FREEDOM, DESIRE AND REVOLUTION: ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST

ETHICS
Author(s): Paul Blackledge
Source: History of Political Thought , Winter 2005, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter 2005), pp.
696-720
Published by: Imprint Academic Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26221757

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 FREEDOM, DESIRE AND REVOLUTION:
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS1

Paul Blackledge2

Abstract: This article examines the pre-history of Alasdair Maclntyre's contempo

rary moral philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s Maclntyre 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 Maclntyre came to replace his earlier with his later frame
work. The article, after reconstructing Maclntyre's Marxist ethics, traces the trajec
tory through which he came to reject Marxism, and shows that while Maclntyre'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built upon two assumptions — that Marx's economic theory was outdated and that a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.
The conclusion is that Maclntyre's rethinking of these assumptions has opened a space
for a renewed dialogue between himself and Marxists.

Introduction

While Alasdair Maclntyre is best known today as the foremost exponent of

what Kelvin Knight has labelled 'revolutionary Aristotelianism',3 there was
another Maclntyre, 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, Maclntyre made a fundamental contribution to Marxist
ethical theory which repays reading today. Nevertheless, despite its power,
Maclntyre's period as a Marxist has been unduly neglected by students of his
work.4 This is unfortunate, for an analysis of the totality of Maclntyre's
Marxist essays of the time is not only interesting in and of itself, it can also

1 Thanks go to Neil Davidson and Kristyn Gorton for their comments on a draft of this
essay.
2 School of Social Sciences, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, LS13HE. Email:
p.blackledge@leedsmet.ac.uk
3 A. Maclntyre 'Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good', in The Maclntyre
Reader, ed. K. Knight (Cambridge, 1998), p. 235.
4 Indeed, the two collections on his ideas that have been published do not address his
early Marxism except tangentially {After Maclntyre, ed. J. Horton and S. Mendus (Cam
bridge, 1994); Alasdair Maclntyre, ed. M. Murphy (Cambridge, 2003)). This failing is
magnified in Knight's selection of Maclntyre's work: The Maclntyre Reader. For, while
Knight is to be congratulated for his inclusion in this selection of Maclntyre's 1958-9
essay 'Notes from the Moral Wilderness', 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 Mac

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Autumn 2005

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 697

illuminate the process through which his thought began to evolve tow
more recent conclusions.
Maclntyre 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, Maclntyre 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'.5 A decade later, Maclntyre outlined what was if
anything an even more devastating critique of Marxism. Marx failed to recog
nize, 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'.6
As we shall see, Maclntyre first elaborated versions of these arguments in
the 1960s when he was still a member of the revolutionary left. What set Mac
lntyre aside from his comrades in this period was not his criticism of Trotsky
or his analysis of the fragmentation of working-class struggles. Rather, Mac
lntyre 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 argu
ments informed the growing political pessimism that was to become most
apparent in After Virtue, in his more recent work Maclntyre has gone some
way to reversing these arguments; suggesting that the gap between his con
temporary 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 Cri
tique of the Gotha Programme, he explicitly dismissed certain moral criticisms

Intyre scholarship, McMylor's introduction to Maclntyre's moral theory engages with

his early Marxism, but only though a very limited reading of his output in the late 1950s
and early 1960s (P. McMy\or, Alasdair Maclntyre: Critic of Modernity (London, 1994)).
5 A. Maclntyre, After Virtue (London, 2nd edn., 1985), pp. 262-3.
6 A. Maclntyre, 'The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken', in The Maclntyre
Reader, ed. Knight, p. 232 (first published in Artifacts, Representations and Social Prac
tice, ed. C. Gould and R. Cohen (Hingham, 1994).

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698 P. BLACKLEDGE

of capitalism. He argued that the dem

ceeds of labour' ignored the truth of
ent-day distribution is "just" so lon
'distribution' on the basis of the 'p
menting on these arguments, Wood h
cept of justice because he understood
particular historical modes of produc
ment that Marx, palpably, did make
capitalism, such that Peffer is able t
held to a 'deontological' ethics.9 Cer
Marx sounded 'conventionally' morali
ing English scoundrels' who 'shameles
'atrociously' or 'foully murdered' ma
Lukes has attempted to make sense
distinguishing between two types of
conflated: the morality of emancipati
'The paradox in marxism's attitude to
is the morality of Recht that it conde
the morality of emancipation that
Lukes, Geras has argued that this dist
one of self-realization is 'unfounded',
true potential within a political conte
Marx in Volume III of Capital, Geras
eties are not to be understood in a Ut
some conception of distributive justic
guish a morality of self-realization fr
distinguish two conceptions of justic
can help explain that while 'Marx did
did not think he thought so'. Wherea
narrow 'legal positivist fashion', he s
tice based upon the principle that

7 Κ. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Progr

national and After, ed. D. Fernbach (Har
8 A. Wood, Karl Marx (London, 1981),
9 R. Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Soc
10 K. Marx, Notes on Indian History (L
11 S. Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxf
12 N. Geras, 'The Controversy about M
A. Callinicos (Oxford, 1989), p. 232. Gera
realm of freedom really begins only wher
expediency ends... The reduction of the w
Capital, Vol. Ill [1894], (Harmondsworth

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 699

needs.13 Such a principle, Geras suggests, would not act merely a

mark against which capitalism is seen to be wanting, but would c
operate in a socialist society as a distributive standard of 'reasona
a system without absolute abundance.14 While Geras' account of
approach to justice is exemplary as far as it goes, beyond an implici
development of the productive forces, he does not discuss the actu
through which this abstract concept of justice can be made concre

Maclntyre's Marxist Morality

By contrast with this solution to the paradox posed by Marx's amb

tionship to morality, Maclntyre, in the 1950s and 1960s, soug
claims for justice to the proletariat's developing struggle for freed
tyre's first contribution to the Marxist literature on ethics was ar
his book Marxism: An Interpretation, which, while it was written a
of the Cold War and from a radical Christian perspective, succeede
uring many of the themes that were to emerge three years later w
of the New Left.15 In particular, Maclntyre began to explode the s
ist and Liberal myth of Marxism as a mechanical model of historic
Maclntyre was drawn, as a Christian, towards Marxism because
it, Marx's political theory converged with his vision of critical C
ics: 'Marxism is of first-class theological significance as a secular
by the gospel which is committed to the problem of power and
therefore to themes of redemption and renewal which its history
minate.'16 Specifically, he perceived a parallel between the situat
Marx in the early 1840s, and that encountered by contemporary r
tians. For just as Marx 'was faced with a stark antithesis' bet
Hegel's and Feuerbach's visions of human freedom, and the re
world of work and suffering, so contemporary Christianity acce
between the sacred and the secular such that it had lost any critica
on the world. Indeed, he argued, bourgeois Christianity, because
reduced to a matter of personal taste to be practised at the weeken
concretely criticized social injustice and thus did not interfere wit
lar existence.17 Maclntyre believed that radical Christians would
learn from Marx's turn to politics as a means of overcoming the g
reality and the vision of freedom in Hegel's system. He thus con
ism: An Interpretation with the suggestion that the key text that sho
by Christians, alongside St Mark's Gospel, was Marx's 'Nationa

13 Géras, 'The Controversy about Marx and Justice', p. 245.

14 Ibid., p. 264.
15 McMylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, p. 12.
16 A. Maclntyre, Marxism: An Interpretation (London, 1953), p. 18.
17 Ibid., pp. 45, 10.

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700 P. BLACKLEDGE

and Philosophy'; for it was in this

moral best; before he succumbed
that is evident in his work from
Unfortunately, while Maclntyre
and a member of the Communist
to provoke much interest in eithe
emergence of the New Left three
with an audience for his ideas and
he deepened these ideas. Therefor
that Maclntyre's early work pref
New Left thinking, it is also imp
Left, Maclntyre's project would
from practical politics.
The events of 1956 — Khrushc
gary and the Anglo-French invas
widespread criticism of the worl
heart of the international system
independent political forces could
a 'New Left' emerged which sou
Communism and Western Capit
Stalinism and social democracy.19
wick pointed out, was less a cohe
which many very diverse politica
this spectrum of political positio
moral critique of Stalinism; and it
that Maclntyre signalled both th
embrace of revolutionary Marxis
Edward Thompson articulated th
Stalinism in his essay 'Socialist
This essay was a brilliant and ori
Stalinism specifically, but also to
heart, however, Thompson's es
even his grand rhetorical flouris
his essay with the claim that one
by a new society, which, despite
qualitative break with capitalism:

18 Ibid., pp. 109, 69.

19 P. Blackledge, 'Reform, Revolutio
New Left', Contemporary Politics, 1
20 P. Sedgwick, 'The Two New Le
(Harmondsworth, 1976). This essay wa
17(1964).

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 701

The instruments of production in the Soviet Union are socialise

bureaucracy is not a class, but is parasitic upon that society. Despite
asitism, the wave of human energy unleashed by the first socialis
tion has multiplied the wealth of society, and vastly enlarged the
horizons of the people.21

However, in contrast to this characterization of the Soviet system

once socialist while yet morally unpalatable, elsewhere he insisted
"end" of Communism is not a "political" end, but a human end' ,22
lation suggested a tremendous gap between the human ends o
experiment and the inhuman means through which these ends w
partially, being realized. So while Thompson implied that a pluralit
could be utilized to achieve the end of communism, he was aware
means were not morally equivalent. Concretely, in the Soviet cas
that the flaws of the Stalinist system could best be understoo
quence of the inadequate model of Marxism that had guided the B
He claimed they had embraced a mechanical interpretation of Ma
superstructure metaphor such that agency, in the form of the con
ity of the masses, was increasingly disregarded, only to find
through the monolithic party which became the guardian of true
sciousness. Following this, the 'immorality' of replacing the actio
individual with those of cardboard abstractions became 'embodied
tional form in the rigid forms of "democratic centralism" ' .23 Co
Thompson's moral critique of Stalinism involved a call both for a
ible interpretation of Marx's theory of history and a rejection of
form of political organization.
For all its undoubted power, Thompson's thesis was susceptible
tinct, but related, criticisms. First, could a mechanical version of
embodied in a democratic centralist organization bear the weight o
nation of the rise of Stalinism? Second, what, if any, were th
between socialism and Communism in his model, and if the l
human 'end', then what could be said of the abhorrent means thr
the Stalinists had at least gone some way to achieving this end? T
implicit answers to these questions suggested that he had not bro
much of the common sense of his age as he imagined. Indeed, para
ditional consequentialist ethics, which included, for the little they
the ethical justifications of their actions deployed by the Stalinists
appeared to agree that good ends could come from bad means. Mo
common with both the dominant liberal and Stalinist histories of
system, Thompson agreed that Leninism entailed Stalinism.

21 E.P. Thompson, 'Socialist Humanism', The New Reasoner, 1 (Summe

105, 138.
22 Ibid., p. 125.
23 Ibid., p. 121.

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702 P. BLACKLEDGE

accepting both of these positions, Thom

linism to an immanent critique from t
his humanist claim that socialism repre
(self) created human potentialities,24 an
tem might represent, in however disto
capitalism. This is more or less the form
Harry Hanson in the next issue of The
Hanson argued that 'Communism, in th
the proletariat. First and foremost, it i
ary elite, for pushing forward the eco
oped country at the fastest possible
process.'25 Furthermore, he insisted tha
indisputable honesty, his was an unten
with the Stalinists, and Marxism mor
framework which, despite fine talk of t
tended to subordinate the former to the
basis from which to criticize Stalinist
framework, Hanson suggested that the
action.26 However, in so doing he dehis
obviously alien to Marx's conception
demanded some reply from the Marxist
Intyre who came to the defence of a so
ism, which, while building on Thompson
capable of offering a powerful alternati
Stalinist consequentialism. Moreover, in
tyre also began to outline one of the m
tionary politics of his day.
Maclntyre's critique of Hanson's rep
Stalinism, 'Notes from the Moral Wilde
Thompson's general perspective, was sim
the weaknesses of Thompson's own e
humanism. Maclntyre opened this essay
the implied Kantianism of Hanson's m
moral critic of Communism is often a
diate Stalinist crimes in the name of mo
appeal to moral principles lies in the

24 Ibid., p. 124.
25 H. Hanson, 'An Open Letter to Edw
(Autumn 1957), p. 88.
26 Ibid., p. 79.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 703

appeal.'27 Maclntyre was just as critical of those apologists for Stali

whom socialism's moral core was lost amidst a mechanical theory of
cal progress. As to their theory of history, while Maclntyre acknow
that it was understood by both Stalin and Popper as being authentica
ist, he could not accept that it could truthfully be read into either Marx
ger or, changing his position since 1953, his more mature writings. R
suggested, Engels had played a negative role in the history of Marxis
through his comparison of Marx with Darwin, he had helped foster a
ical interpretation of historical materialism which reduced human hi
special case of natural history.28 In place of the orthodox interpretati
torical materialism, Maclntyre insisted that if the moral core of Marx
cal theory was to be retrieved and reconstructed from the fragments
had written on the subject then it must be carried out alongside a s
reconstruction of Marx's theory of history.
Maclntyre suggested that it was the Stalinists, who, through the me
a teleological vision of historical progress, identified 'what is moral
with what is actually going to be the outcome of historical developm
that the ' "ought" of principle is swallowed up in the "is" of history'
thus not enough to add something like Kant's ethics to this existing
theory of historical development if one wished to reassert moral prin
Marxism, for this theory of history negated moral choice. However
was it right to reject, as immoral, any historical event from some
higher standpoint, as 'there is no set of common, public standards t
[one] can appeal'. Indeed, any such manoeuvre would tend to gravita
existing tradition of morality which, because these had generally ev
serve some particular dominant class interests, would 'play into the
the defenders of the status quo' .30 Therefore, Maclntyre suggested, a
for both the East and the West in the Cold War based their argume
inadequate theoretical frameworks. If this was true, what would be t
ture of an alternative 'third moral position'? Maclntyre's answer wa
such a position could only be built by 'replacing a misconceived but p
view of what Marxism is by a more correct view'.31
The Stalinist insistence that history's general course was pre
rested, or so Maclntyre insisted, on a misconception of the role
base/superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. What Marx suggest
he deployed this metaphor was neither a mechanical nor a causal relat

27 A. Maclntyre, 'Notes from the Moral Wilderness', in The Maclntyre Rea

Knight, pp. 31-2. Originally published in two parts in New Reasoner, 7 (Winte
pp. 90-100 and New Reasoner, 8 (Spring 1959), pp. 89-98.
28 Ibid., p. 38.
29 Ibid., p. 32.
30 Ibid., pp. 34-5.
31 Ibid., p. 37.

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 704 P. BLACKLEDGE

Rather, he utilized Hegelian concepts t

economic base of a society provides 'a
tures arise, a set of relations around
themselves, a kernel of human rel
Indeed, Maclntyre wrote that in 'cr
structure. 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' .32 Moreover, as the essence of
the human condition is historically conditioned freedom, while general pre
dictions can reasonably be made as to the tendency of people to revolt against
capital and other oppressive systems, Marxists would be mistaken to mechan
ically predict either revolts or successful revolutions as the automatic conse
quence 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, Maclntyre suggested that we look for a 'theory
which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our stan
dards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress
automatic' .33 In his search for a basis from which to reconstruct a Marxist eth
ics, Maclntyre 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 judgments.34
Maclntyre 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' .35 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', Maclntyre 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 Maclntyre
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 inhibi
tions'.36 Moreover, he followed Marx in radically historicizing human nature,

32 Ibid., p. 39.
33 Ibid., p. 40.
34 Ibid., p. 41.
35 Ibid., pp. 43, 41.
36 A. Maclntyre, The Unconscious (London, 2nd edn., 2004), p. 62. The first edition
of this book was published in 1958 — the new edition contains a substantial new preface.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 705

without losing sight of its biological basis: 'it is only with Hegel tha
begins to possess and with Marx that Man achieves a real history', for
history 'becomes one with the history of men'.37 It is in thus historici
that Marx's greatness lies, for he refuses to follow either Hobbes into
cholic model of human needs and desires, or Diderot into a
counterposition of the state of nature against contemporary social st
Instead, Marx comprehends the limited historical truth of Hobbes's
but counterposes to it, not a Utopia, but the real movement of workers i
gle through which they realize that solidarity is a fundamental human
Maclntyre sought to ground this suggestion of Marx's through a p
rewriting of the history of ethics. He argued that such a history coul
ten as a synthesis of three strands: first, a 'history of moral codes'; s
history of human attitudes to desire'; and third, a history of 'human
While moral codes initially related to human desires, with the Pr
reformation the connection between desire and morality is broken. In
the Protestants, as humanity is by nature corrupt, then human desir
act as the basis for moral codes. Moreover, as men are finite beings, th
cannot hope to understand the mind of God, and thus cannot hope to
His moral code. Consequently, 'the moral law becomes a connection o
fiats', which are 'so far as we are concerned totally arbitrary'.38 In
world, 'desire becomes something anarchic and amoral', and, inde
moral codes lose their religious colouration and take on a secular for
are seen to act, for instance in Hobbes, as 'at best an uneasy truce o
between warring desires'.39 To counterpose desires in their natural
these moral codes, as did Diderot, was an inadequate response to
reformation view because this strategy failed to acknowledge that 'i
society desire itself is remoulded, not simply repressed' .40 Two quest
essarily arose from this claim: could this remoulding be absolute, an
process of remoulding was not absolute, was it possible that it might
scended? To understand these issues historically we must ask if a fo
human nature could emerge such that the needs and desires of individ
not felt to be in simple atomized opposition one to the other? Marx, a
to Maclntyre, comprehended both the deep historical and sociological
to this question when he suggested that 'the emergence of human n
something to be comprehended only in terms of the history of class-s
Each age reveals a development of human potentiality which is specific
form of social life and which is specifically limited by the class-struc
that society.' In particular, under advanced capitalism, according to M
Maclntyre, 'the growth of production makes it possible [for m

37 Maclntyre, 'Notes from the Moral Wilderness', p. 46.

38 Ibid., p. 43.
39 Ibid., p. 44.
40 Ibid., p. 43.

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706 P. BLACKLEDGE

reappropriate his own nature'. This

productivity of labour produces the
lives, both morally and materially
agency — the proletariat — which, t
ies a new collectivist spirit, through
both that their needs and desires can
nels, and that they do in fact need a
tyre, the proletariat, in its strugg
conditions for the solution of the
begins to embody the practice which
conception of morality and our conc
this way the proletariat comes to rea
means through which its individual m
it is in fact what they naturally desir
Maclntyre therefore understood th
men ceasing to see moral rules as th
that men have made and accepted fo
nates in the socialist struggles of t
against reified ways of perceiving th
of ethics and utilitarianism are asp
both are forms of alienation rather t
left has rid itself both of the myth of
the reification of socialism as some
taken in its name, then socialists will
means and ends through the history
Marxist morality to be, as against th
lutes', and 'as against the liberal criti
and history'.45
Unfortunately, far from seeming i
socialism appeared to be almost non-
this pressing problem of apathy that
as part of its project of building a n
Left published a collection, edited by
thy. As its title suggests this collecti
and a counter to, the exiting cultur
Thompson overviewed two differe
which he defined as the tendency fo
public evils', and countered to them h

41 Ibid., p. 46.
42 Ibid., p. 45.
43 Ibid., p. 48.
44 Ibid., pp. 42,49.
45 Ibid., p. 47.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 707

view that apathy had grown because 'prosperity leaves no room for disc
tent' ; while, second, he accepted the partial truth of the view that apathy
'an expression of the impotence of the individual in the face of contempo
institutions', but noted that this was a universal truth, whereas apathy was
In place of these models, Thompson believed that the key cause of the c
temporary malaise was that people 'do not believe that there is any worka
alternative, or they very much dislike any alternative (such as Commun
which is proposed' ,46 He thus argued that the New Left should aim to de
strate the practicality of a preferable political system. Indeed, he insisted
so over-ripe was Britain for socialism that 'any vigorous initiative w
probes beyond the conventional limits of party controversy calls into ques
the continuance of the capitalist system'.47 The rest of the book was th
designed to explore this possibility. Moreover, while the New Left did n
hold to a 'party line', most of the contributors to the volume worked with
broadly shared framework, whereas, as Thompson wrote, Maclntyre
Trotskyite differs in some ways from all other contributions'.48
Whatever his disagreements with his New Left comrades, Maclnty
agreed with them that apathy was a pressing political concern wh
demanded serious consideration; and so, in his essay 'Breaking the Chain
Reason', he set himself the task of uncovering the intellectual culture t
reinforced political apathy by denigrating the very concept of commitme
Pointing out that at the cusp of the modern era intellectuals were wont to
tify themselves as radicals, Maclntyre noted that the dominant reason g
by contemporary intellectuals to excuse their own lack of political comm
ment 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 socia
groups. What unites all those who live within them is that their lives ar
shaped and driven forward by events and decisions which are not their ow
making.49

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, Maclntyre sought to trace the intelligentsia's tra
jectory 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

46 E.P. Thompson, 'At the Point of Decay', in Out of Apathy, ed. E.P. Thompson
(London, 1960), pp. 5-8.
47 Ibid., p. 10.
48 Ibid., p. 14.
49 A. Maclntyre, 'Breaking the Chains of Reason', in Out of Apathy, ed. Thompson,
pp. 195-240, p. 198.

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708 P. BLACKLEDGE

thinkers: freedom, reason, human nat

ated much of what he had written in
importance of purposive action to sat
needs, wants and desires through his
tory 'is a series of developing purpose
in the overcoming of conflicts, fre
noted, 'post-Hegelian discussions of f
vital link between freedom and rea
tuted in the name of positive freedom
men have been called free when enclo
tion'.52 Moreover, as the ideals of
became fragmented and therefore los
human potential through which the li
maintained. This process left intellec
culture, ill equipped to respond to the
state' .53 In this context, the human s
alistic method of natural science, suc
tions of social processes became 'the d
human sciences'.54 This process was
model for the rat psychologists and
tended to counterpose to it the impo
eral models of society. Thus Popper
human sciences and took Marxism as
disease, despite the fact that 'Marx hi
Maclntyre's critique of Popper's cl
mechanical materialism allowed him t
sition that he constructed between M
methodological individualism. By con
acterisation of individuals and classes
not two separate tasks'. Therefore, Po
history and no society which is not th
als; but equally there are no individua
apart from their society'.56 Whereas
human behaviour, he continued to
action could, adequately, be postulate
alternative of the methodological i

50 Ibid., p. 199.
51 Ibid., p. 200.
52 Ibid., p. 201.
53 Ibid., p. 208.
54 Ibid., p. 210.
55 Ibid., p. 217.
56 Ibid., p. 220.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 709

false alternatives, Maclntyre repeated his claim for the importance of

ive action: for both mechanical rule-governed behaviour and lawless in
ual action broke the link between 'understanding and action'. The pro
with both of these approaches to social action is that they entail p
fatalism:

Either men can discern the laws which govern social development or t
cannot. If they can, then they must avow that their own behaviour is sub
to these laws and consequently they must admit that they have discover
themselves to be not agents, but victims, part of a social process wh
occurs independently of human mind, feeling and will. If they cannot
cern such laws, then they are necessarily helpless, for they have no inst
ments of change at their hands. So in any case human agency is bound t
ineffective. Of course, so far as small-scale changes are concerned, it m
be otherwise. All sociologists leave room for reformist manoeuvre.57

This ideology, Maclntyre reminded us, did not exist in some pure st
divorced from the world of work and routine, but rather grew out o
world: 'our social life and our intellectual visions reinforce each other.
social life is one in which human activity is rendered uncreative and
We live in a society of . . . predetermined lives'.58 Indeed, so sterile i
social life that even when intellectuals reach beyond it their work is n
through the most conformist interpretation: thus the radical implicati
both Wittengenstein and Freud were, or so Maclntyre argued, castrat
interpretation. How then to break from these predetermined pathwa
opposition to crude vanguardism, Maclntyre insisted that freedom ca
won by telling the masses to do what the elite desires it do, but only by h
'them move where they desire. The goal is not happiness, or satisfactio
freedom. And freedom has to be both means and ends. The mechanica
ration of means and ends is suitable enough for human manipulation,
human liberation.'59 For Maclntyre, emancipatory politics emerge spo
ously through the struggles of the working class against capitalism.60
insight allowed him to move from a standard Marxist critique of Kanti
to a powerful break with the vestigial influence of consequentialism th
been felt as a burden on Marxist approaches to ethics in the century
Maclntyre made his contribution. Thus, because freedom was both the
and the end of socialist activity, such activity, contra the Kantians, req
strong anchorage in contemporary history, while, contra the con
tialists, it was not a reified end that could be inaugurated by a variet
means. Therefore, Maclntyre concluded, 'the philosophers have contin

57 Ibid., p. 225.
58 Ibid., p. 230.
59 Ibid., p. 235.
60 Ibid., pp. 230, 238.

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 710 P. BLACKLEDGE

interpret the world differently; the

less, while he signalled his allegiance t
was less than clear from the text wh
nately he put some meat on these bon
journals of the Trotskyist left in the
Perhaps the most substantial of t
tion'. This essay was in large part a c
ous humanist reinterpretation of Mar
defence of Hegel's conception of free
deepening of this notion through his
dom and the achievement of a classle
Hegelian, Maclntyre refused to reify
rather historicized it as a series of m
the free man 'in every age is that m
makes his own life his own'.62 Withi
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 peo
ple 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 indi
vidual we want to be'. Given the validity of this claim, it was only logical for
Maclntyre to conclude that 'to assert oneself at the expense of the organisa
tion 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 organization that
challenges it: 'The topic of freedom is also the topic of revolution.'63 At this
point, Maclntyre introduced a crucial mediating clause into his argument:
while the working class, through its struggles against capital, might spontane
ously generate emancipatory movements, workers have proved incapable of
spontaneously realizing the potential of these struggles. However, if freedom
cannot be handed to the working class from above, how then might it be real
ized from such unpromising material? Maclntyre answered that socialists
must join revolutionary parties, whose goal is not freedom itself, but rather to
act in such a way as to aid the proletariat to achieve freedom. 'The path to free
dom 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.'64 Moreover, and against those socialists
such as Thompson and the rest of the majority within the New Left who

61 Ibid., p. 240.
62 A. Maclntyre, 'Freedom and Revolution', Labour Review (February/March 1960),
pp. 19-24, p. 20.
63 Ibid., p. 22.
64 Ibid., p. 23.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 711

rejected the goal of building a socialist party, Maclntyre suggested that

suffered from 'the illusion that one can as an isolated individual escape f
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, Maclntyre concluded, 'the road to socialism and democratic centra

are . . . inseparable'.65 More specifically, Maclntyre turned theory into p
tice when he joined the Trotskyist movement in the late 1950s.

Towards Maclntyre's Rejection of Marxism

But what did remaining true to the spirit of Trotskyism imply in the e
1960s? Knight suggests that it involved embracing dogma: by which he
probably means the dogmatic assertion that the working class could beco
the agency of the socialist revolution. However, Maclntyre, at least in th
mid-1960s, did not understand his allegiance to Marxism in such crude ter
Rather, as is readily apparent from his review of Lucien Goldmann's The
den God, he did not believe that the working class would, at some point in
future, certainly be transformed into a revolutionary agency, but rathe
wagered that it might. According to Goldmann's model, Marxists could n
guarantee the victory of socialism, but must make a wager on the revolut
ary potential, and indeed triumph, of the proletariat in the struggle aga
capital.66 Maclntyre accepted this argument, and indeed developed it when
wrote that 'one cannot first understand the world and only then act on it.
one understands the world will depend in part on the decision implicit in
already taken actions. The wager of action is unavoidable.'67 To label Mac
tyre's wager as dogmatic is thus to miss the point: he believed that one wa
another we all make the wager, and those who do not bet on the workers
compelled to retreat back to the tragic vision: if we reject Marx then we
back to Kant. To fully comprehend Maclntyre's break with Marxism we m
therefore ask not what made him drop the dogma, but rather what made
change his bet?
One fact that did not entail Maclntyre's break with the revolutionary
was his realization, noted at the close of After Virtue, that Trotsky's late p
cal perspectives had been refuted by history. In contrast to his la

65 Ibid., p. 24.
66 L. Goldmann, The Hidden God (London, 1964), p. 301.
67 A. Maclntyre, 'Pascal and Marx: On Lucien Goldmann's Hidden God.', in A.
Intyre, Against the Self-images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Lon
1971), pp. 76-87, p. 84.

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 712 P. BLACKLEDGE

pessimistic reading of the failing

review of the third volume of Deu
insisted that Trotskyism was a con
hands of Deutscher stood in stark
those such as Alfred Rosmer an
thrust of this analysis was borrow
with which Maclntyre had become
spectives of this organization, Mac
through its reification of one m
achieve a scientific analysis of the
ble and incoherent foundation; for
the Soviet social formation and the f
predictions which had been refute
classical Marxism after this refutat
necessary break with the letter, if
holding to the letter of their maste
Maclntyre claimed, necessarily b
thought.68
Despite this powerful defence of the relevance of heterodox Trotskyism to
the modern world, within a few years Maclntyre had broken both with Inter
national Socialism specifically and Marxism more generally.69 The first sug
gestion that Maclntyre 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 criticized Williams for
losing sight of the tension in an individual's life between 'his unrealised
potentialities and the barriers which confront their realisation'.70 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 atti
tude 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 'continu
ally expanding investment and continually expanding consumption', the

68 A. Maclntyre, 'Trotsky in Exile', in Maclntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age

pp. 52-9, pp. 57-8. This essay was first published in Encounter in 1963. For Interna
tional Socialism's reading of Trotsky see T. Cliff, 'The Nature of Stalinist Russia'
[1948], in T. Cliff, Marxist Theory after Trotsky (London, 2003), p. 1.
69 While Maclntyre's name was removed from the list of editors of International
Socialism in 1968 — as the organization sought to disassociate itself from his actions
against student radicals in Essex — he had in fact ceased to involve himself with the
organization some two or three years earlier.
70 A. Maclntyre, 'Culture and Revolution', International Socialism, 5 (1961), p. 28.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 713

struggles of the working class, or at least part of it, had been 'instit
ised'.71
While Maclntyre therefore seems to have responded pessimistically to the
decline of CND, in the short term he continued to defend revolutionary poli
tics. Thus, in 'Rejoinder to Left Reformism', he took issue with Henry Col
lins' defence of a left reformist strategy for Labour. Like Bernstein and the
revisionists of the 1890s, Collins, according to Maclntyre, 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 coher
ent response to the problems that beset the working class, than it was a reflec
tion of a particular moment in the history of capitalism, which arose 'within a
capitalism which has learnt some degree of rationalisation and control'.72
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. Accord
ingly, Maclntyre suggested in his essay 'Prediction and Polities', published in
International Socialism in 1963, that contemporary economic trends had cre
ated barriers to the diffusion of socialist class consciousness across the work
ing 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 some
what ironic that many socialists merely inverted the dominant ideology refer
ring to the inevitability of the victory of socialism, rather than the inevitable
continuation of capitalism. Moreover, while he noted that a minority of Marx
ists 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'.73 Macln
tyre opened his attempt to move beyond these two inadequate interpretations
of Marxism with the suggestion that post-war capitalism had been trans
formed 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.74

However, if this argument implied that economic crises on the scale of the
1930s could be managed out of existence, then, while Maclntyre's break with

71 A. Maclntyre, 'The Sleepwalking Society', Socialist Review (May 1962), p. 5.

72 A. Maclntyre, 'Rejoinder to Left Reformism', International Socialism, 6 (1961),
pp. 20-3, p. 21.
73 A. Maclntyre, 'Prediction and Polities', International Socialism, 13 (1963), p. 17.
74 Ibid., p. 18.

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714 P. BLACKLEDGE

mechanical Marxism was plain, it w

avoid the trap of substitutionism: f
towards crises, then what force wo
in society? In 1959 he had avoided t
essary relationship between his the
of human reactions to economic pr
Marx's explanation of capitalist crisi
but of falling return on profit whic
ment. And this explanation, like the
such crisis, rests on his view of wh
capitalism.75

Moreover, he reasserted and deep

gested that revolutionaries should d
together three elements in our soc
tion with social life which capitalism
crisis in capitalist social order'; and
he wrote 'Prediction and Politics' h
were inevitable. This is not to sugg
rain upon which socialists operat
tional amongst Marxists. On the co
associated with capitalism tended to
class: 'there is a sad case for saying
tion today against the employers in
issues on which you are likely to
issues that are going to divide you
this argument was not a particular
tional Socialism group. Neverthel
concern, though not for pessimism
nite cause for optimism' : the shop
ers. Moreover, as the Wilson Gover
by launching a generalized challe
medium of incomes policy, then
between sectional strength and the
nities for the left to influence t
sciousness within the working cl

75 Maclntyre, 'Notes from the Moral

76 Maclntyre, 'Rejoinder to Left Refo
77 A. Maclntyre, Unpublished paper
1963, p. 6. A. Maclntyre, 'Herbert Mar
78 T. Cliff and C. Barker, Incomes P
1966), pp. 128-36. For an earlier elabor
joinder to Left-Reformism', Internat

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 715

Maclntyre argued that Marx's theory of economic crisis was inapplicable

the modern world, his analysis of contemporary trends within the wor
class ended on the pessimistic note of the working class's growing fragme
tion. Consequently, his understanding of the one hope for socialism was
ited to the feeling, found within the working class, that capitalism
constraining their potential for free development: 'The germ of his libera
lies in the twin facts that capitalism cannot prevent him from recognising
he is unfree and from combining with other workers to free himself ,79
Problematically, if economic crises were not going to play the role of
ning the flames of rebellion against this feeling of enslavement, and in
acted to retard them, then Maclntyre was at a loss to explain what forc
beyond the general tendency of capitalism to expand the size of the work
class, would act upon human nature to generate the collective revolts up
which socialists could base their practice. Bereft of an objective tend
towards revolutionary consciousness, Maclntyre increasingly came to vie
the subjective role of socialist activists as the crucial catalyst to the dev
ment of socialist consciousness within the working class. Thus 'Predictio
and Politics' concluded with the argument that as the condition for the f
capitalism was the growth in socialist class consciousness within the pro
iat, and, as this growth was neither inevitable nor impossible, it 'depends u
us' to make that change in consciousness: 'because with our working
allies we may yet learn both what now makes us behave as we do, and w
may transform our action until we become capable of making the transitio
socialism'.80
Maclntyre followed this general argument with a more concrete applic
tion of his understanding of historical materialism in his next essay for
national Socialism: 'Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning'. In this essa
argued that while socialists should reject, as unfeasible, the goal of winn
over the Labour Party to socialism, they should aim to 'recreate a politic
trade unionism out of the existing links between the Labour Party and
unions'. Indeed, Maclntyre was keen to point to the positive potential in
ent in the emergence of a new form of capitalism: for where most sociolo
interpreted the growth of a new layer of brain workers as a sign of
embourgeoisification of the working class, Maclntyre noticed that the c
tions of work of these supposedly middle-class professionals were becom
increasingly proletarianized, such that not only could they be won over
socialism, they could also add to the intellectual capital of the workers' m
ment. Moreover, he envisaged a socialist perspective for this new enlarg

this essay was to bolster Maclntyre's critique of Collins noted above. Thanks to
Harman for this reference.

79 Maclntyre, 'Rejoinder to Left Reformism', p. 23. A. Maclntyre, Marcuse

don, 1970), p. 72.
80 Maclntyre, 'Prediction and Polities', p. 19.

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 716 P. BLACKLEDGE

proletariat. However, to realize this

egy that, initially, involved placin
Labour Government: first, to 'side w
ers'; then to insist that education be
their own lives and to take power
quently, as these demands were be
unionism might organize strikes, not
as planned attempts to break capitali
However, the prerequisite for the
every worker is able to understand a
Unfortunately, there were two obvi
suggestions. First, and least seriou
involved in denying that the Labour
simultaneously demanding that it ess
anti-capitalist, government, in respe
lem was not too serious because, in
interpreted as a series of 'lines in th
to struggle against the incoming g
Maclntyre imagined them.82 Howev
ous problem with Maclntyre's formu
gesting that the only hope for the r
every worker is able to understand
confused the ends of a revolutionary
working class acted as a united anti-
socialist revolution would be guaran
How then did Maclntyre envisage th
sciousness of the mass of workers to
Maclntyre had addressed this issue
only tangentially and at a very gene
all the growing points of human acti
coherent theoretical expression, so t
effective' .83 He added some weight t
presented to an International Soci
implicitly drawing upon Trotsky's T
revolutionary leadership involved fo
which could be made upon the inc
while being formally reformist, cou
revolutionary transformation of soc
for the realization of these deman

81 A. Maclntyre, 'Labour Policy and C

15(1963), p. 8.
82 Maclntyre, Unpublished paper, p. 20.
83 Maclntyre, 'Breaking the Chains of Reason', p. 238.

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 717

consciousness necessary to make that revolution.84 However, as t

ness of Trotsky's model of transitional demands depended on
stances within which they were made, unfavourable circumst
negate their revolutionary content. As Duncan Hallas has argu
given time "today's consciousness of wide layers" is decidedly
tionary, then it will not be transformed by slogans.'85 Unfortunat
text within which Maclntyre wrote was characterized by
non-revolutionary working-class consciousness; and no amoun
tional demands were going to change this. If Maclntyre's tr
demands were not equal to the task of relating to workers in a p
nomic boom and relative depoliticization, it is easy to imagine ho
move from an ultra-optimistic to an ultra-pessimistic interpreta
potential of workers' struggle to generate socialist consciousness,
given his belief that at the economic level the class struggle tende
workers more than it united them.
Hence, without any model of objective tendencies that might fac
political unification of the working class, the workers' cry for f
destined to be atomized and hopeless. This is the conclusion impli
works of the later 1960s, which, while written when he was still n
editor of International Socialism, universally suggested no hope f
tion. So, in his introduction to Marx's ideas for an academic audie
he powerfully argued that 'the most crucial later activity of Marx',
write Capital, but was rather through his actions in 'helping to f
guiding the International Working Men's Association', he con
Marx 'still leaves the question of working-class political growth o
Whether this observation was correct of Marx, it certainly appeare
of Maclntyre's interpretation of Marxism, for his contemporary
insights seemed increasingly abstract and divorced from the prac
mass movement that could bring them to life.
The feeling that Maclntyre's social theory was divorced from a
that immanent forces within contemporary capitalism might dev
transformative agency was reinforced in a series of lectures origin
in 1964, but published some three years later as Secularization
Change. In this book he deployed his sophisticated Marxist method
a comparative history of religious and secular beliefs in modern
America. On the basis of this history he argued that Engels had bee
in his overly optimistic perspective for the future secularization
society, as a corollary of his overly optimistic perspectives fo
However, Maclntyre went beyond a critique of Engels to suggest

84 Maclntyre, Unpublished paper, p. 20.

85 D. Hallas, Trotsky's Marxism (London, 1979), p. 104.
86 A. Maclntyre, 'Marx', in Western Political Philosophers: A Backgroun
M. Cranston (London, 1964), pp. 99-108, p. 106.

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718 P. BLACKLEDGE

inability of men to discard Christianit

post-Christian means of understandin
suggested that this failure was by no
tendencies with which socialists mi
them to prove Engels correct.87
If Maclntyre's rejection of the appli
post-war capitalism opened the door
mism, this tendency was reinforced i
Marx's (and indeed any other) model
coherent theory of the struggle for s
his classic A Short History of Ethics, d
relationship between morality and de
disjoined from either any historical o
earlier been so committed.88 Thus, h
benchmark from which to adjudicate
individual morality to an existentia
1966, at least in as far has he did not
International Socialism, he refused an
defended against any alternative. Mor
with which to underpin it, his theory o
in 'Freedom and Revolution', was le
ity, in this context, could boast no m
peting moral claim. In fact, by the lat
view Marxism as either a science or as
of many competing worldviews. As a
tion of Marxism: An Interpretation i
and Christianity, he removed any sug
been written to inform a committed
where, in the second edition, Marx
Feuerbach and Hegel was still there, g
of the Christianity.90 Indeed, while t
was formally closer to Marxism than
tional Socialism bemoaned the re-wri
of the first edition had made that muc
Whatever the theoretical roots of
Socialism
in 1968, at the time he rem

87 A. Maclntyre, Secularization and Mo

88 A. Maclntyre, A Short History of Et
wick, 'The Ethical Dance — A Review of
Socialist Register, ed. M. Eve and D. Mus
89 Maclntyre, A Short History of Ethics
90 A. Maclntyre, Marxism and Christian
91 R. Kuper, 'Marxism and Christianity',

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 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 719

However, something of his mind-set can be gleaned from his book Marcu
published in 1970. In this essay, Maclntyre emphasized his own continuin
allegiance to the concepts of human liberation and freedom. However, he a
held to something of a performative contraction in so far as he simultaneo
rejected the argument that an ideal pure Marxism could be deployed as an
alternative to the reality of Marxism's history, while accepting an implicit
idealized vision of the struggle for liberation. Thus, he denounced the co
temporary student struggles as 'the first parent-financed revolts' that w
'more like a new version of the children's crusade than a revolutionary mo
ment'.92 This elitist critique of the movement of 1968 allowed Maclntyre
maintain a formal allegiance to the emancipatory politics of the left, wh
dismissing real struggles as they happened around him: so, against the disr
tive influence of 'Marcuse's students', Maclntyre extolled, in 1970, the vi
tues and 'authority' of the university as a seat of learning.93

Conclusion

The power of Maclntyre's Marxism in the period of the first New Left was
rooted in his argument that any moral claim, if it was to be universalized in the
modern world, must be rooted both in a historically conceived theory of
human nature, as actualized 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 determin
ism. However, despite this contribution to Marxist theory, Maclntyre pro
gressively 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 Maclntyre's tra
jectory can be read as a response to the decline of the New Left and CND.
However, this context demanded interpretation, and Maclntyre'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 cri
sis. Together, these two revisions of Marxism meant that he read the contem
porary 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 Maclntyre's will and the pessimism of
his intellect became so great that something eventually had to give. Since
then, while Maclntyre has remained a firm critic of international capitalism, a
deep sense of pessimism has coloured his moral theory.

92 Maclntyre, Marcuse, pp. 61, 89.

93 Ibid., p. 91.

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720 P. BLACKLEDGE

Nonetheless, in his most recent w

towards rejecting the two fundament
pessimism. For instance, in his intro
and Christianity, he suggests that he
value theory — which itself under
Dependent Rational Animals he argue
Virtue and A Short History of Ethics
biology to be possible'.94 In thus reap
nomic theory and more general theo
nificantly reduced the theoretical
Indeed, in a new preface to his 1958
necessity of a linkage between psy
would have made perfect sense to his
remains between Marxism and his co
Maclntyre's changed perspective a
renewed dialogue between his ideas an

Paul Blackledge LEEDS METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

94 A. Maclntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London, 1995), p. xx. A. Maclntyre

Dependent Rational Animals (London, 1999), p. x.
95 Maclntyre, The Unconscious, pp. 27, 114.

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