The Particularities of Political Conversations. Issue 4 (2nd October 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: MacIntyre, Alasdair
• Is Part Of: Review of politics. Volume 77:Issue 4(2015:Autumn)
• Page Start: 641
• Page End: 645
• Publication Date: 2015-10-02
• Subjects: 320.5
• DOI: 10.1017/S0034670515000613
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0034-6705

Abstract

Abstract : Redhead's admirable book addresses the questions, What cultural, religious, and other baggage do we bring with us to our political interactions with others, and how does it affect those interactions? I am grateful both for the way in which he has opened up those questions and for his generally accurate and always generous treatment of my views. If he has in some ways misunderstood them, this is the result only of an error of omission. For he has neglected to take adequate note both of my account of the distinctive characteristics of most political interactions in the liberal democracies of advanced modernity (except, oddly and briefly, in his footnote 208) and of the importance that I attach to the Thomistic conception of common goods. Yet, without reference to these, some of my central claims about what we bring to political conversations are apt to be misunderstood.