Alasdair MacIntyre: Social Practices, Marxism and Ethical Anti-Capitalism
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Paul Blackledge |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00770.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 0 9 VO L 5 7 , 8 6 6 – 8 8 4
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00770.x
Alasdair MacIntyre: Social Practices,
Marxism and Ethical Anti-Capitalismpost_770866..884
Paul Blackledge
Leeds Metropolitan University
Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of social practice sits at the core of his account of the virtue-fostering forms
of resistance to capitalism, liberalism and the modern (un)democratic state. However, while this concept
was articulated, in part, as a response to perceived weaknesses with Marx’s analysis of working-class
revolutionary praxis, and although MacIntyre has criticised Marx for the paucity of his theorisation of
such practice, he has himself only gestured towards concrete instances of his alternative. This essay engages
with one of these examples: MacIntyre’s suggestion that Welsh mining communities in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries should be numbered among those modern communities within which the
virtues have flourished. I explore some of the ramifications of this example for MacIntyre’s broader ethical
theory through the lens of a discussion of the continuities and breaks between his youthful Marxism and
his more mature thought. I suggest that this example problematises his concept of practice in a way that
implies a space for reconciliation between his mature thought and his earlier Marxism.
We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production,
and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible concep-
tions of a rational moral order (MacIntyre, 1979, p. 4).
The recent publication both of a third edition of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
(2007a) and of two selections of his essays, The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and
Politics (both 2006), alongside a number of book-length studies of his thought
(D’Andrea, 2006; Knight, 2007; Lutz, 2004; Murphy, 2003), is perhaps an apt
moment to reconsider his contribution to ethical theory. Interestingly, MacIntyre
also agreed to the re-publication of a number of essays, many essentially unob-
tainable and one previously unpublished, from the period when he was in and
around the British Marxist left in the 1950s and 1960s – Alasdair MacIntyre’s
Engagement with Marxism: Essays and Articles 1953–1974 ( Blackledge and David-
son, 2008). This decision informs the specific content of my essay: I ask what, if
anything, this one-time cadre of the revolutionary left might contribute to the
kind of renewed ethical critique which Andrew Sayer argues is necessary if the
political left is to counter the inhumane imperatives of global capitalism (Sayer,
2000, p. 187).
Concretely, I discuss the possibility that social and political theorists might not
only learn from MacIntyre’s ethics but also from a critical exploration of tensions
between his critique of Marxism and his discussion of those communities through
which the virtues might flourish in resistance to capitalism. I point out that
whereas MacIntyre’s Aristotelian alternative to contemporary moral discourse
once took a Marxist form, his concept of practice was articulated, in part, as a
response to perceived weaknesses with Marx’s (largely implicit) account of the
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ethical content of working-class struggle. After discussing the continuities
between MacIntyre’s youthful Marxism and his more mature thought, I move on
to problematise his concept of practice through an immanent critique of its use
in some of his mature works. I argue that it is a strength of MacIntyre’s concept
of practice that it underpins his account of various types of virtuous resistance to
capitalism and liberalism, which consequently allows him a basis from which to
resist both the extreme pessimism associated with the thought of post-Marxists
such as Adorno and Marcuse and the moral relativism characteristic of Sartre’s
existential Marxism. However, I suggest that his concept of practice is unable to
do all of the work asked of it in his mature writings. Moreover, by addressing a
problem of coherence immanent to his discussions of practices and communities
I posit a solution to a more profound tension within his mature thought. I suggest
that certain of the examples MacIntyre cites as instances of communities that
sustain virtuous resistance to capitalism not only problematise his critique of
Marxism but in so doing also point towards a possible (Marxist) resolution of a
tension existent between aspects of relativism and naturalism within his mature
ethical theory.
The Post-Marxist MacIntyre
If few on the contemporary left would oppose Sayer’s call for an ethical critique
of capitalism, it is probably true that fewer would look to Marx to provide
resources for such a critique. Indeed, the sense that Marxism is inadequate to the
needs of modern politics appears to be confirmed by the trajectory taken by
Analytical Marxism from orthodoxy towards an abstract utopianism (Cohen,
2000, pp. 101–3). Nonetheless, if it is widely agreed that Marx failed to outline an
ethical critique of capitalism,1 it might seem at best counter-intuitive and at worst
simply perverse to look to MacIntyre to fill this gap. Someone who is arguably the
foremost living Thomist moral philosopher does not immediately spring to mind
as a potential source of inspiration for the ethical renewal of the left generally and
of Marxism more specifically. This, however, is exactly what Terry Eagleton has
attempted in his recent borrowing from MacIntyre’s mature work (Eagleton,
2003, pp. 155–7). And while this project might seem eccentric, it appears less so
once we recognise that the common academic assumption that MacIntyre’s
mature critique of liberalism is conservative, communitarian and indeed nostalgic
(Knowles, 2001, p. 235; Kymlicka, 2002, p. 209) cannot be supported by a close
reading of his work (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 245).
While the positive content of MacIntyre’s mature thought has been the source of
some contestation, it is uncontroversial that he is, and consistently has been for
over half a century, a powerful critic of liberalism (MacIntyre, 1988, pp. 335–48).
Thus in 1994 he wrote that ‘my critique of liberalism is one of the few things that
has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my whole life. Ever since I
understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it – and that was when
I was seventeen years old’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 43). Nonetheless, if he explained
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his youthful break with liberalism through his engagement with the Communist
party in the East End of London in the 1940s (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 44), the fact
that he has since aligned himself with Thomism would appear to imply that the
young revolutionary who once described Marx as ‘the world-spirit in the British
Museum reading room’ (MacIntyre, 1973) has come to challenge liberalism from
a much more conservative standpoint in his maturity (compare Lutz, 2004;
Sedgwick, 1982). If this is an understandable perspective, it is nonetheless one that
elides over the depth of continuity in MacIntyre’s project over the last half
century. Indeed, by contrast with the conservative interpretation of MacIntyre’s
mature work, in an interview with Kinesis published in 1994 he claimed that there
are ‘two points in which I remain very much at one with the Marxist tradition’:
its critique of the state, and the desire of Marxists to ‘understand reasoning,
especially practical reasoning, as giving expression to forms of social practice’
(MacIntyre, 1994, p. 35). More specifically, despite his now distant break with the
Marxist left, his mature embrace of natural law theory acts, in part, to reinforce a
long-held adherence to Marx’s needs principle:‘from each according to ability, to
each according to need’ is a programmatic slogan he has embraced throughout his
adult life (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xxiii; 1999, p. 130, p. 111).
This suggests that Eagleton is right to recognise the revolutionary implications of
some aspects of MacIntyre’s mature thought, a supposition that is reinforced if we
look at MacIntyre’s claim, made in AfterVirtue and elsewhere, that Marxism is ‘still
one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’, and that if contem-
porary theorists ‘are now to learn how to criticise Marxism’, the main reason for
this is not to ‘separate ourselves from its errors’, but rather to ‘once again become
able to learn from it’ (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 262; 1995a, p. xxx). Similarly, in the
prologue to the third edition of After Virtue, he writes that ‘I was and remain
deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of
capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists’ (MacIntyre,
2007a, p. xvi). Concretely, his critique of capitalism was evident in 1994 when he
suggested that Michael Milken, the corrupt Wall Street banker who inspired the
character played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, was right
against his ‘moralist’ critics when he claimed that he had only been ‘doing his job’,
but that he was wrong to believe that this should have kept him out of jail: on the
contrary ‘it probably means that many other financial managers should be [in
prison] too’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 40). On a more practical note, his mature
radicalism was apparent when in 2006 he signalled his support for those struggles
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