ABSTRACT
In this conclusion I shall attempt to reveal what I take to be some of the potential for social scientists in MacIntyre’s recent conceptual innovations around the issues of traditions, social practices and the idea of narrative, and will attempt to see what light his work casts on some fairly recent social and political conflicts. In general I will be drawing principally on MacIntyre’s After Virtue. The reasons for doing this are largely practical and reflect something of the intellectual climate of the social sciences. In the first place, After Virtue was at least partly intended to directly address a social science audience, by dealing with some of the philosophical issues underpinning the debates about social science methodology. It is therefore hardly surprising that some of its conceptualisations are, perhaps, rather easier to ‘operationalise’, than the more historical and philosophical ideas of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and ThreeRival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Secondly it is, no doubt, true, that given the still strong Enlightenment prejudices of most western social scientists, the intellectual content of After Virtue is more acceptable to them than the arguments of the latter books, with their strong and open endorsment of Thomist philosophy. It would be quite wrong, however, to give the impression that these later works contain nothing of interest for even the most resolutely sceptical and secularised social scientist. As I stressed at the beginning of this study there can be no substitute for reading MacIntyre’s books, for they are in a very real sense, and especially
latterly, historical and philosophical narratives in which it is quite literally true to say that the whole substance is in the detail. For it is in the detailed historical reconstruction, written inevitably from within some tradition, that apparently incommensurable conceptual schemes, and ways of life, might seriously engage with one another. In particular it is worth mentioning, very briefly, the arguments of MacIntyre’s Gifford lectures presented in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. For here MacIntyre sets up three contrasting patterns of enquiry within modernity.
