre have roots extending back to the early 1960s, with normative ramifications that have yet to be fully realized by philosophers and political theorists. I hope to make these ramifications clear in the account that follows.

Second, social science in our own day is overwhelmed by the towering accomplishments of the natural sciences. Social scientists are everywhere on the defensive as they are asked to meet the same success in prediction, explanation, and technological control as is found in the precincts of physics and biology. But what if the predictive, technological-control model of scientific success is a mistaken standard when applied to the social sciences? My treatment of Taylor and MacIntyre is a narrative of the historical emergence of an alternative philosophy of social science to those that currently shape the majority of research programs in society and politics. As shall be made clear, Taylor and MacIntyre each drew on a long tradition of interpretive thought that includes the cultural studies of e.P. Thompson, the linguistic philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Peter Winch, and the phenomenology and hermeneutics of G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, I believe they do represent the state of the art in interpretive philosophy of social science.

In this respect, the narrative that follows is meant to vindicate and revive interpretive insights in the face of skepticism and opposition. Over fifty years have passed since the much hailed “interpretive turn” emerged in the english-speaking world. Yet today the reforms of this turn have stalled. And although many social scientists now accept certain interpretive criticisms of their work, they also tend to treat interpretivism as one method among many, one more tool in a kit. Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s philosophical accounts of the social sciences run directly against this tendency. Their philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research. This interpretive framework also provides social scientists with a normatively engaged way to do research, bridging the gap with political theory and ethics. Social science and political theory can at last be reunified.

Third, policy makers and everyday political actors will find in these pages the philosophical justification for more deliberative, democratic, and antielitist approaches to politics. Both Taylor and MacIntyre, I will argue, adopted conceptions of the human person that rebuff mechanistic and reductive trends within modern policy making. Where modern political authority is often buttressed by the specialized and supposedly value-neutral vocabularies of economic and political experts, these philosophers both give reasons to insist that explaining social reality requires engaging with the beliefs, values, and meanings of nonexpert citizens. Interpretive social science resists modernity’s tendency to authorize rule by value-neutral experts, managers, and technocrats in favor of a more participatory and humanistic vision of political life. Thus, in policy formation also, the dichotomy between normative political theory and empirical social science is overcome.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Problem of Superstition and the Divorce of Political Theory from Social Science

1. The Deeper Sources of the Breakup: The Rise of “Naturalism” in Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics

2. The First British New Left’s Rebellion against Naturalism

3. Analytic Philosophy as a Weapon for Attacking Naturalism

4. Inspiring a New Social Science: Aristotle and Heidegger

5. Overcoming Value-Neutrality in the Social Sciences

6. The Great Reunification: An Antinaturalist Social Science

Conclusion: Future Projects and a Renewed Humanism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book, containing many original contributions to the field, does an excellent job in identifying a real problem in mainstream political theory—its overly normative character and its separation from social science. It contains many original contributions to the field. I particularly liked the way in which the problems of naturalism are presented as institutional, cultural, and political as well as philosophical. The historical background to these problems is also interesting and sheds fresh light on the issues." —Nicholas Smith, Macquarie University

"Jason Blakely skillfully uses the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor as his interpretive lens for observing how the naturalist /antinaturalist debate develops in the philosophy of the social sciences over the second half of the twentieth century. Blakely does this, moreover, with great clarity and economy. His book thus offers a philosophical and historical perspective on an important debate that is both intellectually substantive and highly readable." —Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz

"Although a number of other scholars have at least considered writing on this subject over the past decade and more, I am not aware of any book-length treatment of it or of any treatment that is so well informed or so well judged. Jason Blakely's account might well prove definitive." —Kelvin Knight, London Metropolitan University

"Jason Blakeley writes a well-researched, well-argued manifesto for a new social science. The power of the analysis is that this new social science need not be revolutionary, since Macintyre and Taylor have already paved the way. Will others follow? Will political science and the other social sciences follow? Only time will tell. I’d encourage social scientists and philosophers of all stripes to pick up this helpful volume." —voeglinview

From the Publisher

"Although a number of other scholars have at least considered writing on this subject over the past decade and more, I am not aware of any book-length treatment of it or of any treatment that is so well informed or so well judged. Jason Blakely's account might well prove definitive." —Kelvin Knight, London Metropolitan University

Kelvin Knight

"Jason Blakely skillfully uses the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor as his interpretive lens for observing how the naturalist /antinaturalist debate develops in the philosophy of the social sciences over the second half of the twentieth century. Blakely does this, moreover, with great clarity and economy. His book thus offers a philosophical and historical perspective on an important debate that is both intellectually substantive and highly readable." —Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz

University of California-Santa Cruz

"This book, containing many original contributions to the field, does an excellent job in identifying a real problem in mainstream political theory—its overly normative character and its separation from social science. It contains many original contributions to the field. I particularly liked the way in which the problems of naturalism are presented as institutional, cultural, and political as well as philosophical. The historical background to these problems is also interesting and sheds fresh light on the issues." —Nicholas Smith, Macquarie University

Macquarie University

"This book does an excellent job in identifying a real problem in mainstream political theory—its overly normative character and its separation from social science. It contains many original contributions to the field. I particularly liked the way in which the problems of naturalism are presented as institutional, cultural, and political as well as philosophical. The historical background to these problems is also interesting and sheds fresh light on the issues."

Macquarie University - Nicholas Smith

"Jason Blakeley writes a well-researched, well-argued manifesto for a new social science. The power of the analysis is that this new social science need not be revolutionary, since Macintyre and Taylor have already paved the way. Will others follow? Will political science and the other social sciences follow? Only time will tell. I’d encourage social scientists and philosophers of all stripes to pick up this helpful volume."

voeglinview

"Jason Blakely skillfully uses the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor as his interpretive lens for observing how the naturalist /antinaturalist debate develops in the philosophy of the social sciences over the second half of the twentieth century. Blakely does this, moreover, with great clarity and economy. His book thus offers a philosophical and historical perspective on an important debate that is both intellectually substantive and highly readable."

University of California-Santa Cruz - Paul A. Roth