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modern bureaucratic society when he returns to it at the end of the
book. But I remain somewhat uncertain about it, no doubt due, in
part, to my own confusions on the subject.
At times the thesis seems to be: modern capitalism, which is
now increasingly bureaucratized, has removed the very "concept of a
practice with goods internal to ourselves ... to the margins of our
lives." We are forced to function during a good part of our lives in
pursuit of external goods; and unlinked by allegiance to common
practice, our relations are more and more atomistic and manipula–
tive. Modern moral philosophy is the reflection of this. It stands to
modern society rather as, say, Aquinas stood to late medieval soci–
ety, as a representative formulation of that society's ethical life and
aspirations. But this is a catastrophic thesis when combined with
MacIntyre's view that this philosophy constitutes mere fragments of
a conceptual scheme, that we possess only "simulacra of morality."
This would make us an exceptionally unfortunate age in history:
our
characteristic thought is a form of confused incomprehension of our–
selves, not really moral thinking at all. Are we that badly off?
MacIntrye indeed seems to think so, as the catastrophe image
implies. But at other times, things seem not so terrible. After all, we
can still think straight about morals, understand the language of vir–
tues, and its relation to practices. MacIntyre's book helps us to do so
again. Thus the modern philosophies he attacks - emotivism, pre–
scriptivism, existentialism - can be seen as bad theories. It is not
they who should be related to contemporary society as Thomism was
to fourteenth-century Europe, but rather a theory of the kind which
MacIntyre himself is developing.
What would remain true on this reading is that modern
bureaucratic capitalist society is very inhospitable to the best moral
thinking of which we are capable. But this is not all that exceptional
a predicament. Aristotle gives superb expression to the morality of a
polis
just as it is going under; and Stoicism, as MacIntyre points out,
is a forerunner of modern theories in abstracting the moral agent
from his context. This picture of moral thinking against the grain is
what MacIntyre evokes with the closing image in the book - our per–
iod analogous to the dark ages, and calling for its St. Benedict.
But this too overstates the case. MacIntyre doesn't give much
weight to what he from time to time acknowledges; that the modern
idea of the free, disengaged moral subject doesn't just arise through
our failing grip on the notion of virtue but corresponds to a charac-
