Politics in the Conflicts of Modernity: Aristotelian and Marxist

ABSTRACT

Alasdair MacIntyre's latest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, confirms his interest in Marxism as a form of critique. MacIntyre's debt to Marx has been central to recent scholarship, strengthening his reception as a radical thinker. This article examines the relationship between politics and ethics in MacIntyre and Marx. Following Aristotle, MacIntyre sees ethics as part of political inquiry. Marx features in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity to help confront the “ethics-of-the-market” and the “ethics-of-the-state.” This renewed engagement demands a reassessment of his critique of Marx. MacIntyre argues Marx lacks a sufficient account of the human good. However, MacIntyre fails to consider the implications of his own characterisation of Marx's Aristotelianism. Marx develops an ethical understanding derived from an Aristotelian social ontology, elaborated first in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” with the concept of “species-being,” and, then, in the value-form theory in Capital. Marx's teleological concept of labour supplies his social theory with an ethical structure. I argue MacIntyre's critique of Marx, and in turn C. L. R. James, underplays the importance of this concept of labour in founding a collective politics of resistance, and instead, retreats to the politics of the local community.

KEYWORDS:

• Alasdair MacIntyre
• Karl Marx
• C. L. R. James
• social ontology
• social theory

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jeffery L. Nicholas, Paul Muldoon, and Daniel Lopez for valuable feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Michael Lazarus is preparing a doctoral dissertation in political theory at the Monash University. His research investigates the role of ethics in Marx’s social theory and the importance of the Aristotelian and Hegelian dimensions of Marx’s immanent mode of critique.

Notes

1 Not to mention ignoring these types of comments: “I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic and social, and cultural order of capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists” (MacIntyre 2007, xvii).

2 Compare the review of Victor Serge’s memoirs (MacIntyre 2009d, 263‒265; 2016, 247, 260‒261).

3 See Paul Blackledge’s contribution to this column.

4 This view is also present in MacIntyre (1953, 92‒109; 1995, 75‒102). As the 2009 collection demonstrates, in his youth he tended to vacillate on this; compare for instance MacIntyre (2009b) to MacIntyre (2009c).

5 For an important elaboration of this view see Rubin (1973).

6 Perhaps a result of his own time as a Trotskyist. The most detailed assessment is Davidson (2014, 129‒181). However, his assessment in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is more balanced than his scathing, yet revealing discussion, MacIntyre (1973).

7 See Nicholas’s introduction to this column.

8 The moral courage of James's activity as an early Trotskyist in defiance of Stalinist orthodoxy is demonstrated well in Høgsbjerg (2014).