Abstract

The verb in the title of James B. White's When Words Lose Their Meaning directs attention to one direction of change, decay. White takes for his emblem the passage from Thucydides from which derives his title, as defining a topic and suggesting a view of life that directs attention to the relation between language, on the one hand, and both the individual self and collective life on the (1961-62). That direction of change that is the focus of attention resembles the plot Alasdair MacIntyre recounts in After Virtue and elsewhere, in which virtues become vices, arts become skills, goods become commodities, and practices and norms lose their intelligibility.1 Neither White nor MacIntyre offers a narrative of the opposite direction of change, in which words and deeds gain, or regain, meaning. Because of this emphasis on decline, each is a conservative, although not necessarily politically conservative, since in each while the processes of corruption are detailed innovative and fructifying forces by contrast appear beyond explanation as heroic. The absence of stories in which meaning and community increase does not mean that each thinks that the world has moved away from a golden age and is going to the dogs, although I see each often misread in that way. It simply means that there is an intelligible plot to decline, but not to advances. Advances happen, but there is no pattern to them. It takes, in White's accounts, someone of the status of Thucydides or James Madison, beyond rational planning, to make words gain meaning, and Aquinas occupies a similar place in MacIntyre's story. The exemplary performances of great literary texts, including great legal literary texts, constitute White's account of how words gain their meaning. There is no overall narrative pattern or story in which these exempla live, while the story of decline has a plot, contains explanatory forces, and all the other rhetorical devices that make it appear more intelligible than the story of how words gain their meaning. We can learn how words gain meaning from exempla, although not necessarily learn to imitate them, and we can learn about decline and fall through generalizations and narratives. The patterns of decline make it possible to fight against those forces, while there are no programs for creativity. Exemplary and causal history are both reasonable ways of talking about and learning from the past, but their co-