Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre (review)

512 BOOK REVIEWS Pagels simply shifted the sense in which she is using the word "liberty " with reference to readings of Gen. 1-3-from the earlier discussion in which it had primarily a theological and moral sense, to the discussion in chapter five, where a decidedly political specification is introduced. The Augustine who in contrast to earlier theologians appears as little more than an ideologue for the Roman Catholic Empire is one which is engineered largely by this shi£t in term usage, and not by evidence from the texts. With considerably less trouble, Pagels could have found in Eusebius of Caesarea, or some other court theologian , a willing ideologue much more pliable than Augustine was. Her point that theologians and historians of ideas need to take more seriously the political agendas against which ideas arise is well taken. But by insisting that it was the political expediency of Augustine's teaching on original sin that caused it to catch on (pp. 99-100, 105, 118), Pagels skates perilously close to a reductionist reading of this theology despite her stated intention (p. xxvii) to the contrary. Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania JOHN C. CAVADINI Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by ALASDAIR MAc!NTYRE. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Pp. xi+ 410. $22.95 (hardbound). One part of the Enlightenment project, for the past 300 years or so, has been to reach assured foundations for both thought and action. Thus Descartes, near the beginning of this project, insisted on starting with propositions which are clearly and distinctly true and on suspending commitment to any received wisdom. From this untainted beginning , the ,thinker could build the edifice of thought and culture securely . Ordinary people might not maintain such purity; but, so influential has this image been in Western history, that even today we take the scientist and the philosopher as critical inquirers unbound by ties of tradition. Alasdair Maclntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is a brilliant challenge to this common understanding. Maclntyre's title indicates the scope as well as the direction of his argument. When questions of justice arise, that is, questions about the relationships of people with each other, about the apportioning of the goods of society and so on, they cannot be answered without reversing the question, without asking about the society in which the question BOOK REVIEWS 518 arises. To a great extent, the deeper question can only he answered from within that society with all of its givens. Sorting out the claims and counter-claims requires us to put them in the context of tradition. The same must he said for the questions of truth and of inquiry which always flow though and around the arguments about right and wrong. There .too we must reverse the question. The standards of rationality , like those of justice, inhere in society, in an ongoing enterprise from which the thinker cannot separate himself if he is to proceed. Hence the question, "Whose rationality? " The rejection of Descartes's pure beginning is not original with MacIntyre . C. S. Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name just two among many, made the argument too effectively for rebuttal. What is different about Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is that it focusses as much on the relative pronouns as on the substantives. It traces concern about justice and rationality through history. Macintyre takes it as "crucial that the concept of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rational enquiry cannot be elucidated apart from its exemplifications." However, rather than attempting a universal survey, he attends to four exemplifications capable of supporting and clarifying the central thesis: ancient Greece from Homer to Aristotle, patristic and medieval Christianity with Augustine and Aquinas as the center points, the Scottish enlightenment beginning in the kirk and ending with Hume and Reid, and finally the very liberalism stemming from the enlightenment and challenged by the book at hand. What unifies a tradition is not so much an idea as a problem and a preoccupation. The problem and its attendant preoccupation become the focus of struggle(s) within society in a way which forms its internal development, which establishes its intellectual and moral perimeter , and which sets it in relation to...