Virtue and Power: The Narrative of Reason and the Reasoning of Public Narratives in the Construction of a New Politics of the Collective Good

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues for a politics constructed on a refined version of virtue ethics that is more radically democratic and thereby more directly concerned with imbalances and asymmetries of power. Beginning with a critique of MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian account, I contend that he does not sufficiently tend to the full dynamic between rationality and power thereby occluding key democratic practices needed to counter the dominion of modern capitalism. While he offers the prospect of social protection and integration, his virtue ethics fails sufficiently to incorporate emancipatory movement, a problem I trace to his dismissal of Periclean isegoria and his truncated narrative of the oppression inherent to capitalism. Returning to this Periclean practice, I look to the example of Zapatista Kuxlejal politics to develop a virtue ethics that incorporates social integration with emancipation through receptive self-making in public narrative, collective governance in mutual obedience, and a participatory pedagogy of the collective good.