By Francis X. Maier

More than forty years ago and shortly before he entered the Catholic faith, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote an essay worth revisiting today. MacIntyre is a brilliant scholar but a sometimes-tedious writer. As a result, his essay - "Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority" - has all the eloquence of an air-conditioning repair manual. But as background to our current political environment, its value is very real. I'll explain.

For MacIntyre:

Modern liberal politics is dominated by a conception of the political process as one of bargaining between interests. Political morality consists in the observance of certain legally enforceable restrictions upon conduct; morality in general is relegated to private life. There is largely lacking any conception of political life as being the pursuit of the common good, nor can there be, for our dominant effective notion of the common good is merely that of an artifact compounded out of individual and partial interests as a result of the bargaining process.

Such a feeble sense of the common good has consequences. As MacIntyre argues, "in the modern world's understanding, for example, the notion of a just price makes no sense; justice belongs in one realm and the price mechanism in another." Plus, "the relationship of the good citizen to a good man is an essentially Aristotelian question. . .about the distribution of certain dispositions (virtues) in a systematic way within the entire community."

Put simply: In today's world dominated by technology and the social sciences, the common good and a virtuous citizenry have only a marginal connection. The "common good" is a statistical abstraction amounting to the sum of similar appetites. Aristotle and his concern for a civic life anchored in the cultivation of personal virtue have about as much relevance to political reality as a blacksmith and the needs of his craft.

This implies an equally feeble anthropology. In other words, it suggests a degraded understanding of who and what a human being is, and what - if anything - our unique dignity as creatures might be. This in turn affects our politics which becomes unmoored from any stable, Biblical grounding.

In practice, the social sciences tend to treat the human person as a data point and an object of study, not a subject with conscience, free will, and a transcendent destiny demanding reverence. Religious belief is typically assumed to be a self-imposed, irrational mystification; an effort to create higher meaning where otherwise none exists.

The irony, as MacIntyre notes, is that the social sciences themselves very easily become an exercise in "technical sophistication [that ends] in mystification." For MacIntyre, social science can be seen as "essentially a histrionic subject: how to act the part of a natural scientist on the stage of the social sciences with the more technical parts of the discipline functioning as do greasepaint, false beards and costumes in the theater."

The difference is that "actors in the theater always know that they are actors, and so do their audience." The methodologists of social science and their audiences too often don't.

This is why Christian Smith, himself a distinguished social scientist, described American sociology as, "not merely the science of society nor merely a politically liberal-leaning discipline, but a particular sacred project, a movement to venerate, protect, and advance" certain ideological goals and assumptions "with the zeal of new religious converts."

It's why a thoroughly secular scholar like Neil Postman reclassified social science as a branch of moral philosophy rather than genuine science, and why the historian Christopher Lasch - never a religious believer and always a man of the old working-class left - showed such skepticism toward the social sciences in his own writing on matters of society, family, mature citizenship, and culture.

The problem with social science isn't the collec...