FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and
cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through state power
regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be
their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of under–
standing their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the
good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those tra–
ditional forms of human community within which this project has to
be embodied.
311
The usual tirades against at least classical liberalism-that it fosters
atomism, subjective autonomy and, thus, ethical relativism, decadence and
social life that rests on power rather than justice-voiced by conservatives
as well as radicals, may all be added to this lament of MacIntyre.
Is there anything to these vehement sentiments?
The honest answer is that, if only inadvertently, MacIntyre's hostility
has something, albeit minimal, going for it. The lamentable features of lib–
eralism have to do with failing to distinguish two considerably different
ways in which the system can be defended and insisting on advancing one
as superior to the other, whereas probably just the opposite is true.
The case for a free society, as understood within the earlier classical lib–
eral traditions, has been advanced on several bases, including skepticism,
mysticism, positivism, natural law and natural rights, utilitarianism and
pragmatism. Yet, liberalism was primarily defended as a modern approach
to politics, one that has gained much of its strength from certain affini ties
with science. We may distinguish the earlier.and the later arguments as the
positive and the normative cases for freedom.
The twentieth-century novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand put on record
the most fully developed-though insufficiently detailed-normative
argument for classical liberal ideas and ideals that dominate the discussion
of the meri ts and liabili ties of classical liberalism today. Earlier hints of such
a defense were offered by John Locke and others in the natural law school
of moral and political philosophy.
In
our time, Robert Nozick, Loren
Lomasky, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas
J.
Den Uyl, Fred
D.
Miller,
Jr., Eric Mack, among others, and I have carried forth the normative tradi–
tion.
In
contrast, the most persistent positive case in economics is made by
Milton Friedman, given his direct treatment of certain methodological
issues that serve as the philosophical foundation of such an approach to
social philosophy, as well as some others in the field of positive political
economy-for example, Gordon Tullock, David Friedman, the late George
Stigler, and Gary Becker (the latter two both Nobel Laureates). The late
Ludwig von Mises and EA. Hayek have also produced non-normative
