Alasdair MacIntyre ended his 1981 masterwork After Virtue with the following, now somewhat infamous, conclusion:
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict. (MacIntyre 2007, p. 263)
After Virtue is a rich, complex and controversial work. The philosopher John Dunn remarked of MacIntyre in a contemporary review: ‘Only a moral philosopher singularly unconcerned at the risk of making a fool of himself could have written After Virtue ’. This was qualified through Dunn’s assertion that MacIntyre is:
… the most stirring and the most imaginatively challenging writer on moral and political issues in the English language. After Virtue shows … the rewards of a lifetime of intellectual courage. (Dunn 1981)
The virtue of intellectual courage is one, I would agree, that is central to any reasonable interpretation of MacIntyre’s intellectual history. MacIntyre has always been one to ask the difficult questions and to be prepared to look elsewhere if he does not like the answers he gets. Yet this intellectual courage is not always interpreted in quite such a positive manner. MacIntyre is often regarded, not without a little hostility, as an intellectual chameleon, or worse. Ernest Gellner once said ‘what distinguishes Professor MacIntyre is not the number of beliefs he has doubted, but the number of beliefs he has embraced’ (Gellner in Horton and Mendus 1994, p. 1). With undeniable venom he has been targeted for his ‘virulent philistinism’, of having ‘occupied nearly every conceivable political and intellectual position’ without ever having ‘really understood any of them’ (Blackburn 1970, p. 11). One could point to any number of other disparaging remarks from figures such as Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson, and many others besides. It is not difficult to work out that much of the hostility to MacIntyre has come from those on the left. Why is this so? I would suggest there are at least three reasons for this.
Firstly, MacIntyre made some admittedly dubious publishing decisions during the early part of his career, deciding to contribute to journals that were allegedly sponsored by organizations such as the C.I.A. (Blackledge and Davidson 2008b). Secondly, and perhaps rather unfairly, MacIntyre gained a reputation for specializing in ‘hatchet-jobs’ against various respected figures of the left. Certainly, if one reads 1970’s Marcuse there is an undeniably forceful tone to the critique, with the titular subject described as having ‘a taste for pretentious nostrums described in inflated language’ (MacIntyre 1970, p. 86). Yet elsewhere MacIntyre has engaged positively with Marcuse which his critics tend to forget or choose to ignore. Similarly, while MacIntyre has been critical of figures such as Dunayevskaya, Wright Mills, Deutscher, Gellner himself, to name a few, he has always also been complimentary too and relatively fair and consistent in his assessments. What has probably caused the most ire from the left against MacIntyre, is the fact that he came to completely reject Marxism as a political practice after being, for a time in the 1950s and 1960s, one of its most eloquent and significant exponents. MacIntyre moved, within a decade, from being deeply involved in both the new left and revolutionary Marxist organizations, to a complete withdrawal from active politics in Britain and relocation to various professorial posts in America. The publication of AV, a decade after his move to the States thus failed, for the most part, to interest any of his former comrades on the left. This was not only because of MacIntyre’s rejection of Marxism in practice but also because there was almost nothing of Marxism contained within AV. Indeed, it is unsurprising, on a superficial reading of AV, that few were aware of the body of work within Marxism that MacIntyre had left behind. Those who did engage with AV therefore tended to be unaware of his Marxist past, saw it as irrelevant, or were most likely put off by the seemingly pessimistic political conclusions that AV ended with.
Yet AV is certainly not the work of a political ultra-pessimist, although it is not difficult to see why it has been made out to be so, nor why it would not sit very easily with those on the Marxist left. One Marxist critic, who nevertheless retained much admiration for MacIntyre, commented on MacIntyre’s political trajectory since leaving Marxism:
It all reads to me like a call for hippie communes without hippies. If MacIntyre means by “morality” what he used to mean by it, such communities cannot be a moral response to what the system is doing to humanity in the twenty-first century. (Harman 2009)
Another, this time from outside the Marxist tradition, saw the exclusionary implications of MacIntyre’s politics sounding like a call that ‘those of us who are clever and prosperous’ should ‘foregather with groups of like-minded friends to cultivate our own gardens, while the weeds grow and the litter collects in the public places’ (Schneewind 1982, pp. 662–663).Yet the conclusion that MacIntyre builds to, already present in AV but fleshed out more since and made clear in the third edition, is that we need not a retreat from, but a new kind of engagement with, the social order (MacIntyre 2007, p.xvi). This new kind of engagement is nevertheless on a qualitatively different scale from that envisaged by Marxism. The call for constructions of local communities that might foster the virtuous life is hardly in the traditional Marxist revolutionary spirit—gone is the belief in a full-scale, revolutionary transformation of society. Indeed, the contrast between the Marxist MacIntyre and the contemporary MacIntyre is a stark one. MacIntyre’s early Marxist essays are stamped with an unmistakable political optimism, despite his relationship with Marxism never being an uncritical one. Notes from the Moral Wilderness and numerous contemporary essays have this quality to them. Yet, within a few years, a growing pessimism was becoming much more evident in MacIntyre’s work. So while still retaining much from Marxism, MacIntyre was eventually to argue in 1991 that ‘Marxism is not just an inadequate, but a largely inept, instrument for social analysis’ (MacIntyre 1991a, p. 258). This suggests, significantly, that MacIntyre’s critique goes well beyond its perceived political inadequacies. This is indeed the case. MacIntyre’s rejection of Marxism encompasses both its political and philosophical failings, as intertwined as they are.
MacIntyre, in both his Marxist past and Thomistic-Aristotelian present, has arguably been at his strongest in his ‘negative’, critical approach to ethics and politics. That is to say, from the 1950s until the present day, MacIntyre has succeeded in brilliantly deconstructing, firstly, the moral perspectives of the liberal critic of Stalinism and his flipside the Stalinist, then, in generalizing this perspective, the metatheories of the enlightenment and modernity itself. Anyone that reads A Short History of Ethics or AV will surely recognize this often brilliantly incisive and insightful aspect of his work. What is arguably more problematic in MacIntyre is the potential solutions that he has historically posited to these moral dilemmas and the problem of ethics more generally. This is not necessarily a weakness (MacIntyre’s reply—at least in his mature thought—would be along the lines of there are no solutions), yet it does entail that there is something of a lacuna in his work, either a vagueness or a sense of pessimism—the former which perhaps best characterized his early, Marxist approach to ethics and the latter his contemporary position as a post-Marxist. It is beyond the scope of this book to assess MacIntyre’s post-Marxism, although I do point to some of the contemporary debates and contestations in the closing chapter. My aim is rather more limited in that I seek to provide some level of understanding of how MacIntyre began and developed his first ethical project from within the resources of Marxism and on what grounds he eventually came to abandon it. If one goes straight from the optimism of an early essay such as NFTMW, to the seemingly gloomy predictions of AV, one would be forgiven, at first glance, for wondering if they were written by the same person.
It would be easy therefore to present MacIntyre as an intellectual chameleon, incessantly changing his mind and politics, hopping from one philosophical and political framework to another. He is clearly not a Marxist anymore. He has moved from Marx, to Aristotle , to an Aristotelian-Thomism, through Anglicanism, to Atheism and then to Catholicism. Yet if we return to the virtue of intellectual courage, I would suggest that what defines MacIntyre as a rare kind of philosopher is his unswerving willingness to put not only the views of others but, more importantly, his own views into question. Most inhabit more or less the same tradition throughout their lives, yet MacIntyre has always been prepared to tear up the script if he comes to believe it is not right. MacIntyre himself suggests he has traversed through three intellectual periods in his life. Firstly, the period prior to 1971 (nearly twenty years of work), MacIntyre says, is an essentially fragmented and messy period of enquiry in his intellectual history. Secondly, from 1971 to 1977 he describes as a period of ‘sometimes painfully self-critical reflection’ and, thirdly, from 1977, the contemporary project that he continues to develop (MacIntyre 1991b, p. 268). This does not mean that these three periods are separate, or indeed separable, as there are key themes and views that have remained quite central throughout the entirety of MacIntyre’s career. It is one aim of this book to try to draw some of these key themes and commitments that have remained central to MacIntyre together.
This means that an analysis of one such aspect of MacIntyre’s thought, in this case Marxism, must necessarily encompass each of these periods to a certain degree. The first three chapters of this book explore MacIntyre’s engagement with Marxism during the period when he was closest to Marxism. Indeed, from his early engagements with both Marxism and Christianity, MacIntyre would become one of the leading figures, I would argue, both in the New Left and in the revolutionary Marxist parties that he inhabited during this time. Through examining MacIntyre’s own work, the debates with and influence of other Marxists, and the wider political context, I aim to provide a reasonably clear picture of MacIntyre’s Marxism during this period. These chapters also provide an understanding of not only what MacIntyre took from Marx , but what he came to see as being increasingly problematic. MacIntyre’s relationship with Marx and Marxism was never uncritical, as anyone familiar with his work would expect, and the foundations of his rejection of Marxism were already, to an extent, developing in his Marxist period.
It would be inaccurate to paint a picture of MacIntyre simply as an intellectual chameleon, albeit one with the courage to follow through on his changing political convictions. As others have noted, there are key areas in which MacIntyre has displayed significant continuity in his thought. The understanding of the relationship of philosophy to practice and the inadequacies of most moral philosophy, the critique of modern liberal capitalism and the necessity for developing an ethical revolutionary alternative form of social practice, all remain relatively consistent throughout MacIntyre’s intellectual genesis, as I shall aim to highlight. Indeed, it could be argued that, certainly ethically and politically, MacIntyre’s commitments have, at least in some ways, not changed. What has certainly changed is the framework, the political and philosophical vehicle through which MacIntyre’s ethical and political vision might best be delivered. So while the politics that the contemporary MacIntyre advocates is radically different in terms of scope and possibility from Marxism, what have not changed are the values that underpin them. A central aim here will be to identify and discuss those influences and commitments that remain of great significance to MacIntyre developing, as they often did, from within the resources of Marxism.
Yet reject Marxism MacIntyre did, at least as a viable ethical, political practice. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there are significant works that signal the reasons that would eventually see MacIntyre discard Marxism, however incompletely. It is unfortunate that the contemporary MacIntyre has not brought together a comprehensive work that deals with this rejection (although perhaps Marxism and Christianity comes closest to this). Nevertheless, the comprehensive rejection is there, if not always readily apparent. The brief critique of Marxism that MacIntyre gives in AV remains the best summary of MacIntyre’s critique of Marxism (MacIntyre 2007, pp. 261–262). Chapter 5 aims to develop and expand this five-point critique in order to give a clearer picture of why MacIntyre sees Marxism as inadequate to the modern world. This is quite a wide-ranging critique that is at once political and philosophical. Broadly, MacIntyre’s argument is that Marxism fails to break from the inadequate moral frameworks of liberal modernity, both in theory and practice therefore, like liberal modernity itself, is unable to be morally coherent or politically relevant. Marxism, despite its best efforts sugge...