Inseparable Rivals: On the Social Ontology of Practices and Institutions

MacIntyre’s account of practices and institutions leaves open essential questions about what kind of social things they are, how exactly they fit together, and where they might fit into a broader Aristotelian social theory. As commonly read, After Virtue depicts the two as separate, rival social forms that rely on one another but endlessly conflict because they focus on rival types of good. Yet practices depend on institutional features not just to survive long-term, but even to be social orders of excellence in the first place. Institutions, likewise, depend on shared activity and the virtues of coordination even to realize the instrumental goods that MacIntyre assigns to them. Hence, there are internal, constitutive relations at work as well as external, competitive ones. On a fuller picture, both “practice” and “institution” denote derivative elements of a complete social form. Neither picks out any community as an independent whole, and the full flourishing of any community always and unavoidably involves elements of both concepts. Yet the social wholes in which one or the other element predominates are so different as to deserve separate categories (here called “organization” vs. “practice-as-a-whole”), which recapitulate the moral and practical tensions that MacIntyre so fruitfully identified.