I went deep on Alasdair MacIntyre this week — episodes 244–247 of Philosophize This. I wasn’t expecting it to land where it did.
MacIntyre is known for After Virtue, his argument that modern moral philosophy is a shipwreck — scattered pieces of a framework that has lost the ship it came from. But what caught me this time was his critique of what he calls the encyclopedic tradition. And the moment I heard it, I understood something about startups I’d been circling for two years.
The Encyclopedist’s Illusion
The encyclopedic tradition — the dominant mode of modern intellectual culture since the Enlightenment — presents itself as neutral ground. No priors, no tradition, no hidden commitments. Just: lay all the options out, define your terms, reason from first principles, and let the evidence speak.
MacIntyre’s move is simple and devastating: that’s itself a tradition. A very young one, built on Aristotelian and Platonic foundations it refuses to acknowledge. Kant’s “pure reason” is doing work that wouldn’t make sense without Aristotle’s background assumptions about rationality and ends. Hume’s empiricism inherits a teleological vocabulary it’s in the middle of rejecting. The encyclopedists borrowed the tools and denied the source.
More than that: the encyclopedic tradition is specifically defined by what it excludes. It denies having a teleological project — a shared account of what things are for — and so it systematically rules out teleological questions as illegitimate. Not answered. Not refuted. Just out of scope.
The Manager in the Room
MacIntyre gives an example that’s been living in my head since I first encountered it. Imagine a meeting. Someone raises their hand and asks: “Wait — should we even be doing this? What are we actually trying to accomplish here?”
The manager responds: “Great question. Let’s get a beer after work and talk through it.”
Not “here’s the answer.” Not “we hashed this out at the founding and here’s what we decided.” Just — that’s not a question we can raise in this room. The teleological question has been classified as out of scope. Not because it’s been answered, but because the frame we’re operating in has no mechanism for answering it. The encyclopedic culture’s entire structure depends on never asking it directly.
Every organization I’ve worked in has had this manager. And I’ve been that manager. The question doesn’t get raised — not because the answer is obvious, but because raising it would reveal that nobody actually knows.
The Startup Contradiction
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Silicon Valley startups are not encyclopedic cultures. They are teleological enterprises. Every pitch deck, every all-hands, every “we’re on a mission to change the world” — these are teleological claims. The founder has a vision of a future state that is better than the present, and the whole organization exists to bring it into being.
But the language they use to operate is encyclopedic. “Data-driven decision making.” “Radical transparency.” “We’ll lay all the options out and choose the best one.” “No politics, just results.”
This is the structural contradiction: you cannot have an encyclopedic culture and a teleological founder. The encyclopedia says: here are the options, reason to the best answer. The founder’s vision says: the answer is already determined; your job is execution and belief.
Startups hire “evangelists.” Think about that word choice. An evangelist is someone who believes in a telos — a good news about what is real and what matters — and carries it forward. That’s not a neutral, encyclopedic role. That’s a confessional one.
And then the same company tells those evangelists to make rational, evidence-based decisions — as if the teleological question has been settled and we’re now purely in the encyclopedic mode of optimizing toward it.
It hasn’t been settled. It’s been hidden.
When an employee genuinely asks “should we be building this?” — when they raise the teleological question in good faith — they discover that the encyclopedic frame is a performance. The answer was determined before they got there. The “rational culture” was a recruiting story.
Genuine belief requires a shared teleological project. When the project is actually one person’s vision — not a covenant, not a shared account of what’s real — the “evangelism” is compliance dressed as conviction. And people can feel the difference, even when they can’t name it.
What Business Topologies Is Diagnosing
This is the thing I’ve been trying to name for two years.
The Business Topologies thesis isn’t primarily about organizational structure. It’s about ontological alignment. The claim is: hierarchy is out of sync with how reality actually works — not just morally, not just inefficiently, but structurally wrong about the nature of things.
The encyclopedic startup is a particularly acute version of this. It’s an organization that is lying about its own operating system. The lie isn’t just strategic — it’s generative of dysfunction. You can’t build a coherent organization on a contradiction. The misalignment shows up as culture problems, retention problems, execution drift, and the creeping sense that something is off that nobody can quite articulate.
Mises is interesting here because he does something similar at the theoretical level: praxeology deliberately brackets the content of ends. It’s “value-neutral” — it studies how humans act toward their goals without adjudicating what those goals should be. But Mises is operating with a hidden teleological assumption he never makes fully explicit: individual liberty, the market as discovery process, the spontaneous order as good. He’s inside the encyclopedic tradition while the machinery of his argument depends on a teleological commitment he hasn’t surfaced.
I’m doing something different. I’m starting with a teleological project and I’m making it explicit: there is a coherent account of reality, and organizations that violate it will fail in characteristic ways. Business Topologies is an attempt to describe those patterns.
Open Questions
A few threads I want to pull on:
MacIntyre’s actual landing point. The Philosophize This episodes raise the shipwreck but I don’t think they fully convey where MacIntyre ends up. He concludes that Thomistic Aristotelianism is the most defensible tradition — meaning he’s for a positive teleological claim, not just against the encyclopedic one. I want to read God, Philosophy, Universities and the later work.
Mises’ hidden telos. What specifically is Mises optimizing for, beneath the praxeological neutrality? Individual liberty? The market as epistemic discovery? There’s something there worth surfacing explicitly.
The founder-covenant question. What would it look like for a startup to have a genuinely shared teleological project rather than a founder’s vision that everyone is asked to ratify? I don’t think the answer is “no leader” — I think the answer is something closer to what Faur means by the horizontal society. But I haven’t worked that out yet.
That last one is the practical question Business Topologies is ultimately trying to answer.