The eclipse of “virtue” in moral discourse announced by Alasdair MacIntyre thirty-five years ago may have been premature. There has been a notable revival of interest in “virtue” among philosophers and other intellectuals in recent years. Just when the postmodern soul was faced with the stark choice of “Nietzsche or Aristotle” (with Nietzsche winning in a landslide), a number of scholars have illustrated that “virtue” is made of sterner stuff. As long as “character” remains distinct from “personality” (or mere personhood), “virtue” will remain a perennial theme of moral reflection. Like it or not, we are simply “stuck with virtue,” the name given the lecture series from which The Science of Modern Virtue originated.

The volume’s subtitle is somewhat misleading. While Descartes, Darwin, and Locke occupy center stage, a number of other thinkers make guest appearances, with notable performances by Spinoza, Tocqueville, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Aquinas. (Leo Strauss assumes the role of Hamlet’s ghost throughout.) As most of the contributors are philosophers or political theorists this is hardly surprising, but the thirteen chapters are not as integrated as the book’s title suggests. With the exception of the final chapter, a scathing critique of Larry Arnhart’s daring synthesis of Darwin and Aristotle, each author goes his or her own way, often with interesting, if mixed results.

Most of the thirteen contributors occupy positions at religious-affiliated institutions or departments, and a notable current of Christianity runs beneath the surface of many of the essays. On occasion this current rises to the top. After a bracing (and thoroughly naturalist) account of the prospects of applying neuroscience to manipulate feelings and behavior, Jeffery Bishop (Ph.D. and M.D.) concludes with an invocation of the Mass and an invitation (via St. John the Divine) to “Come and see” (p. 179). In light of the Clockwork Orange-like world Dr. Bishop adumbrates, the mysteries of the Eucharist look benign aside the specter of unfettered technology. The dangers of an amoral science and deracinated scientists—both traceable to Descartes—are also sounded by Tobin Craig. The ability of institutional, profit-driven science to “deliver the goods” to governments and consumers has mystified popular understanding and trumped the civic superintendence of applied science. “Insert coin and let the good times roll” (p. 206).

In his brief commentary on Bishop’s essay, Ralph Hancock underscores the “fundamental paradox of modernity” from Bacon to Heidegger: the sacrifice of virtue and truth to will and resolution (p. 185). Descartes, the seminal modernist, plays the villain throughout much of the volume, not for attacking virtue and faith but for replacing them with mastery of nature and self-assurance in an essentially godless world. “In this way” (as Thomas Hibbs writes), “Descartes’ overcoming of Socrates, his new science of virtue, is simultaneously a strategy for bypassing the debate between Athens and Jerusalem” (p. 41). The “sovereign good” survives in Descartes, but it is neither the contemplative equanimity of Aristotle nor the beatific vision of Aquinas.

Like Hibbs, Daniel Maher endorses the “ironic” reading of Descartes’ treatment of religion and theology, that is, as a tacit but profound rejection of the “tradition of Christian faith” (p. 47). The idea that Descartes’ “proof” of God was disingenuous and deployed to provide cover is as old as the proof itself. No amount of irony or affirmation could disguise the radical nature of Descartes’ rationalist wrecking ball. He may have dodged the Catholic Church in France, but he ran afoul of the Protestant authorities in Holland—an even greater irony. Yet if Descartes broke thoroughly with the Scholastic-Christian tradition, a visible if tenuous link remained with the Socratic ideal of the philosophic life. While “the connection between natural science and virtue remains somewhat elusive” in Descartes, Maher finds a glimmer of “the fulfillment of the classical erôs” in the philosopher’s quest “to know the first principles of nature” (pp. 53, 52). Descartes could have his cake and eat it too—enjoy tranquility of mind with a resolute confidence in the ultimate triumph of his teaching.

Marc Guerra is less compromising in his treatment of Descartes, whose equation of scientific truth with wisdom “reverses the claims of both Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology” (p. 146). (Of course, Descartes would accept this as high praise.) For Guerra, the snake in the garden was the universal appeal of Descartes’ project—cognizable by all and beneficial to all. Paradoxically, this project cannot rationally account for morality or insure the beneficent use of science. According to Guerra, Locke was no more successful in grounding morality in “any objective, rationally knowable reality” (p. 157).

If Cartesian doubt exploded the verities of Classical-Christian thought, Spinoza’s pantheism, according to Samuel Goldman, threatened to obliterate human autonomy and with it the foundations of democracy. Curiously, the argument is introduced by way of Tocqueville, who characterizes Americans as unconscious “Cartesians,” skeptical, but accepting of religion. Such thinking supplied a highly individualist ethic consistent with a participatory, democratic society. On the other hand, Tocqueville describes the French as “pantheists,” whose skepticism extends to all things, rendering them a revolutionary people. Yet the determinism implicit in pantheism and its collapse of causality beckon a fatalism inconsistent with individual responsibility and democratic politics. Spinoza, an advocate of democracy, failed to anticipate the spread of pantheism beyond an innocuous intellectual few. Moreover, by directly rejecting all religious authority Spinoza went beyond Descartes, abandoning “the nexus of transcendent theism and human individuality that Tocqueville would identify as crucial to political freedom” (p. 66).

James Stoner draws on four of Locke’s best known texts to illustrate how “the place of virtue is taken by the concept of freedom” in modern thought (p. 84). For Locke, “tolerance” and “self-interest” take the place of “virtue” in ethics and politics while a deistic Creator replaces the God of revelation in religion. Yet Stoner's assertion that the American Founders did not believe mere Lockean virtue could “sustain a liberal republic” is rather puzzling (p. 90). The Founders were Lockean almost to a man and roundly rejected antique virtue (strict forms of arête and virtù) as inappropriate in a modern, commercial republic. Besides, on Stoner’s own admission we’re “stuck with Locke.”

That Locke was a nominalist in ethics is widely accepted, but that he failed to identify human beings as a distinct and inclusive species will strike many as remarkable. This, however, is the conclusion Sara Henary draws from her analysis of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The implications for Locke’s doctrine of natural equality found in the Second Treatise are shrewdly considered. In fine, Locke is inconsistent—his religious arguments for equality are “somewhat disingenuous” (p. 120) and “his commitment to equality is political” not essential (p. 94).

Just as Arnhart attempts to synthesize Aristotle and Darwin in support of natural virtue, Lauren Hall seeks to invoke Darwin in defense of “a Lockean limited government that protects individual rights” (p. 130). Both arguments are far too lengthy and detailed to attempt even a summary here, but they merit close attention. Peter Lawler’s lead essay is something of an anomaly—a farrago of synoptic social analysis, philosophic satire, and historical forecasting that is at once eccentric, insightful, and mildly amusing. That “virtue” itself is never defined or discussed in this volume is not the least of its ironies.

On the whole, the essays in The Modern Science of Virtue are intellectually stimulating but perhaps too eclectic, reductionist, and traditionalist to appeal to the mainstream of political science. Enlisting old philosophers and scientists in the current culture wars is an intellectual temptation best resisted. On the other hand, an uncritical nostalgia for the Classical-Christian tradition is unlikely to rescue “virtue” from modern scientism. This aside, the issues raised by the contributors to this volume are by no means trivial and will continue to receive the thoughtful consideration of scholars from across disciplines.