Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre's paper ‘The idea of an educated public’ followed on his frontal attack in After Virtue on the ‘failed’ intellectual project of the Enlightenment and on its liberal heritage. His argument, in the paper, was that the only way we can save ourselves from that failure is by restoring the idea of an educated public modelled on the type found in eighteenth century Scotland. This article takes up the issue of the ‘crisis’ of modernity, and argues that MacIntyre's ‘public’ is just one possible one and not necessarily the best. Other, competing conceptions of an educated public have been proposed, among others by Dewey and Habermas, that do not necessitate the conservative solution of going back to the past.