ABSTRACT
In this part I shall look at the relationship of MacIntyre’s recent work to a particular sociologically informed historical narrative. I shall do this by supplementing and expanding the account that is partly assumed and partly present in MacIntyre’s analysis in both After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? What follows will, in an inevitably sketched form, try to examine some of the connections and determinations involved, between the account of the economic and social ‘Great Transformation’, narrated principally, but not solely, by Karl Polanyi, and the philosophic and cultural transformation, presented by MacIntyre-stressing the congruence of their approaches. The process of the social transformation in its ideological and cultural forms will be clarified by the use of certain characters, but in this instance drawn from real life, who seem to me to represent the contradictions and complexities of MacIntyre’s account of the rise of modernity. These figures are two conservative theorists,
Edmund Burke the Tory philosopher and George Fitzhugh the defender of the slave plantation system in the American South. These figures help us think through, if only by example, the vexed question of the effects of social relations upon intellectual thought and culture.
