Alasdair MacIntyre: Narratives and Communities

Winch's work raises a wealth of epistemological, ontological, political and moral issues relevant to the philosophy of the social sciences and they can be developed in different ways.

MacIntyre's central concern is moral philosophy. He argues that it is only in the context of a tradition that any sort of morality can be meaningful, and that we can talk about a tradition only in the context of two other concepts: practice and narrative. By ‘practice' he seems to mean a coherent social practice which enables a moral life to be pursued, and this enables human beings to tell coherent stories about themselves. He argues that human beings are by nature storytelling animals, and the stories we tell about ourselves are rooted in ancient myths where everybody is given a clear role. It is this sort of coherence of meaning in individual life that Winch suggests could be the advantage of Azande society.

MacIntyre's criticism of modern society is developed though a distinction between external and internal goods - ‘goods' here meaning what is valued and desired, ‘goods' as opposed to ‘evils'.

For MacIntyre, there is a contradictory or dialectical relationship between practices and institutions. Practices, the pursuit of internal goods, are dependent upon institutions, but the latter are also concerned with the pursuit of external goods so there is always a danger of corruption. What is important in all of this is that MacIntyre is putting forward an argument which is epistemologically similar to Winch. We can understand human action only within its context, within the language game or within the form of life within which it takes place - which MacIntyre seems to deal with as practices and institutions. The epistemology carries with it implications for moral philosophy: in his discussion of the Azande, Winch plays with the idea that the advantage of Zande culture over Western culture is that it offers a more coherent meaning to the individual life than does the modern world - it is therefore wrong to see Zande witchcraft through one or another set of scientific spectacles. MacIntyre turns this into a full-scale critique of modernity, arguing that we have entered a new dark age in which the pursuit of external goods has eaten away at the pursuit of internal goods and the coherence of social life which is both a condition for and a source of coherent individual and social narratives.

More important, MacIntyre provides a philosophical foundation for the contemporary emphasis on narrative in sociology, social psychology and sociology and perhaps to a lesser extent in social history. The emphasis has developed in different ways in each discipline. Dan P. MacAdams (1993), for example, influenced by the work of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, talks about the importance of building up personal myths for a sense of identity and meaning in life; Jerome Bruner (1987), the cognitive psychologist, in a seminal paper suggests that there is only narrative in people's lives, that there is no difference between the life as lived and the life as told. The culture supplies the narrative structures around which we organize our personal lives, and in this organization we are bound into our culture. In sociology the idea of narrative has been particularly important in looking at the way in which people deal with illness or life crises such as divorce (Andrews et al. 2000). In all cases it is suggested that a coherent narrative is a source of personal identity and connection to the wider social group.

We can, then, think of narrative as providing another basis for the interpretive approach to the social sciences. The emphasis on narrative presents an alternative to instrumental rationality and extends the notion of rationality as rule-following to take into account the way we give significance to our lives within a form of life.