What MacIntyre Knows, and Doesn’t Know, about the State

What Alasdair MacIntyre knows, for has been the master teacher of it to all of us for decades, is
that modern nation-state cannot do anything truly good for its citizens. MacIntyre has argued
consistently and forcefully that the American Regime, due to its foundation in an anti-
Aristotelian, pro-Lockean privatization of the Good, and notwithstanding those good classical
and medieval elements of political order the American Founders’ inherited and adopted, is not
a functional political practice. On the national level, it is most accurately described as an
alliance, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, which is by definition sub-political, for it aims
only at preserving life and natural liberty (and property, if you like), but not the truly good life
of moral liberty. In the Lockean/American conception, the good life is enabled by sub-state
agencies and institutions and practices, such as families, voluntary associations, and churches.
In short, the modern state is not, at least deliberately and intentionally, ordered to a common
good, but only to the private interests of its citizens; it is a “public-interest” organization, as
MacIntyre has called it, more like a utility company than a city.

Yet, MacIntyre, in a recent lecture entitled, “Justification of Coercion and Constraint,” given at
the Notre Dame Ethics and Culture Conference in 2015, called for, not some ideal, small-scale,
polis-like, rightly founded and structured, good willed, morally capable, natural-law friendly,
and otherwise legitimate and trustworthy political authority to be more empowered than ever
before to secure certain morally robust goods and prevent certain evils through coercion and
constraint, but for the presently configured Federal Government of the United States America
to do so, that is, an exemplar of the nation-state model that he once called a “dangerous and
unmanageable institution.” And MacIntyre was not talking about local, town-hall-meeting fines
for naughty behavior here, but severe penalties for government disapproved speech, as well as
exemptionless government-mandated vaccinations, forced military service, and government
prescribed curriculum in education.

My paper is a critique of MacIntyre's speech from a Thomistic perspective to the Benedict

Option, one that considers the use of coercion and restraint by political authority justified in
theory, but questions whether it can be justified for the contemporary nation-state, especially
one that has shown itself to be untrustworthy, mendacious, and violent.