ABSTRACT
In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre sets up an opposition between two types of social order that existed in the eighteenth century, where passions and interests had become redefined (following broadly Hirschman) in such a manner as to constitute social relationships as market relationships. This, of course, is the social order of England. The second social order MacIntyre considers is Scotland and the contrast he draws could hardly be sharper. For Scotland in the eighteenth century was able to understand itself through a network of distinctive religious, educational and legal institutions which gave it a powerful Protestant public doctrine. These institutions were the precondition for the existence in Scotland of a:
type of society which is understood by most of those who inhabit it as exemplifying in its social and political order principles independent of and antecedent to the passions and interests of the individuals and groups that compose that society…requires for its maintenance the generally shared possession-not necessarily universally shared-of some account of the knowledge and a set of institutionalized means for bringing those principles to bear on the issues of practical life.1
