Alasdair MacIntyre’s original critique of liberal modernity has won followers on the Left and the Right. His account of how capitalism has undermined the conditions of human flourishing deserves the serious attention of socialists.
Alasdair MacIntyre speaking on August 6, 2022. (Levan Ramishvili / Flickr)
Alasdair MacIntyre is that rarest of intellectuals: an author of such obvious intelligence and depth that his insights have been claimed by figures across the political spectrum. This includes many important intellectuals on the political right. Robert Bork, a founding figure of constitutional originalism who Ronald Reagan tried and failed to appoint to the Supreme Court, saw MacIntyre as convincingly disproving that “moral philosophy can ever arrive at a universally accepted system.” In his essay collection Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents, prominent conservative writer Patrick Deneen endorses MacIntyre’s claim that we “live on the cusp of a New Dark Ages,” which, Deneen argues, can only be avoided by an “end to liberalism” and a transition “into a post-liberal and hopeful future.”
This conservative interpretation of MacIntyre draws heavily on his condemnation of liberal modernity. Conservatives read MacIntyre as offering a typically right-wing story of decline and fall, from the auspicious heights of an objective understanding of human flourishing and virtue articulated by Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy to a libertine philosophy that cannot discriminate between better and worse desires or ways of living. But few of these conservative appropriations of MacIntyre take seriously a constant through line in his work: his unremitting condemnation of capitalism and his abiding appreciation for the thought of Karl Marx.
Right-wing interpreters usually take one of two stances on MacIntyre’s critiques of liberalism and capitalism. Either they reject both, or they follow MacIntyre in rejecting liberalism while remaining silent on — or continuing to endorse — capitalism. In fact, much in MacIntyre’s critique of capitalism is vital, as are many of his positive claims about the importance of virtue and community. But I believe that a progressive liberalism, or liberal socialism, can answer his objections by rejecting most of what is noxious about modernity while preserving its core achievements.
MacIntyre and Marx
Political scientist Ian Shapiro describes MacIntyre as a “fairly conventional Marxist” up until his turn to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in the late 1970s and the ’80s. But this elides the idiosyncratic character of MacIntyre’s early Marxism and the ways he has never really broken with Marx. There is a continuity to MacIntyre’s work that lies in the critical rejection of capitalist modernity and its atomistic nihilism as well as in his emphasis on rebuilding egalitarian communities and social solidarity as an answer to the sickness.
These distinctive preoccupations can be seen in MacIntyre’s early minor classic Marxism and Christianity (1968), which makes a compelling case that Marxism should not be understood as an emphatic rejection of the Christian worldview. MacIntyre stresses that Marx and Engels weren’t interested in the crude materialist rejection of religion as something simply untrue from a scientific standpoint. Instead, they recognized that religion was likely to persist, even in the face of materialist and scientific-rationalist objections, because it answered the “social needs” of billions of people living in alienated and class-ridden societies. The only way to permanently overcome religion was to build the kind of just and nonalienated societies that religious faiths projected onto the afterlife or the world to come.
The young MacIntyre was optimistic that Marxism could carry on the best of the Christian tradition as the theoretical and practical vehicle of our social hopes. This early optimism began to wither as the revolutionary aspirations of the New Left in the 1960s gave way to reactionary retrenchment in the ’70s. The more characteristically acidic side of MacIntyre is on full display in his short book Marcuse (1970), which doubles as both a scathing (and sometimes unfair) evaluation of the titular philosopher and a riposte to the period’s outsize optimism. MacIntyre argues that the critical theory of the era vacillated between projecting inflated hopes of a vague utopia to come and expressing pessimism about whether the “revolutionary forces” that would supposedly bring this utopia about were up to the task.
MacIntyre criticizes Marcuse and other nouveau Marxist theorists for imagining that “human nature is indefinitely malleable” and for the “elitism” of thinking that the “majority cannot voice their true needs, for they cannot perceive or feel them. The minority must therefore voice their needs for them and this active minority must rescue the necessarily passive majority.” The “active minority” would consist of critical theorists rather than the “working class” — who Marcuse treated as so hoodwinked by one-dimensional reason and Boomer rock that they could no longer be expected to transcend their “false consciousness.”
The young MacIntyre was optimistic that Marxism could carry on the best of the Christian tradition as the theoretical and practical vehicle of our social hopes.
Reading some of MacIntyre’s rhetoric in Marcuse, one might be forgiven for thinking the author was on the familiar trajectory of a disappointed radical becoming a conservative out of disgust for leftist intellectuals and their impotent radicalism. But the book is in fact closer to a nostalgic lament for a more powerful, working-class Marxism that MacIntyre worries might have run its course. He disdains “flower power, the language of the hippie subculture, that of soul culture, the use of four-letter words” as many forms of “petty-bourgeois bohemia.”
MacIntyre’s gloomy rejection of ’60s radicalism as merely an expression of bourgeois romanticism and consumerist individualism is, like much of his early work, by turns thoughtful and polemically overstated. Its pessimism about the New Left looks prescient given the failure of the era’s social movements to comprehensively challenge capitalism’s injustice. But MacIntyre understates the importance of the civil rights and feminist movements, as well as student opposition to the war in Vietnam. These movements won some important victories and were certainly motivated by higher ideals than individualistic desires to get high and enjoy free love.
MacIntyre’s thought pivoted sharply in the 1980s with the publication of his most famous work, After Virtue. At the core of the book is a richly thought-out rejection of modernity. MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project conceived itself as a rationalist enterprise to shed humankind’s attachment to unreason — an awakening from self-imposed immaturity, as Immanuel Kant put it in “What is Enlightenment?” This project meant relentlessly attacking what Enlightenment philosophers saw as antiquarian modes of thinking, from Aristotle to Aquinas, which held that there are higher ends built into nature and/or ordained by God, the pursuit of which constitutes human flourishing.
To be clear, MacIntyre acknowledges the real force of certain modern epistemological and metaphysical objections to premodern moral conceptions. There was no turning back the clock on modern scientific theory with a simple return to classical Aristotelian natural teleology. This nuance is often ignored by postliberals like Deneen, who assume that we can just reject the moral framework of liberal modernity without bothering to refute the metaphysics it stands on.
What is more important for the MacIntyre of After Virtue is the failure of Enlightenment liberals to put anything morally stable in place of what they zealously destroyed. Already profoundly influenced by the mores of emerging capitalism, early liberals sought to ground morality in atomized individuals’ rational pursuit of self-interested and self-selected goals. This project came in many different flavors, MacIntyre argued, from Kantian deontology to utilitarianism to libertarian natural-rights doctrines.
What is more important for the MacIntyre of After Virtue is the failure of Enlightenment liberals to put anything morally stable in place of what they zealously destroyed.
But for MacIntyre, all these liberal constructs fail to establish objective moral standards and end up in the same place: emotivism. This view holds that morality itself is little more than an expression of subjective taste, and one’s choice of a moral outlook isn’t fundamentally different from one’s choices as a consumer clicking away on Amazon.
Indeed, MacIntyre argued, moral discourse itself has become saturated by the dumb flatness of market language. Some people might “prefer” to live a life of Christian abstention, others one of hedonistic sexual abandon, and still others one of bourgeois mediocrity. Liberal societies tried to create space for all of these moral viewpoints, while capitalists would cheerfully employ workers all around the world to produce Bibles and pornography alike to cater to these varied desires.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre begins developing a complex Aristotelian alternative to the worldview of liberal modernity. This alternative is a moral framework based on the cultivation of virtues, understood as the pursuit of human excellence made possible by particular traditions and practices. These traditional practices are established by ways of life within our specific communities and are supported by institutions ranging from social clubs to hockey teams to churches.
MacIntyre makes clear, however, that he isn’t advancing a conservative thesis that defends traditional practices and institutions, as a matter of prerational loyalty, against liberal modernity, à la Edmund Burke. The sort of traditions he’s talking about includes modes of arguments that are critical of the status quo, even radically so. Marxism itself, after all, emerged as a self-critique of Enlightenment liberalism. Criticizing the use of tradition by “conservative political theorists” as “ideological,” MacIntyre claims that “when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.”
A Christian Marxism?
MacIntyre’s attitude toward Marx and Marxism in After Virtue is ambivalent. On the one hand, he charges Marxist socialism with being at its core “deeply optimistic.” It assumed that the development of human productive powers under capitalism would lay the foundation for a more humane society. Yet, MacIntyre asks, if the “moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived?”
For MacIntyre in the 1980s, Marxist optimism of the will was in conflict with its more sensible pessimism of the intellect, which demonstrated over and over again that the alienation and egoism induced by capitalism usually expressed itself in destructive ways rather than a push for democratic socialism. But stripped of this unwarranted optimism about socialism, Marxism has become as exhausted as “every other political tradition in our culture.” Indeed, when Marxism is confronted with moral questions, MacIntyre argues, it falls back on quintessentially liberal moral philosophies like utilitarianism or Kantianism.
MacIntyre’s positive endorsement of a practice- and community-based ethics of virtue is intended as a constructive alternative to this Marxist and critical-theoretical exhaustion. But as MacIntyre himself came to realize, a progressive project cannot achieve such a rethinking of modernity without relying on Marx. In his latest major book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016), MacIntyre restates many of his core objections to liberal modernity in more measured terms. There he returns to Marx as the figure who provides the “key resources” for understanding the travails of the modern world — albeit a Marx synthesized with Aristotle and Aquinas.
When Marxism is confronted with moral questions, MacIntyre argues, it falls back on quintessentially liberal moral philosophies like utilitarianism or Kantianism.
Marxism explains how the historical rise of capitalism came to stamp so much of our moral thinking and discourse, MacIntyre says. This includes the adoption of characteristic ways of thinking about the economy and human nature, which are taken as transhistorical truths rather than reflections of a specific mode of production.
These ways of thinking prevent apologists for capitalism from recognizing the system’s culpability in producing misery and social decay. Capitalism’s defenders endlessly explain these problems away, often by suggesting our core failure is just not being committed enough to the market.
Anti-Liberalism or Anti-Capitalism?
In his Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters, Ronald Beiner praises MacIntyre’s “very ambitious meta-narrative, leading from virtuous antiquity to corrupt modernity” while critiquing his “problematic blend of conservatism and radicalism.” Beiner argues that MacIntyre is insufficiently sensitive to the benefits of liberal modernity, while having little to suggest in its place other than a kind of localism — we should focus on rebuilding the moral lives of particular close-knit communities, restoring or recreating traditional practices and institutions that allow us to pursue the human good together. Beiner writes that if our
only philosophical purpose is to impugn liberalism of any stripes as a false philosophy, then this amalgam of Marxism and Thomism seems to supply what one seeks, but if one is looking for a political philosophy that articulates, in a more positive fashion, what is true and what is dubious in contemporary experience, then MacIntyre’s synthesis of conservatism and radicalism looks quite a bit more questionable.
I’m less convinced that there is much that is genuinely conservative in MacIntyre’s writing: either in the sense that he wants to conserve much about modernity, or that he’s in any way committed to the anti-egalitarian core of right-wing thinking. Quite the opposite. But I agree with Beiner that MacIntyre’s profound diagnoses of the problems of modernity are often more compelling than his alternative positive conception of morality.
This is because he goes too far in conflating the moral core of liberalism worth saving with the ideological categories of advanced capitalism. When MacIntyre writes in Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity that “in liberal democratic societies, ostensibly committed to egalitarian political ideals, gross financial and educational inequalities issue in gross political inequalities,” he is no doubt right. But egalitarian liberals from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls would have agreed with MacIntyre here and pointed to the wide gap between the “egalitarian political ideal” of liberalism and its real-world perversion by capital. The answer, on this view, isn’t to abandon liberalism, but to actually realize its moral principles in practice.
MacIntyre goes too far in conflating the moral core of liberalism worth saving with the ideological categories of advanced capitalism.
Classical liberal thinking of the sort MacIntyre rightly rejects was characterized by a commitment to what political theorist C. B. Macpherson called “possessive individualism.” This constituted a powerful fusion of anthropology and ethics, which conceived the human world in terms of atomized, self-interested individuals each aspiring to no higher end than maximizing their own chosen pleasures. Much of proto-liberal and classical liberal thinking is concerned to show how such fundamentally egoistic and infinitely acquisitive beings can nonetheless live together peacefully. Eventually, classical liberalism arrived at the ideal of the market as a mechanism that channels human selfishness into a sphere of bounded competition where acquisitiveness is tempered by respect for the rule of law — especially respect for property rights.
This outlook is bleak and uninspiring, and it deserves the full force of MacIntyre’s critique. To the extent that modern neoliberalism constitutes a descendent or perhaps a radicalization of the possessive worldview, it is very much the case that we live in a world where the barbarians “have already been governing us for some time,” as MacIntyre puts it.
A Philosophy for Human Flourishing
But there is another strain of liberalism, a progressive and egalitarian one, that has long rejected the idea that the highest goal in life should be something as sad as each person maximizing the satisfaction of their own selfish desires. Thinkers like Mill, Rawls, and Chantal Mouffe, for instance, have argued that liberal individualism can and should be combined with generous redistribution and workplace democracy. A liberal socialism, built around principles of solidarity and mutual respect, could also satisfy our yearning for community and a society where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
Importantly, this liberal conception of socialist community and development includes a recognition that individual civil and political rights need to be protected and expanded, lest “the community” ends up dominating individuals, inhibiting personal freedom and itself becoming a source of alienation. This concern about the domination of the individual by traditional authorities is an enduring one leveled against authors like MacIntyre, and is perhaps one reason why many of his contemporaries who were also labeled “communitarians” came around to defending core liberal rights.
The liberal conception of socialist community includes a recognition that individual civil and political rights need to be protected and expanded, lest ‘the community’ ends up dominating individuals.
In other respects, egalitarian liberals and MacIntyreans might not be so far apart. Rawls, for example, advocated what he called the “Aristotelian principle,” which holds that “other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.” Partly on this ground, he argued that a just society should offer all people equal chances at developing their capacities. He would certainly be at one with MacIntyre here, and in lamenting the ways capitalism systematically holds most people back in this regard.
A core disagreement between liberal egalitarians like Rawls and myself, on the one hand, and MacIntyre on the other concerns the fundamental moral framework underlying our views about what social justice requires. Rawlsians (or Rawlsian-Marxists in my case) believe that an understanding of society as a community of free and equal rational persons, each defining their own conception of the good life but committed to treating others fairly, justifies radically egalitarian institutions (up to and including collective ownership). MacIntyre holds that abstract moral principles of this sort rest on an impoverished conception of human nature, and that they in fact fail to yield determinate conclusions about how people should live their lives or what kind of society we should build. That is why he argues for a moral framework based in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, which says that objective answers about the good life are to be found through reflection rooted in particular communities and their traditions and practices.
Recovering the Common Good(s)
Pushed too far, I think, this fails to recognize that individuals are highly diverse in terms of what enables them to flourish successfully. MacIntyre is correct to reject a kind of relativizing abstraction that fails to recognize that all human creatures share familiar material and social needs, and to affirm that their denial to anyone amounts to a grave injury. But people with diverse psychologies and social experience require space to realize and express their individual identities if they are to flourish; to be “living trees” that grow to their natural potential, as John Stuart Mill would put it.
This isn’t a crude, atomistic individualism, since Mill, Rawls, and other liberal egalitarians have all recognized that it is only in the right kind of egalitarian and democratic society that these projects of individuation can take place, in cooperation with others. This line of thought is core to the Marxist humanist project as well: in particular, the ideal of enabling individuals to become multisided in cooperation with others, as part of a society where the “development of human capacities” becomes an end in itself as Marx puts it in Capital, Volume Three.
MacIntyre is correct to reject a kind of relativizing abstraction that fails to recognize that all human creatures share familiar material and social needs, and to affirm that their denial to anyone amounts to a grave injury.
MacIntyre himself seems to have drifted toward appreciating the variety of individual personalities and forms of expression by the time of Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity. There he celebrates the different kinds of lives that thriving traditions and a commitment to self-reflection can enable people to live: including everyone from saintly priests to bohemian writers like D. H. Lawrence. But it’s unclear to me how this could occur without support for socio-political and cultural liberalism, even if we must reject neoliberal economics to obtain it.
Where MacIntyre does make a real advance on the liberal tradition is in his discussion of “common goods.” Common goods are not just public goods, in the sense of goods that the state ensures are provided to all individual citizens but which we each enjoy as individuals, like parks or schools. Common goods are instead goods people can only pursue together, because they can only be enjoyed as a member of a group or a participant in a particular social practice.
A family, for example, takes joy in the success of each of its members, not just because they benefit as individuals from one another’s success (e.g., children being grateful their parents got a raise at work so they can get nicer Christmas gifts). Rather, each member recognizes the family’s doing well as a source of their own well-being. Something similar goes for social practices like chess, MacIntyre argues: the common good of chess is realized by an ongoing historical tradition of people playing the game and reflecting on it and striving for excellence within norms defined by the community. And religious communities find joy in celebrating the life milestones of their members as a reconsecration of their sacred ties.
MacIntyre argues that capitalism destroys our capacity to enjoy such common goods, by reducing all our activity to the pursuit of self-interested desire, and he worries that liberal moral philosophy doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of these sorts of goods in the first place. Whether or not he is right about this historically, I think liberal philosophy can acknowledge the importance of common goods. What is clear is that capitalism’s corrosive effects on virtue, community, and social solidarity — and the need to overcome them — is a pressing moral question of our age. Anyone who is interested in thinking through what solving this problem might look like, philosophically and practically, should read MacIntyre.