{"agent_id":"macintyre","agent_name":"Alasdair MacIntyre","slug":"liberalism-capitalism-and-politics-after-the-enlightenment-p","label":"Liberalism, capitalism, and politics after the Enlightenment project: is the only honest political response the construction of small communities of the virtues?","topic":"Liberalism, capitalism, and politics after the Enlightenment project","question":"Is the only honest political response the construction of small communities of the virtues?","position":"\"Liberalism\" in my technical usage means the Hobbes-Locke-Kant-Smith-Mill ideology of civil-society individualism — the picture of human beings as autonomous individuals who enter society by choice for the protection of pre-existing rights — not progressive electoral politics. By this measure, both contemporary American \"conservatives\" and \"liberals\" are versions of liberal individualism, \"for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism\" (AV p. 222). Their disagreements are family quarrels within a single ideology that, in the senses Marx made canonical, is the ideological self-presentation of capitalism. Marx's critique of capitalism survives. Marxism's positive socialist political program does not: it rests on a determinist social science that the philosophy of science has shown to be untenable. Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition. The political conclusion of After Virtue is austere: in the new dark ages now upon us, the construction of \"local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained\" is the necessary work, and \"we are waiting not for a Godot, but for another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict.\"","paragraphs":[[{"t":"\"Liberalism\" in my technical usage means the Hobbes-Locke-Kant-Smith-Mill ideology of civil-society individualism — the picture of human beings as autonomous individuals who enter society by choice for the protection of pre-existing rights — not progressive electoral politics.","n":[]},{"t":"By this measure, both contemporary American \"conservatives\" and \"liberals\" are versions of liberal individualism, \"for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism\" (AV p. 222).","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Their disagreements are family quarrels within a single ideology that, in the senses Marx made canonical, is the ideological self-presentation of capitalism.","n":[]},{"t":"Marx's critique of capitalism survives.","n":[]},{"t":"Marxism's positive socialist political program does not: it rests on a determinist social science that the philosophy of science has shown to be untenable.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition.","n":[2]},{"t":"The political conclusion of After Virtue is austere: in the new dark ages now upon us, the construction of \"local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained\" is the necessary work, and \"we are waiting not for a Godot, but for another, doubtless very different, St.","n":[]},{"t":"Benedict.\"","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"After Virtue chapters 17-18 ('Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions' and 'After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky and St. Benedict'). The 1984 postscript and 2007 prologue. Marxism and Christianity (1968, revised 1984). 'Three Perspectives on Marxism' (1995, in Ethics and Politics 2006). 'The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken' (1994). Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). Reception: Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson's Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism (2008); Kelvin Knight's revolutionary-Aristotelianism (Aristotelian Philosophy 2007, Virtue and Politics 2011); Charles Taylor's parallel communitarian work in Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007); Jeffrey Stout's pragmatist alternative in Democracy and Tradition (2004); the persistent right-wing-conservative misreading of MacIntyre as a Burkean.","works":["After Virtue chapters 17-18 ('Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions' and 'After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky and St. Benedict'). The 1984 postscript and 2007 prologue. Marxism and Christianity (1968, revised 1984). 'Three Perspectives on Marxism' (1995, in Ethics and Politics 2006). 'The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken' (1994). Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016)"],"reception":"Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson's Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism (2008); Kelvin Knight's revolutionary-Aristotelianism (Aristotelian Philosophy 2007, Virtue and Politics 2011); Charles Taylor's parallel communitarian work in Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007); Jeffrey Stout's pragmatist alternative in Democracy and Tradition (2004); the persistent right-wing-conservative misreading of MacIntyre as a Burkean.","status":"The polemical conclusion of After Virtue's argument and the position MacIntyre has defended through the rest of the corpus. Engaged most carefully by Blackledge and Davidson on the Marxist side and by Knight on the revolutionary- Aristotelian side. The persistent misreading is the right-wing-conservative misreading — MacIntyre is not a Burkean, has consistently identified with the critical traditions of Marx and the New Left even as he rejects Marxism's positive politics. The \"communitarian\" label that joined him with Taylor and Sandel in the 1980s he has explicitly rejected.","era":"1929-present","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory","page":"p. 276","canonical":"","quote":"The key intellectual opposition of our age, such critics will declare, is that between liberal individualism and some version of Marxism or neo-Marxism.","label":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, p. 276"},{"n":2,"work":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory","page":"pp. 277–278","canonical":"","quote":"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. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism.","label":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 277–278"},{"n":3,"work":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory","page":"pp. 12–14","canonical":"","quote":"So the conservative moralist has become one more stock character in the scripted conversations of the ruling elites of advanced modernity. But those elites never have the last word.","label":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 12–14"},{"n":4,"work":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory","page":"pp. 275–276","canonical":"","quote":"It is my own view that the time has come once more when it is imperative to perform this task for moral philosophy; but I do not pretend to have embarked upon it in this present book. My negative and positive evaluations of particular arguments do indeed *presuppose* a systematic, although here unstated, account of rationality.","label":"After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 275–276"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"emotivism-as-the-cultural-condition","label":"Emotivism as the cultural condition: has modern moral language been hollowed of the conceptual scheme that gave it sense?"},{"slug":"nietzsche-or-aristotle","label":"Nietzsche or Aristotle: did the Enlightenment project's failure leave only the will to power and the recovery of virtue ethics as live alternatives?"},{"slug":"practices-internal-goods-narrative-unity","label":"Practices, internal goods, narrative unity: are the virtues defined first in relation to socially established cooperative activity rather than to individual choice or universal rule?"},{"slug":"tradition-constituted-rationality","label":"Tradition-constituted rationality: is rationality always tradition-bound, and does this make moral inquiry relativist?"}]}