Liberalism, capitalism, and politics after the Enlightenment project: is the only honest political response the construction of small communities of the virtues?

Alasdair MacIntyre, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

"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).1

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.2 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."3

Sources

  1. The key intellectual opposition of our age, such critics will declare, is that between liberal individualism and some version of Marxism or neo-Marxism.
    After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, p. 276
  2. 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.
    After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 277–278
  3. 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.
    After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 12–14

Where the argument is made

  • 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)

How the argument was received

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.