Paul Blackledge
Abstract
In this paper I examine the pre-history of Alasdair MacIntyre’s contemporary moral philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s MacIntyre was a leading member of the British New Left, from whence he gravitated towards a form of heterodox Trotskyism. During this period he began to formulate a Marxist ethics which both compares with and informs the thesis of his magnum opus After Virtue. As the conclusion of After Virtue is premised upon a dismissal of Marxism, it is of some interest to explore the exact route through which MacIntyre came to replace his earlier with his later framework. In this essay, after reconstructing MacIntyre’s Marxist ethics, I trace the trajectory through which he came to reject Marxism, and show that while MacIntyre’s mature critique of Marxism first took shape in the 1960s, his political pessimism was built upon two assumptions – that Marx’s economic theory was outdated, and that a defensible theory of human nature did not exist – which he has recently questioned. I conclude that MacIntyre’s rethinking of these assumptions has opened a space for a renewed dialogue between himself and Marxists.
Introduction
While Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the foremost exponent of what Kelvin Knight has labelled ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’,[2] there was another MacIntyre, only dimly perceptible in the footnotes of his more recent books, whose contribution to social and ethical theory bears comparison with that of the author of After Virtue and other subsequent works. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, MacIntyre made a fundamental contribution to Marxist ethical theory which repays reading today. Nevertheless, despite its power, MacIntyre’s period as a Marxist has been unduly neglected by students of his work.[3] This is unfortunate, for an analysis of the totality of MacIntyre’s Marxist essays of the time is not only interesting in and of itself, it can also illuminate the process through which his thought began to evolve towards his more recent conclusions.
MacIntyre famously concluded After Virtue with the suggestion that ‘we are waiting not for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St.Benedict’, and premised this suggestion on a prior dismissal of the adequacy to the modern world of Marxist politics. He suggested that, first, Trotsky’s late political optimism was based upon subsequently falsified predictions for the future of the Soviet Union; while, second, Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism ‘entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led to darkness.’ Consequently, MacIntyre argued, ‘a Marxist who took Trotsky’s last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist.’[4] A decade later, MacIntyre outlined what was if anything an even more devastating critique of Marxism. Marx failed to recognise, he argued, ‘that while proletarianisation makes it necessary for workers to resist, it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.’[5]
As we shall see, MacIntyre first elaborated versions of these arguments in the 1960s when he was still a member of the revolutionary left. What set MacIntyre aside from his comrades in this period was not his criticism of Trotsky or his analysis of the fragmentation of working class struggles. Rather, MacIntyre differentiated himself from more orthodox members of the far-left through his disputation of Marx’s theory of economic crisis, and his rejection of any theory of human nature. Interestingly, while these underlying arguments informed the growing political pessimism that was to become most apparent in After Virtue, in his more recent work MacIntyre has gone some way to reversing these arguments; suggesting that the gap between his contemporary thought and his earlier Marxism is not as wide as it once was.
Marxism and Morality
Marx, famously, had an ambivalent relationship to ethical theory. On the one hand, in some of his more mechanical formulations, his ‘science’ of history appeared to explain behaviour rather than act as a guide to it. Indeed, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, he explicitly dismissed certain moral criticisms of capitalism. He argued that the demand for the ‘fair distribution of the proceeds of labour’ ignored the truth of the bourgeois assertion ‘that the present-day distribution is “fair”’, so long as “fair” was understood in terms of ‘distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production’.[6] Commenting upon these arguments, Wood has claimed that Marx rejected the concept of justice because he understood it to be tied up with, and to sanction, particular historical modes of production.[7] It is a problem for Wood’s argument that Marx, palpably, did make a number of claims as to the injustice of capitalism, such that Peffer is able to argue, with some justification, that he held to a ‘deontological’ ethics.[8] Certainly, in his Notes on Indian History, Marx sounded ‘conventionally’ moralistic when he wrote of ‘the blood sucking English scoundrels’, who ‘shamelessly annexed’ part of the country, and ‘atrociously’ or ‘foully murdered’ many of its inhabitants.[9]
Lukes has attempted to make sense of this ‘paradox’ in Marx’s oeuvre by distinguishing between two types of moral claims which Marx unfortunately conflated: the morality of emancipation and the morality of justice or Recht. ‘The paradox in marxism’s attitude to morality is resolved once we see that it is the morality of Recht that it condemns as ideological and anachronistic, and the morality of emancipation that it adopts as its own’.[10] In opposition to Lukes, Geras has argued that this distinction between a morality of justice and one of self-realisation is ‘unfounded’, for individuals can only realise their true potential within a political context. Thus, following remarks made by Marx in volume III of Capital, Geras argues that if post-revolutionary societies are not to be understood in a utopian manner, then they must include some conception of distributive justice.[11] Geras insists that, rather than distinguish a morality of self-realisation from one of justice in Marx, it is better to distinguish two conceptions of justice, one implicit and one explicit, which can help explain that while ‘Marx did think that capitalism was unjust … he did not think he thought so’. Whereas Marx therefore dismissed justice in its narrow ‘legal positivist fashion’, he subscribed to a broader distributive justice based upon the principle that each should receive according to their needs.[12] Such a principle, Geras suggests, would not act merely as a benchmark against which capitalism is seen to be wanting, but would continue to operate in a socialist society as a distributive standard of ‘reasonable’ need in a system without absolute abundance.[13] While Geras’ account of a Marxist approach to justice is exemplary as far as it goes, beyond an implicit link to the development of the productive forces, he does not discuss the actual processes through which this abstract concept of justice can be made concrete.
MacIntyre’s Marxist Morality
By contrast with this formal solution to the paradox posed by Marx’s ambiguous relationship to morality, MacIntyre, in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to relate claims for justice to the proletariat’s developing struggle for freedom. MacIntyre’s first contribution to the Marxist literature on ethics was articulated in his book Marxism: An Interpretation, which, while it was written at the height of the Cold War and from a radical Christian perspective, succeeded in prefiguring many of the themes that were to emerge three years later with the birth of the New Left.[14] In particular, MacIntyre began to explode the shared Stalinist and Liberal myth of Marxism as a mechanical model of historical progress.
MacIntyre was drawn, as a Christian, towards Marxism because, as he saw it, Marx’s political theory converged with his vision of critical Christian ethics: ‘Marxism is of first-class theological significance as a secularism formed by the gospel which is committed to the problem of power and justice and therefore to themes of redemption and renewal which its history can but illuminate’.[15] Specifically, he perceived a parallel between the situation faced by Marx in the early 1840s, and that encountered by contemporary radical Christians. For just as Marx ‘was faced with a stark antithesis’ between both Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s visions of human freedom, and the reality of the world of work and suffering, so contemporary Christianity accepted a split between the sacred and the secular such that it had lost any critical perspective on the world. Indeed, he argued, bourgeois Christianity, because it had been reduced to a matter of personal taste to be practiced at the weekend, no longer concretely criticised social injustice and thus did not interfere with daily secular existence.[16] MacIntyre believed that radical Christians would do well to learn from Marx’s turn to politics as a means of overcoming the gap between reality and the vision of freedom in Hegel’s system. He thus concluded Marxism: An Interpretation with the suggestion that the key text that should be read by Christians, alongside St Mark’s Gospel, was Marx’s ‘National Economy and Philosophy’; for it was in this early essay that Marx was at his prophetic, moral best; before he succumbed to the allure of pseudo-scientific prediction that is evident in his work from The German Ideology onwards.[17]
Unfortunately, while MacIntyre was at this time both a practicing Christian and a member of the Communist Party, this interpretation of Marxism failed to provoke much interest in either Communist or Christian circles. It was the emergence of the New Left three years later that provided MacIntyre both with an audience for his ideas, and a practical source of inspiration from which he deepened these ideas. Therefore, while it is true to say, as does McMylor, that MacIntyre’s early work prefigured many of the themes that dominated New Left thinking, it is also important to remember that, without the New Left, MacIntyre’s project would have remained abstract and disconnected from practical politics.
The events of 1956 – Khrushchev’s secret speech, his invasion of Hungary and the Anglo‑French invasion of Egypt – together created a space for widespread criticism of the world order as a totality. In striking deep at the heart of the international system these actions created a space within which independent political forces could grow in Britain. In response to these events a ‘New Left’ emerged which sought to map a third way between Eastern Communism and Western Capitalism, and their left‑wing political allies: Stalinism and social democracy.[18] Nevertheless, the New Left, as Peter Sedgwick pointed out, was less a coherent movement than it was a milieu, within which many very diverse political perspectives were aired.[19] Interestingly, this spectrum of political positions found expression through a debate on the moral critique of Stalinism; and it was through his contribution to this debate that MacIntyre signalled both the trajectory of his future research, and his embrace of revolutionary Marxism.
Edward Thompson articulated the most sophisticated New Left critique of Stalinism in his essay ‘SocialistHumanism: An Epistle to the Philistines’. This essay was a brilliant and original contribution not just to the analysis of Stalinism specifically, but also to Marxist moral theory more generally. At its heart, however, Thompson’s essay embraced a fatal contradiction, which even his grand rhetorical flourishes were unable fully to conceal. He opened his essay with the claim that one quarter of the earth’s surface was controlled by a new society, which, despite its many abhorrent features, represented a qualitative break with capitalism: ‘The instruments of production in the Soviet Union are socialised. The bureaucracy is not a class, but is parasitic upon that society. Despite its parasitism, the wave of human energy unleashed by the first socialist revolution has multiplied the wealth of society, and vastly enlarged the cultural horizons of the people’.[20] However, in contrast to this characterisation of the Soviet system as being at once socialist while yet morally unpalatable, elsewhere, he insisted that ‘the “end” of Communism is not a “political” end, but a human end’.[21] This formulation suggested a tremendous gap between the human ends of the Soviet experiment and the inhuman means through which these ends were, at least partially, being realised. So while Thompson implied that a plurality of means could be utilised to achieve the end of communism, he was aware that these means were not morally equivalent. Concretely, in the Soviet case, he argued that the flaws of the Stalinist system could best be understood as a consequence of the inadequate model of Marxism that had guided the Bolsheviks. They, or so he claimed, had embraced a mechanical interpretation of Marx’s base/superstructure metaphor such that agency, in the form of the conscious activity of the masses, was increasingly disregarded, only to find expression through the monolithic party which became the guardian of true socialist consciousness. Following this, the ‘immorality’ of replacing the actions of real individual with those of cardboard abstractions became ‘embodied in institutional form in the rigid forms of “democratic centralism”’.[22] Consequently, Thompson’s moral critique of Stalinism involved a call both for a more flexible interpretation of Marx’s theory of history, and a rejection of the Leninist form of political organisation.
For all its undoubted power, Thompson’s thesis was susceptible to two distinct, but related, criticisms. First, could a mechanical version of Marxism as embodied in a democratic centralist organisation bear the weight of his explanation of the rise of Stalinism? Second, what, if any, were the relations between socialism and Communism in his model, and if the latter was a human ‘end’, then what could be said of the abhorrent means through which the Stalinists had at least gone some way to achieving the this end? Thompson’s implicit answers to these questions suggested that he had not broken with as much of the common sense of his age as he imagined. Indeed, paralleling traditional consequentialist ethics, which included, for the little they were worth, the ethical justifications of their actions deployed by the Stalinists, Thompson appeared to agree that that good ends could come from bad means. Moreover, in common with both the dominant liberal and Stalinist histories of the Soviet system, Thompson agreed that Leninism entailed Stalinism. In tacitly accepting both of these positions, Thompson opened his moral critique of Stalinism to an immanent critique from those who saw a contradiction between his humanist claim that socialism represented the realisation of historically (self) created human potentialities,[23] and any suggestion that the Stalinist system might represent, in however distorted form, a progressive break with capitalism. This is more or less the form of the critique that was formulated by Harry Hanson in the next issue of The New Reasoner.
Hanson argued that ‘Communism, in the modern world, is not the creed of the proletariat. First and foremost, it is a technique, operated by a revolutionary elite, for pushing forward the economic development of an underdeveloped country at the fastest possible rate … [which] is a very painful process’.[24] Furthermore, he insisted that, for all Thompson’s rhetoric, and his indisputable honesty, his was an untenable critique of Stalinism, as it shared with the Stalinists, and Marxism more generally, a consequentialist moral framework which, despite fine talk of the interdependence of means and ends, tended to subordinate the former to the latter, thus offering an unsatisfactory basis from which to criticise Stalinist immorality. In place of such a moral framework, Hanson suggested that the left should look to Kant as a guide to action.[25] However, in so doing he dehistoricised morality in a way that was obviously alien to Marx’s conception of history. This argument thus demanded some reply for the Marxists within the New Left, and it was MacIntyre who came to the defence of a sophisticated version of socialist humanism, which, while building on Thompson’s insights, began to outline a project capable of offering a powerful alternative to both Hanson’s Kantianism and to Stalinist consequentialism. Moreover, in developing this perspective, MacIntyre also began to outline one of the most sophisticated defences of revolutionary politics of his day.
MacIntyre’s critique of Hanson’s reply to Thompson’s moral critique of Stalinism, ‘Notes From the Moral Wilderness’, while written as a defence of Thompson’s general perspective, was simultaneously an implicit critique of the weaknesses of Thompson’s own exposition of the doctrine of socialist humanism. MacIntyre opened this essay with a classically Marxist critique of the implied Kantianism of Hanson’s morality: ‘The ex-Communist turned moral critic of Communism is often a figure of genuine pathos … They repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle; but the fragility of their appeal to moral principles lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of that appeal’.[26] MacIntyre was just as critical of those apologists for Stalinism, for whom socialism’s moral core was lost amidst a mechanical theory of historical progress. As to their theory of history, while MacIntyre acknowledged that it was understood by both Stalin and Popper as being authentically Marxist, he could not accept that it could truthfully be read into either Marx’s younger or, changing his position since 1953, his more mature writings. Rather, he suggested, Engels had played a negative role in the history of Marxism, when, through his comparison of Marx with Darwin, he had helped foster a mechanical interpretation of historical materialism which reduced human history to a special case of natural history.[27] In place of the orthodox interpretation of historical materialism, MacIntyre insisted that if the moral core of Marxist political theory was to be retrieved and reconstructed from the fragments that Marx had written on the subject then it must be carried out alongside a similar reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history.
MacIntyre suggested that it was the Stalinists, who, through the medium of a teleological vision of historical progress, identified ‘what is morally right with what is actually going to be the outcome of historical development’, such that the ‘“ought” of principle is swallowed up in the “is” of history’.[28] It was thus not enough to add something like Kant’s ethics to this existing Stalinist theory of historical development if one wished to reassert moral principle into Marxism, for this theory of history negated moral choice. However, neither was it right to reject, as immoral, any historical event from some supposed higher standpoint, as ‘there is no set of common, public standards to which [one] can appeal’. Indeed, any such manoeuvre would tend to gravitate to an existing tradition of morality which, because these had generally evolved to serve some particular dominant class interests, would ‘play into the hands of the defenders of the status quo’.[29] Therefore, MacIntyre suggested, apologists for both the East and the West in the Cold War based their arguments upon inadequate theoretical frameworks. If this was true, what would be the structure of an alternative ‘third moral position’? MacIntyre’s answer was that such a position could only be built by ‘replacing a misconceived but prevalent view of what Marxism is by a more correct view’.[30]
The Stalinist insistence that history’s general course was predictable rested, or so MacIntyre insisted, on a misconception of the role of the base/superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. What Marx suggested when he deployed this metaphor was neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship. Rather, he utilised Hegelian concepts to denote the process through which the economic base of a society provides ‘a framework within which superstructures arise, a set off relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows’. Indeed, MacIntyre wrote that in ‘creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one’. Thus the Stalinist model of historical progress, within which political developments were understood to follow automatically from economic causes, could not be further from Marx’s model; for in Marx’s view ‘the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure’.[31] Moreover, as the essence of the human condition is historically conditioned freedom, while general predictions can reasonably be made as to the tendency of people to revolt against capital and other oppressive systems; Marxists would be mistaken to mechanically predict either revolts or successful revolutions as the automatic consequence of any particular economic process. Hence, where both Stalin’s teleology of historical progress and Kant’s ahistorical categorical imperative were found to be wanting, MacIntyre suggested that we look for a ‘theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress automatic’.[32] In his search for a basis from which to reconstruct a Marxist ethics, MacIntyre insisted, contrary to ‘the liberal belief in the autonomy of morality’, that it was the purposive character of human action that could both distinguish human history from natural history, and which could provide a historical and materialist basis for moral judgements.[33]
MacIntyre suggested that Marxists should follow Aristotle specifically, and the Greeks more generally, in making a link between ethics and human desires: ‘we make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like’.[34] He thus proposed to relate morality to desire in a way that was radically at odds with Kant; for where, in Kant, ‘the “ought” of morality is utterly divorced from the “is” of desire’, MacIntyre insisted that to divorce ethics from activities which aim to satisfy needs and desires in this way ‘is to make it unintelligible as a form of human action’. While MacIntyre therefore sought to relate morality to human desires and needs, his reading of Freud had taught him that desires could be ‘redirected’ by a ‘variety of inhibitions’.[35] Moreover, he followed Marx in radically historicising human nature, without loosing sight of its biological basis: ‘it is only with Hegel that Man begins to possess and with Marx that Man achieves a real history’, for in Marx, history ‘becomes one with the history of men’.[36] It is in thus historicising Man that Marx’s greatness lies, for he refuses to follow either Hobbes into a melancholic model of human needs and desires, or Diderot into a utopian counterposition of the state of nature against contemporary social structures. Instead, Marx comprehends the limited historical truth of Hobbes’s insight, but counterposes to it, not a utopia, but the real movement of workers in struggle through which they realise that solidarity is a fundamental human desire.
MacIntyre sought to ground this suggestion of Marx’s through a peculiar rewriting of the history of ethics. He argued that such a history could be written as a synthesis of three strands: first, a ‘history of moral codes’; second, ‘a history of human attitudes to desire’; and third, a history of ‘human nature’. While moral codes initially related to human desires, with the Protestant reformation the connection between desire and morality is broken. Indeed, for the Protestants, as humanity is by nature corrupt, then human desires cannot act as the basis for moral codes. Moreover, as men are finite beings, then they cannot hope to understand the mind of God, and thus cannot hope to fathom His moral code. Consequently, ‘the moral law becomes a connection of divine fiats’, which are ‘so far as we are concerned totally arbitrary’.[37] In such a world, ‘desire becomes something anarchic and amoral’, and, indeed, once moral codes lose their religious colouration and take on a secular form, they are seen to act, for instance in Hobbes, as ‘at best an uneasy truce or peace between warring desires’.[38] To counterpose desires, in their natural state, to these moral codes, as did Diderot, was an inadequate response to the post-reformation view because this strategy failed to acknowledge that ‘in class society desire itself is remoulded, not simply repressed’.[39] Two questions necessarily arose from this claim: could this remoulding be absolute, and if this process of remoulding was not absolute, was it possible that it might be transcended? To understand these issues historically we must ask if a form a human nature could emerge such that the needs and desires of individuals are not felt to be in simple atomised opposition one to the other? Marx, according to MacIntyre, comprehended both the deep historical and sociological content to this question when he suggested that ‘the emergence of human nature is something to be comprehended only in terms of the history of class-struggle. Each age reveals a development of human potentiality which is specific to that form of social life and which is specifically limited by the class-structure of that society’. In particular, under advanced capitalism, according to Marx and MacIntyre, ‘the growth of production makes it possible [for man] to reappropriate his own nature’. This is true in two ways: first, the increasing productivity of labour produces the potential for us all to lead much richer lives, both morally and materially; and second, capitalism also creates an agency – the proletariat – which, through its struggles for freedom, embodies a new collectivist spirit, through which individuals come to understand both that their needs and desires can best be satisfied through collective channels, and that they do in fact need and desire solidarity.[40] According to MacIntyre, the proletariat, in its struggles against capital, begins to create the conditions for the solution of the contemporary problems of morality: it begins to embody the practice which could overcome the ‘rift between our conception of morality and our conception of desire’.[41] Indeed, in acting in this way the proletariat comes to realise that solidarity is not simply a useful means through which its individual members struggle to meet their needs, but it is in fact what they naturally desire.[42]
MacIntyre therefore understood the history of morality as ‘the history of men ceasing to see moral rules as the repression of desire and as something that men have made and accepted for themselves’; which concretely culminates in the socialist struggles of the proletariat against its alienation, and against reified ways of perceiving the world. Conversely, ‘both the autonomy of ethics and utilitarianism are aspects of the consciousness of capitalism; both are forms of alienation rather than moral guides’.[43] So, once the political left has rid itself both of the myth of the inevitable triumph of socialism, and of the reification of socialism as some indefinite end which justifies any action taken in its name, then socialists will truly comprehend the interpenetration of means and ends through the history of class struggle, and will understand Marxist morality to be, as against the Stalinists, ‘an assertion of moral absolutes’, and ‘as against the liberal critic of Stalinism it is an assertion of desire and history’.[44]
Unfortunately, far from seeming inevitable, the proletariat’s struggle for socialism appeared to be almost non-existent in the late 1950s: and it was to this pressing problem of apathy that the New Left turned its attention. Indeed, as part of its project of building a new socialist movement, the New Left published a collection, edited by Edward Thompson, entitled Out of Apathy in 1960. As its title suggests this collection was designed to be both an analysis of, and a counter to, the exiting culture of apathy. In his introductory essay, Thompson overviewed two different explanations for the rise of apathy, which he defined as the tendency for people to look to ‘private solutions to public evils’, and countered to them his own alternative. First, he rejected the view that apathy had grown because ‘prosperity leaves no room for discontent’; while, second, he accepted the partial truth of the view that apathy was ‘an expression of the impotence of the individual in the face of contemporary institutions’, but noted that this was a universal truth, whereas apathy was not. In place of these models, Thompson believed that the key cause of the contemporary malaise was that people ‘do not believe that there is any workable alternative, or they very much dislike any alternative (such as Communism) which is proposed’.[45] He thus argued that the New Left should aim to demonstrate the practicality of a preferable political system. Indeed, he insisted that so over-ripe was Britain for socialism that ‘any vigorous initiative which probes beyond the conventional limits of party controversy calls into question the continuance of the capitalist system’.[46] The rest of the book was then designed to explore this possibility. Moreover, while the New Left did not hold to a ‘party line’, most of the contributors to the volume worked within a broadly shared framework, and, as Thompson wrote, MacIntyre ‘as a Trotskyite differs in some ways from all other contributions’.[47]
Whatever his disagreements with his New Left comrades, MacIntyre agreed with them that apathy was a pressing political concern which demanded serious consideration; and so, in his essay ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, he set himself the task of uncovering the intellectual culture that reinforced political apathy by denigrating the very concept of commitment. Pointing out that at the cusp of the modern era intellectuals were wont to identify themselves as radicals, MacIntyre noted that the dominant reason given by contemporary intellectuals to excuse their own lack of political commitment was to note the apathy of the workers. Yet, as he argued, ‘an addiction to ITV is perhaps no more likely to reduce one to being an impotent spectator of life than is an habitual reading of The Times or The Guardian. The grooves of conformism are different for different social groups. What unites all those who live within them is that their lives are shaped and driven forward by events and decisions which are not their own making’.[48] So what had happened to the radical intelligentsia, to cause the growth in its apathy over the last two centuries?
In answer to this question, MacIntyre sought to trace the intelligentsia’s trajectory from the Enlightenment to the modern age. ‘The inheritors of the Enlightenment are in their different ways Hegel and Marx’; and these two used a bevy of concepts that are still of the utmost value to contemporary thinkers: freedom, reason, human nature, and history.[49] MacIntyre then reiterated much of what he had written in ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ on the importance of purposive action to satisfy developing, but biologically rooted, needs, wants and desires through history. Indeed, he claimed that human history ‘is a series of developing purposes, in which, through the action of reason in the overcoming of conflicts, freedom is attained’.[50] Unfortunately, he noted, ‘post-Hegelian discussions of freedom have not often preserved this vital link between freedom and reason’. Instead, tyrannies have been instituted in the name of positive freedoms; while, ‘in the name of negative freedom men have been called free when enclosed by ignorance and their natural situation’.[51] Moreover, as the ideals of classical education declined, education became fragmented and therefore lost sight of the totalising conception of human potential through which the link between freedom and reason could be maintained. This process left intellectuals, operating within that fragmented culture, ill equipped to respond to the ‘moulding pressures of industry and the state’.[52] In this context, the human sciences were overwhelmed by the imperialistic method of natural science, such that the search for mechanical explanations of social processes became ‘the dream that still haunts and informs the human sciences’.[53] This process was double-edged, for while it became the model for the rat psychologists and their ilk, those who rejected its method tended to counterpose to it the impossibility of ever developing adequate general models of society. Thus Popper rejected the mechanical model of the human sciences; and took Marxism as the prime modern incarnation of this disease, despite the fact that ‘Marx himself had first indicted it’.[54]
MacIntyre’s critique of Popper’s classification of Marxism as a form of mechanical materialism allowed him to reject, as a false dichotomy, the opposition that he constructed between Marx’s pseudo-scientific collectivism, and methodological individualism. By contrast, MacIntyre insisted that ‘the characterisation of individuals and classes has to go together. Essentially these are not two separate tasks’. therefore, while Popper ‘is right to stress that there is no history and no society which is not the history or society of concrete individuals; but equally there are no individuals who exist apart from their history or apart from their society’.[55] Whereas MacIntyre rejected clockwork models of human behaviour, he continued to believe that general models of human action could, adequately, be postulated; for he refused to accept the atomistic alternative of the methodological individualists. In opposition to Popper’s false alternatives, MacIntyre repeated his claim for the importance of purposive action: for both mechanical rule governed behaviour, and lawless individual action broke the link between ‘understanding and action’. The problem with both of these approaches to social action is that they entail political fatalism: ‘Either men can discern the laws which govern social development or they cannot. If they can, then they must avow that their own behaviour is subject to these laws and consequently they must admit that they have discovered themselves to be not agents, but victims, part of a social process which occurs independently of human mind, feeling and will. If they cannot discern such laws, then they are necessarily helpless, for they have no instruments of change at their hands. So in any case human agency is bound to be ineffective. Of course, so far as small-scale changes are concerned, it may be otherwise. All sociologists leave room for reformist manoeuvre’.[56]
This ideology, MacIntyre reminded us, did not exist in some pure state divorced from the world of work and routine, but rather grew out of this world: ‘our social life and our intellectual visions reinforce each other. Our social life is one in which human activity is rendered uncreative and sterile. We live in a society of … predetermined lives’.[57] Indeed, so sterile is our social life, that even when intellectuals reach beyond it, their work is neutered through the most conformist interpretation: thus the radical implications of both Wittengenstein and Freud were, or so MacIntyre argued, castrated in interpretation. How then to break from these predetermined pathways? In opposition to crude vanguardism, MacIntyre insisted that freedom cannot be won by telling the masses to do what the elite desires it do, but only by helping ‘them move where they desire. The goal is not happiness, or satisfaction, but freedom. And freedom has to be both means and ends. The mechanical separation of means and ends is suitable enough for human manipulation, not human liberation’.[58] And for MacIntyre, emancipatory politics emerge spontaneously through the struggles of the working class against capitalism.[59] This insight allowed him to move from a standard Marxist critique of Kantianism, to a powerful break with vestigial influence of consequentialism that had been felt as a burden on Marxist approaches to ethics in the century before MacIntyre made his contribution. Thus, because freedom was both the means and the ends of socialist activity, such activity, contra the Kantians, required a strong anchorage in contemporary history, while, contra the consequentialists, it was not a reified end that could be inaugurated by a variety of means. Therefore, MacIntyre concluded, ‘the philosophers have continued to interpret the world differently; the point remains, to change it’.[60] Nevertheless, while he signalled his allegiance to Trotskyism at the end of this essay, it was less than clear from the text what this allegiance actually entailed. Fortunately, he put some meat on these bones in a number of essays published in the journals of the Trotskyist left in the early 1960s.
Perhaps the most substantial of these essays was ‘Freedom and Revolution’. This essay was in large part a continuation and deepening of his previous humanist reinterpretation of Marxism. It opened with a reiteration of his defence of Hegel’s conception of freedom as the essence of man, and Marx’s deepening of this notion through his insistence that ‘the achievement of freedom and the achievement of a classless society are inseparably united’. As a Hegelian, MacIntyre refused to reify freedom as the endpoint of history, but rather historicised it as a series of moments moving towards this end. Thus, the free man ‘in every age is that man who to the extent that it is possible makes his own life his own’.[61] Within bourgeois society, MacIntyre located the freedom of the bohemian as an inauthentic model of freedom; ‘a mere inversion of bourgeois values’, and counterposes to this model the Marxist argument that as we exist as individuals through our relations with other people then the achievement of ‘freedom is not a problem of individual against society but the problem of what sort of society we want and what sort of individual we want to be’. Given the validity of this claim, it was only logical for MacIntyre to conclude that ‘to assert oneself at the expense of the organisation in order to be free is to miss the fact that only within some organisational form can human freedom be embodied’. Further, as capitalism emasculates freedom, then to be free means to involve oneself in some organisation that challenges capitalist relations of production: ‘The topic of freedom is also the topic of revolution’.[62] At this point, MacIntyre introduced a crucial mediating clause into his argument: while the working class, through its struggles against capital, might spontaneously generate emancipatory movements, workers have proved incapable of spontaneously realising the potential of these struggles. However, if freedom cannot be handed to the working class from above, how then might it be realised from such unpromising material? MacIntyre answered that socialists must join revolutionary parties, whose goal is not freedom itself, but rather to act in such a way so as to aid the proletariat to achieve freedom. ‘The path to freedom must be by means of an organisation which is dedicated not to building freedom but to moving the working class to build it. The necessity for this is the necessity for a vanguard party’.[63] Moreover, and as against those socialists such as Thompson and the rest of the majority within the New Left, who rejected the goal of building a socialist party, MacIntyre suggested that they suffered from ‘the illusion that one can as an isolated individual escape from the moulding and the subtle enslavement of the status quo’. Indeed, ‘the individual who tries most to live as an individual, to have a mind entirely of his own, will in fact make himself more and more likely to become in his thinking a passive reflection of the socially dominant ideas; while the individual who recognizes his dependence on others has taken a path which can lead to an authentic independence of mind’. Thus, MacIntyre concluded, ‘the road to socialism and democratic centralism are … inseparable’.[64] More specifically, MacIntyre turned theory into practice when he joined the Trotskyist movement in the late 1950s.
Towards MacIntyre’s Rejection of Marxism
But what did remaining true to the spirit of Trotskyism imply in the early 1960s? Knight suggests that it involved embracing dogma: by which he most probably means the dogmatic assertion that the working class could become the agency of the socialist revolution. However, MacIntyre, at least in the mid-1960s, did not understand his allegiance to Marxism in such crude terms. Rather, as is readily apparent from his review of Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God, he did not believe that the working class would, at some point in the future, certainly be transformed into a revolutionary agency, but rather he wagered that it might. According to Goldmann’s model, Marxists could not guarantee the victory of socialism, but must make a wager on the revolutionary potential, and indeed triumph, of the proletariat in the struggle against capital. [65] MacIntyre accepted this argument, and indeed developed it when he wrote that ‘one cannot first understand the world and only then act on it. How one understands the world will depend in part on the decision implicit in ones already taken actions. The wager of action is unavoidable’.[66] To label MacIntyre’s wager as dogmatic is thus to miss the point: he believed that one way or another we all make the wager, and those who do not bet on the workers are compelled to retreat back to the tragic vision: if we reject Marx then we fall back to Kant. To fully comprehend MacIntyre’s break with Marxism we must therefore ask not, what made him drop the dogma, but rather what made him change his bet?
One fact that did not entail MacIntyre’s break with the revolutionary left was his realisation, noted at the close of After Virtue, that Trotsky’s late political perspectives had been refuted by history. In contrast to his later pessimistic reading of the failings of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism, in a review of the third volume of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, MacIntyre insisted that Trotskyism was a contested tradition, whose ossification in the hands of Deutscher stood in stark contrast to its living force in the work of those such as Alfred Rosmer and Trotsky’s widow Natalya. The general thrust of this analysis was borrowed from International Socialism, the group with which MacIntyre had become associated from 1960. In line with the perspectives of this organisation, MacIntyre insisted that orthodox Trotskyism, through its reification of one moment of Trotsky’s evolving attempt to achieve a scientific analysis of the Soviet Union, was built upon an indefensible and incoherent foundation; for Trotsky had linked his characterisation of the Soviet social formation, and the future of classical Marxism, to a number of predictions which had been refuted by history. To maintain an allegiance to classical Marxism after this refutation of Trotsky’s predictions, thus implied a necessary break with the letter, if not the spirit, of Trotskyism. Indeed, in holding to the letter of their master’s thought, the orthodox Trotskyists, or so MacIntyre claimed, necessarily broke with the revolutionary spirit of his thought.[67]
Despite this powerful defence of the relevance of heterodox Trotskyism to the modern world, within a few years MacIntyre had broken both with International Socialism specifically and Marxism more generally.[68] The first suggestion that MacIntyre had begun to rethink the role of the working class as a potential agent of socialist revolution came in 1962. A year earlier, in a review of Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution, he had criticised Williams for losing sight of the tension in an individual’s life between ‘his unrealised potentialities and the barriers which confront their realisation’.[69] However, in ‘The Sleepwalking Society’ he bemoaned the lack of impact of the latest of CND’s Aldermaston demonstrations, and explained this as a consequence of the power of the mass media in inculcating, within the working class, ‘an attitude of apathy and acceptance towards the political status quo’. Moreover, he sought to explain proletarian susceptibility to this power with a claim that the ‘working class has been effectively divided into the oppressed but helpless and the strong but bribed’. Indeed, he insisted that in conditions of ‘continually expanding investment and continually expanding consumption’, the struggles of the working class, or at least part of it, had been ‘institutionalised’.[70]
While MacIntyre therefore seems to have responded pessimistically to the decline of CND, in the short term he continued to defend revolutionary politics. Thus, in ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, he took issue with Henry Collins’ defence of a left reformist strategy for Labour. Like Bernstein and the revisionists of the 1890s, Collins, according to MacIntyre, accepted a mechanical separation of the economic structure of the world, from ideas about it. Consequently, Collins failed to see that reformism was less a coherent response to the problems that beset the working class, than it was a reflection of a particular moment in the history of capitalism, which arose ‘within a capitalism which has learnt some degree of rationalisation and control’.[71]
However, while the ideology of revisionism reflected a specific moment in the evolution of capitalism, it was less apparent that revolutionary politics would replace it as the hegemonic ideology within the working class. Accordingly, MacIntyre suggested in his essay ‘Prediction and Politics’, published in International Socialism in 1963, that contemporary economic trends had created barriers to the diffusion of socialist class consciousness across the working class. He opened this essay with a critique of the use by socialists of the word inevitable: indeed, he insisted that as socialism was premised on the rejection of the inevitability of the continuation of capitalism, it was somewhat ironic that many socialists merely inverted the dominant ideology referring to the inevitability of the victory of socialism, rather than the inevitable continuation of capitalism. Moreover, while he noted that a minority of Marxists had rejected the argument that socialism was inevitable, most notably Lenin and Trotsky, none of these had produced a ‘coherent substitute’ to the mechanically deterministic interpretation of historical materialism; rather they had merely rejected a form of ‘automism’ for ‘substitutionism’.[72] MacIntyre opened his attempt to move beyond these two inadequate interpretations of Marxism with the suggestion that post-war capitalism had been transformed by the ‘conscious, intelligent innovation’ of the bourgeoisie and its representatives: ‘If capitalists had behaved in the forties and fifties as they did in the twenties the apparently mechanical laws of the economy would have issued in slump. But there are no longer slumps for the same reason that the pig-cycle is no longer with us: the changed self-consciousness of the participants’.[73]
However, if this argument implied that economic crises on the scale of the 1930s could be managed out of existence, then, while MacIntyre’s break with mechanical Marxism was plain, it was not obvious how his own politics could avoid the trap of substitutionism: for if capitalism had overcome its tendency towards crises, then what force would push workers to question their position in society? In 1959 he had avoided this trap through his insistence on the necessary relationship between his theory of human nature, and his understanding of human reactions to economic processes: ‘Marx’s explanation of capitalist crisis is not a matter of underconsumption, but of falling return on profit which leads the capitalist to lower his investment. And this explanation, like the explanation of proletarian reactions to such crisis, rests on his view of what has happened to human nature under capitalism’.[74] Moreover, he reasserted and deepened this argument in 1961, when he suggested that revolutionaries should develop a programme that sought ‘to bring together three elements in our social life’: ‘the deep and incurable dissatisfaction with social life which capitalism breeds’; ‘the recurrent state of objective crisis in capitalist social order’; and ‘socialist theory’.[75] However, by the time he wrote ‘Prediction and Politics’ he no longer accepted that economic crises were inevitable. This is not to suggest that he understood the ‘objective’ terrain upon which socialists operated to be much more static than was traditional amongst Marxists. On the contrary, the dynamic economic processes associated with capitalism tended to fragment rather than to unify the working class: ‘there is a sad case for saying that being in an economically strong position today against the employers in certain industries at least, means that the issues on which you are likely to fight and even possibly win are just the issues that are going to divide you from less skilled workers’.[76] Interestingly, this argument was not a particularly heretical analysis within the International Socialism group. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the group this ‘cause of concern, though not for pessimism’, was combined with an analysis of a ‘definite cause for optimism’: the shop-floor confidence of many ordinary workers. Moreover, as the Wilson Government was reacting to the ‘stop-go’ crises by launching a generalised challenge to sectional confidence through the medium of incomes policy, then it was suggested that the contradiction between sectional strength and the general attack opened a series of opportunities for the left to influence the emergence of a genuinely socialist consciousness within the working class.[77] In contrast to this perspective, as MacIntyre argued that Marx’s theory of economic crisis was inapplicable to the modern world, his analysis of contemporary trends within the working class ended on the pessimistic note of the working class’s growing fragmentation. Consequently, his understanding of the one hope for socialism was limited to the feeling, found within the working class, that capitalism was constraining their potential for free development: ‘The germ of his liberation lies in the twin facts that capitalism cannot prevent him from recognising that he is unfree and from combining with other workers to free himself’.[78]
Problematically, if economic crises were not going to play the role of fanning the flames of rebellion against this feeling of enslavement, and indeed acted to retard them, then MacIntyre was at a loss to explain what forces, beyond the general tendency of capitalism to expand the size of the working class, would act upon human nature to generate the collective revolts upon which socialists could base their practice. Bereft of an objective tendency towards revolutionary consciousness, MacIntyre increasingly came to view the subjective role of socialist activists as the crucial catalyst to the development of socialist consciousness within the working class. Thus ‘Prediction and Politics’ concluded with the argument that as the condition for the fall of capitalism was the growth in socialist class consciousness within the proletariat, and, as this growth was neither inevitable nor impossible, it ‘depends upon us’ to make that change in consciousness: ‘because with our working class allies we may yet learn both what now makes us behave as we do, and what may transform our action until we become capable of making the transition to socialism’.[79]
MacIntyre followed this general argument with a more concrete application of his understanding of historical materialism in his next essay for International Socialism: ‘Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning’. In this essay he argued that while socialists should reject, as unfeasible, the goal of winning over the Labour Party to socialism, they should aim to ‘recreate a political trade unionism out of the existing links between the Labour Party and the unions’. Indeed, MacIntyre was keen to point to the positive potential inherent in the emergence of a new form of capitalism: for where most sociologists interpreted the growth of a new layer of brain workers as a sign of the embourgeoisification of the working class, MacIntyre noticed that the conditions of work of these supposedly middle-class professionals were becoming increasingly proletarianised, such that, not only could they be won over to socialism, but also that they could add to the intellectual capital of the workers’ movement. Moreover, he envisaged a socialist perspective for this new enlarged proletariat. However, to realise this potential would involve a political strategy that, initially, involved placing a series of demands on the incoming Labour Government: first, to ‘side with the workers and against the employers’; then to insist that education be designed to equip ‘workers to control their own lives and to take power’; and thirdly, to abolish ‘the bomb’. Subsequently, as these demands were being made, a new form of political trade unionism might organise strikes, not as reactions to managerial pressures, but as planned attempts to break capitalism at its points of greatest vulnerability. However, the prerequisite for the success of this project, was that ‘almost every worker is able to understand and assent to this strategy’.[80]
Unfortunately, there were two obvious sets of problems with these strategic suggestions. First, and least seriously, there was a problem of coherence involved in denying that the Labour Party could be won to socialism, whilst simultaneously demanding that it essentially act as a socialist, or at least as an anti-capitalist, government, in respect to three key areas of policy. This problem was not too serious because, in practice, the demands could easily be interpreted as a series of ‘lines in the sand’ over which the left was preparing to struggle against the incoming government: and indeed, this is exactly how MacIntyre imagined them.[81] However, there was a second, and far more serious problem with MacIntyre’s formulation of a strategy for socialists: by suggesting that the only hope for the realisation of this strategy was that ‘almost every worker is able to understand and assent’ to it, MacIntyre essentially confused the ends of a revolutionary process with its means; for once the working class acted as a united anti-capitalist force, then the success of the socialist revolution would be guaranteed, indeed it would have been achieved. How then did MacIntyre envisage the movement from the existing class consciousness of the mass of workers to a future socialist consciousness?
MacIntyre had addressed this issue in ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, but only tangentially and at a very general level: ‘Our deep need is … to provide all the growing points of human activity against the present social order with coherent theoretical expression, so that they may be rationally guided and effective’.[82] He added some weight to this framework in an unpublished paper presented to an International Socialism day-school in 1963. In this essay, implicitly drawing upon Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, he argued that revolutionary leadership involved formulating a series of political demands which could be made upon the incoming Labour government, and which, while being formally reformist, could, in practice, only be realised through a revolutionary transformation of society. His suggestion was that in fighting for the realisation of these demands workers would develop the socialist consciousness necessary to make that revolution[83]. However, as the effectiveness of Trotsky’s model of transitional demands depended on the circumstances within which they were made, unfavourable circumstances would negate their revolutionary content. As Duncan Hallas has argued, ‘If at a given time ‘today’s consciousness of wide layers’ is decidedly non-revolutionary, then it will not be transformed by slogans’.[84] Unfortunately, the context within which MacIntyre wrote was characterised by decidedly non-revolutionary working-class consciousness; and no amount of transitional demands were going to change this. If MacIntyre’s transitional demands were not adequate to the task of relating to workers in a period of economic boom and relative depoliticisation, it is easy to imagine how he might move from an ultra-optimistic to an ultra-pessimistic interpretation of the potential of workers’ struggle to generate socialist consciousness, especially given his belief that at the economic level the class struggle tended to divide workers more than it united them.
Hence, without any model of objective tendencies that might facilitate the political unification of the working class, then the workers’ cry for freedom was destined to be atomised and hopeless. This is the conclusion implied in his works of the later 1960s, which, while written when he was still nominally an editor of International Socialism, universally suggested no hope for revolution. So, in his introduction to Marx’s ideas for an academic audience, while he powerfully argued that ‘the most crucial later activity of Marx’, was not to write Capital, but was rather through his actions in ‘helping to found and guiding the International Working Men’s Association’, he concluded that Marx ‘still leaves the question of working-class political growth obscure’.[85] Whether this observation was correct of Marx, it certainly appeared to be true of MacIntyre’s interpretation of Marxism, for his contemporary strategic insights seemed increasingly abstract and divorced from the practice of a mass movement that could bring them to life.
The feeling that MacIntyre’s social theory was divorced from any sense that immanent forces within contemporary capitalism might develop into a transformative agency was reinforced in a series of lectures originally given in 1964, but published some three years later as Secularisation and Moral Change. In this book he deployed his sophisticated Marxist method to outline a comparative history of religious and secular beliefs in modern Britain and America. On the basis of this history he argued that Engels had been mistaken in his overly optimistic perspective for the future secularisation of British society, as a corollary of his overly optimistic perspectives for socialism. However, MacIntyre went beyond a critique of Engels to suggest that ‘the inability of men to discard Christianity is part of their inability to provide any post-Christian means of understanding their situation in the world’. And while he suggested that this failure was by no means ‘ultimate’, he noted no inherent tendencies with which socialists might engage that could, belatedly, help them to prove Engels correct.[86]
If MacIntyre’s rejection of the applicability of Marx’s economic theory to post-war capitalism opened the door to his increasing sense of political pessimism, this tendency was reinforced in the mid-1960s when he moved to reject Marx’s (and indeed any other) model of human nature as a basis upon which a coherent theory of the struggle for socialism could be based. For instance, in his classic A Short History of Ethics, despite some tangential remarks as to the relationship between morality and desire, his own moral standpoint seemed disjoined from either any historical or materialist premises to which he had earlier been so committed.[87] Thus, he rejected the idea of human nature as a benchmark from which to adjudicate moral claims, and consequently reduced individual morality to an existential choice.[88] While he chose Marxism in 1966, at least in as far has he did not publicly break with the editorial board of International Socialism, he refused any criteria such that this choice could be defended against any alternative. Moreover, without a theory of human nature with which to underpin it, his theory of revolution, at least as he had outlined it in ‘Freedom and Revolution’, was left baseless. MacIntyre’s socialist morality, in this context, could boast no more compelling foundation than any competing moral claim. In fact, by the late 1960s, it appeared that he had ceased to view Marxism as either a science or as a guide to action, but rather as just one of many competing worldviews. As a result, when he republished a new edition of Marxism: An Interpretation in 1968, under the new title of Marxism and Christianity, he removed any suggestion that the original text might have been written to inform a committed Christian-socialist practice. Therefore, where, in the second edition, Marx’s relationship to Christianity through Feuerbach and Hegel was still there, gone was the call to action; as indeed was most of the Christianity.[89] Indeed, while the second edition, as a work of theory, was formally closer to Marxism than was the first, the reviewer for International Socialism bemoaned the re-write, and proclaimed that the activist core of the first edition had made that much the better of the two books.[90]
Whatever the theoretical roots of MacIntyre’s break with International Socialism in 1968, at the time he remained silent as to his personal motives. However, something of his mind-set can be gleaned from his book Marcuse, published 1970. In this essay MacIntyre emphasised his own continuing allegiance to the concepts of human liberation and freedom. However, he also held to something of a performative contraction in as far he simultaneously rejected the argument that an ideal pure Marxism can be deployed as an alternative to the reality of Marxism’s history, while accepting an implicitly idealised vision of the struggle for liberation. Thus, he denounced the contemporary student struggles as ‘the first parent-financed revolts’ that were ‘more like a new version of the children’s crusade than a revolutionary movement’.[91] This elitist critique of the movement of 1968 allowed MacIntyre to maintain a formal allegiance to the emancipatory politics of the left, whilst dismissing real struggles as they happened around him: so, against the disruptive influence of ‘Marcuse’s students’, MacIntyre extolled, in 1970, the virtues and ‘authority’ of the university as a seat of learning.[92]
Conclusion
The power of MacIntyre’s Marxism in the period of the first New Left was rooted in his argument that any moral claim, if it was to be universalised in the modern world, must be rooted both in a historically conceived theory of human nature, as actualised within the real historical struggles for freedom of the oppressed. To this end, he played a key role in retrieving the revolutionary kernel of Marx’s theory of history from the deadening grip of Stalinism, and thus in releasing historical materialism from the cage of Stalinist determinism. However, despite this contribution to Marxist theory, MacIntyre progressively distanced himself from the Marxist left through the 1960s. While, this tendency was brought to a head in 1968, when he played a minor role as ‘policeman’ to the students of Essex, it had much deeper roots than this. On the one hand, the context was unpropitious for the left, and MacIntyre’s trajectory can be read as a response to the decline of the New Left and CND. However, this context demanded interpretation, and MacIntyre’s pessimistic reading of it was informed by, first, his rejection of the idea of an essential human nature, and second, by his dismissal of Marx’s theory of economic crisis. Together, these two revisions of Marxism meant that he read the contemporary fragmentation of the class struggle as a much more profound barrier to the struggle for socialism than was implied by the ‘cause for concern’ noted by other members of International Socialism. Indeed, as the 1960s wore on, the tension between the optimism of MacIntyre’s will and the pessimism of his intellect became so great that it eventually had to give. Since then, while MacIntyre has remained a firm critic of international capitalism, a deep sense of pessimism has coloured his moral theory.
Nonetheless, in
his most recent works, MacIntyre has moved some way towards rejecting the two
fundamental assumptions that informed his earlier pessimism. For instance, in
his introduction to the 1995 edition of Marxism
and Christianity, he suggests that he had previously been too harsh on Marx’s
value theory – which itself underpins his theory of crisis. Moreover, in Dependent Rational Animals he argues
that he had been mistaken, in After
Virtue and A Short History of Ethics,
to suppose that ‘an ethics independent of biology to be possible.’[93]
In thus reappraising his relationship to Marx’s economic theory and more
general theories of human nature, MacIntyre has significantly reduced the
theoretical space between himself and Marxism. Indeed, in a new preface to his 1958
study of Freud, MacIntyre reasserts the necessity of a linkage between
psychoanalysis and politics in a way that would have made perfect sense to his
earlier Marxist self.[94] And
while a large gap remains between Marxism and his contemporary moral and
political thought, MacIntyre’s changed perspective at least opens up the
possibility of a renewed dialogue between his ideas and Marxism.
[1] Thanks to Neil Davidson for his comments on a draft of this essay.
[2] A. MacIntyre ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’ in K. Knight ed. The MacIntyre Reader (Cambridge, 1998), p.235
[3] Indeed, the two collections that have been published on his ideas do not address his early Marxism except tangentially (J, Horton & S. Mendus eds. After MacIntyre (Cambridge 1994), M. Murphy ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge, 2003)). This failing is magnified in Knight’s selection of MacIntyre’s work: The MacIntyre Reader. For, while Knight is to be congratulated for his inclusion of MacIntyre’s 1958-9 essay ‘Notes From the Moral Wilderness’ in this selection, he misrepresents the power of that essay through his decision to locate it simply as a misguided precursor to his later arguments, rather than as a key constituent of a very different project. In contrast to the bulk of MacIntyre scholarship, McMylor’s introduction to MacIntyre’s moral theory does engage with his early Marxism, but only though a very limited reading of his output in the late 1950s and early 1960s (P. McMylor Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (London, 1994))
[4] A. MacIntyre After Virtue Second Edition (London 1985), pp. 262-3
[5] A. MacIntyre ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken’ in K. Knight ed. The MacIntyre Reader (Cambridge, 1998), p.232
[6] K. Marx Critique of the Gotha Programme (Peking, 1972), p. 12
[7] A. Wood Karl Marx (London, 1981), pp. 130-132.
[8] R. Peffer Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990), p.46
[9] K. Marx Notes on Indian History (London, 1950), pp. 110; 124; 127; 163
[10] S. Lukes Marxism and Morality (Oxford, 1985), p. 29
[11] N. Geras ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’ in A. Callinicos ed. Marxist Theory (Oxford, 1989), p. 232. Geras is commenting upon Marx’s claim that ‘the realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends … The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite’ (K. Marx Capital Vol. III Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 959.
[12] Geras ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, p. 245
[13] ibid., p. 264
[14] McMylor Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 12
[15] A. MacIntyre Marxism: An Interpretation (London, 1953), p. 18
[16] ibid., pp. 45; 10
[17] ibid., pp. 109; 69
[18] P. Blackledge ‘Reform, Revolution and the Problem of Organisation in the First New Left’ Contemporary Politics Vol. 10, No. 1 2004, pp. 21-36, p.23
[19] P. Sedgwick ‘The Two New Lefts’ D. Widgery, D. ed. The Left in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1976). This essay was originally published in International Socialism 17, 1964.
[20] E.P. Thompson ‘Socialist Humanism’ The New Reasoner 1 Summer 1957, pp. 105; 138
[21] ibid., p. 125
[22] ibid., p. 121
[23] ibid., p. 124
[24] H. Hanson ‘An Open Letter to Edward Thompson’ The New Reasoner 2 Autumn 1957, p. 88
[25] ibid., p. 79
[26] A. MacIntyre (1998a) ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ in Knight ed The MacIntyre Reader, pp. 31-2. Originally published in two parts in New Reasoner, No.7 (Winter 1958-9), pp. 90-100 and New Reasoner, No.8 (Spring 1959), pp. 89-98.
[27] Ibid., p. 38
[28] ibid., p. 32
[29] ibid., pp. 34-5
[30] ibid., p. 37
[31] ibid., p. 39
[32] ibid. p. 40
[33] ibid., p. 41
[34] ibid., pp. 43; 41
[35] A. MacIntyre The Unconscious Second Edition (London, 2004), p. 62. The first edition of this book was published in 1958 – the new edition contains a substantial new preface.
[36] MacIntyre ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, p. 46
[37] ibid., p. 43
[38] ibid., p. 44
[39] ibid., p. 43
[40] ibid., p. 46
[41] ibid., p. 45
[42] ibid., p. 48
[43] ibid., p.42; 49
[44] ibid., p. 47
[45] E.P. Thompson ‘At the Point of Decay’ in E.P. Thompson ed. Out of Apathy (London, 1960), pp. 5-8
[46] ibid., p.10
[47] ibid., p. 14
[48] A. MacIntyre ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason,’ inE. P. Thompson ed. Out of Apathy (London, 1960) pp. 195-240, p. 198
[49] ibid., p. 199
[50] ibid., p. 200
[51] ibid., p. 201
[52] ibid., p. 208
[53] ibid., p. 210
[54] ibid., p. 217
[55] ibid., p. 220
[56] ibid., p. 225
[57] ibid., p. 230
[58] ibid., p. 235
[59] ibid., pp. 230; 238
[60] ibid., p. 240
[61] A. MacIntyre ‘Freedom and Revolution,’ Labour Review, Feb./Mar. 1960, pp. 19-24, p. 20
[62] ibid., p. 22
[63] ibid., p. 23
[64] ibid., p. 24
[65] L. Goldmann The Hidden God (London, 1964), p. 301
[66] A. MacIntyre ‘Pascal and Marx: On Lucien Goldmann’s Hidden God’ in A. MacIntyre Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London, 1971), pp. 76-87, p. 84
[67] A. MacIntyre ‘Trotsky in Exile’ in MacIntyre Against the Self-Images of the Age pp. 52-59, pp. 57-8. This essay was first published in Encounter in 1963. For International Socialism’s reading of Trotsky see T. Cliff [1948] ‘The Nature of Stalinist Russia’ in T. Cliff Marxist Theory after Trotsky (London, 2003), p. 1.
[68] While MacIntyre’s name was removed from the list of editors of International Socialism in 1968 – as the organisation sought to disassociate itself from his actions against student radicals in Essex – he had in fact ceased to involve himself with the organisation some two or three years earlier.
[69] A. MacIntyre ‘Culture and Revolution’ International Socialism 5, 1961, p. 28
[70] A. MacIntyre ‘The Sleepwalking Society’ Socialist Review May 1962, p. 5
[71] A. MacIntyre ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’ International Socialism 6, 1961, pp. 20-23, p. 21
[72] A. MacIntyre ‘Prediction and Politics’ International Socialism 13, 1963, p. 17
[73] ibid., p. 18
[74] MacIntyre ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ pp. 39-40
[75]MacIntyre ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, p. 23
[76] A. MacIntyre Unpublished paper given to International Socialism day school 1963, p. 6. A. MacIntyre ‘Herbert Marcuse’ Survey No 62, Jan 1967, p. 43.
[77] T. Cliff & C. Barker Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards (London, 1966), pp. 128-136. For an earlier elaboration of a similar argument, see M. Kidron ‘Rejoinder to Left-Reformism’ International Socialism 7, 1961, p. 15. Kidron’s aim in this essay was to bolster MacIntyre’s critique of Collins noted above. Thanks to Chris Harman for this reference.
[78] MacIntyre ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’ p. 23. A. MacIntyre Marcuse (London, 1970), p. 72
[79] MacIntyre ‘Prediction and Politics’ , p. 19
[80] A. MacIntyre ‘Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning’ International Socialism 15, 1963, p. 8
[81] MacIntyre Unpublished paper, p. 20
[82] MacIntyre ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, p. 238
[83] MacIntyre Unpublished paper, p. 20
[84] D. Hallas Trotsky’s Marxism (London, 1979), p. 104
[85] A. MacIntyre ‘Marx,’ inM. Cranston ed. Western Political Philosophers: A Background Book, (London, 1964) pp. 99-108, p. 106.
[86] A. MacIntyre Secularization and Moral Change (London, 1967), p. 75
[87] A. MacIntyre A Short History of Ethics (London, 1966), pp. 210-214. cf P. Sedgwick ‘The Ethical Dance – A Review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue’ in M. Eve & D. Musson eds. The Socialist Register (London, 1982).
[88] MacIntyre A Short History of Ethics pp. 268-9
[89] A. MacIntyre Marxism and Christianity (London, 1968)
[90] R. Kuper ‘Marxism and Christianity’ International Socialism 42, 1970, p. 35
[91] MacIntyre Marcuse, pp. 61; 89
[92] ibid., p. 91
[93] A. MacIntyre Marxism and Christianity (London, 1995), p. xx. A. MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals (London, 1999), p. x.
[94] MacIntyre The Unconscious, pp. 27; 114