Professions and Politics in Crisis

This book contends that the crises of well-being, distress, and dysfunction currently afflicting the legal profession, other professions, and our politics can best be addressed by encouraging people to pursue a flourishing life of meaning and purpose focused on achieving common goods in communities of excellence and virtue, especially in response to a calling. It draws centrally upon the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, arguably the most famous living moral philosopher and notorious for his critique of liberal democracy, its capitalist, large-scale market economy, and hyper-individualism in late Modernity.

Constructing a fishing village called Piscopolis as a central image and theoretical ideal, the book integrates relevant aspects of MacIntyre's Thomistic Aristotelianism into a clear, comprehensible, and original synthesis that also significantly expands and supplements MacIntyre's theoretical approach, including insights drawn from Heideggerian phenomenology. It examines the legal polis, the "fishing village of the law" called Juropolis, to illustrate how the Piscopolis ideal challenges members of the professions and suggests how the ideal might be deployed more broadly to organically transform the liberal democratic state into a "republic of virtue."

With the Covid-19 pandemic starkly revealing the need for such transformation, the book will interest both the MacIntyrean expert and novice alike and appeal broadly to moral and political philosophers, ethicists, theologians, legal professionals, professional development educators, and scholarly lay readers.

Professor Jones, while primarily addressing the professions (with an emphasis on the legal ones) and politics, has written the book of moral philosophy most needed in these times. . . . He focuses primarily on Alasdair MacIntyre's Thomistic Aristotelianism, but readers need to know nothing about Aquinas or, for that matter, Aristotle, to follow his carefully drawn arguments about the practices that constitute our lives, the goods (and therefore the selves) we seek within those practices, and the implication of our doing so for what we call the political, but really is our ways of being with others in the world. . . . Professor Jones' own carefully tempered optimism about this shook me out of my own pessimism and I hope it does the same for you.

This is brilliant work not only deserving of a large audience but such an audience is something we should hope for as well. At times Jones is almost plodding in his English analytical carefulness, but as you proceed through these sections as a reader you will find yourself thankful that he was for they give you such confidence in all that follows so that, at the end, you join him in his essential message of hope. Thank you, Professor Jones, for writing this extraordinary book."

— Jack L. Sammons, Professor Emeritus, Mercer University School of Law