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ABSTRACT
This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of politics. The second is the relationship between structural and personal transformation. The third is how forms of social life exceed, but are always under pressure from, existing forms of political economy and how this concern shapes articulations of political agency outside of statist and property-based understandings of citizenship. I contend that addressing these concerns is a background condition for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness.
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Notes
1 Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, 9–33, 95–120.
2 MacIntyre, “The Thesis on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken,” 232.
3 For example, Womanist social ethics, George Tinker’s Native American liberation theology, Catholic social teaching, non-statist streams of Christian Socialism, Latin American liberation theology, eco-feminists such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, and agrarians such as Wendell Berry and Vandana Shiva all share this concern.
4 Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 201–3.
5 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 27–8.
6 Dubler and Lloyd, Break Every Yoke.
7 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 282.
8 hooks, Salvation; Nash, “Practicing Love.”
9 Povinelli, Empire of Love; Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed.
10 West, Democracy Matters; Kottman, Love as Human Freedom.
11 Mbembe, Necropolitics.
12 Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, 11–35.
13 De La Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes,” 345.
14 Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making, 2–3.
15 Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 359–99.
16 Maritain, Man and the State; Integral Humanism, 162–76.
17 Maritain, Integral Humanism, 163 and 171.
18 Ibid., 169–71, 186–95.
19 Quoted in Walsh, “The Decolonial For,” 18.
20 See, for example, MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 123–4.
21 Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, 197–200. Against MacIntyre, I argue that forms of self-organized, cooperative endeavor or consociations need organized relationship with other consociations through particular kinds of non-statist, relational democratic politics of the kind exemplified in community organizing. While he gestures towards it, MacIntyre lacks the kind of account of a common life democratic politics I have developed but needs one if he is to address the charge that the kinds of local communities he celebrates become intolerant enclaves.
22 See especially, Williams, Country and the City. MacIntyre’s discussions of fishing and farming communities as sites for the formation of practical reasoners capable of resisting capitalism and statism in pursuit of goods in common should also be seen in this context. See for example, MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 176–83.
23 Kenny, The First New Left. See also, Chun, The British New Left.
24 Part of what is at stake here is that Marxism needs a normative conception of justice as part of a broader non-relativistic meta-ethics that Marx’s own social theory denies the possibility of. In practice, Marxists of various stripes reach for some already existing ethical theories to provide a basis for an account of justice. MacIntyre’s work wrestles with exactly this problem, animated as it is by the question of how to ensure justice is not what the strong decide. In doing so, he points to the same problem in other critical projects which fail to give a sufficient account of their moral basis (notably, Foucault), and the incoherence of other accounts of justice (namely, liberalism) which fail to give a sufficient account of their material conditions and historicity.
25 From 1965 onwards, the second generation of the British New Left, spearheaded by Perry Anderson, rejected the “moralism” of the earlier debates, criticizing its humanist language as being “populist” and “pre-socialist.” Anderson later came to recognize the need for a moral basis for socialism but never developed one. Blackledge, “Morality and Revolution”; Davis, “Reappraising British Socialist Humanism.”
26 Blackledge, “Alasdair MacIntyre as a Marxist and as a Critic of Marxism”; D’Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue; Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy, 102–24.
27 Herbert McCabe made this link explicit at the time. McCabe, “Catholic Marxists,” 13. For an account of the emergence and politics of the English Catholic New Left, see Corrin, “The English Catholic New Left.” The Catholic New Left was in direct conversation with and arguably contributed to the origins of Latin American liberation theology (ibid, 11–13). See also, Wicker, “Justice, Peace, and Dominicans 1216–1999.”
28 MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity. This work builds on a previous work, Marxism: An Interpretation, published in 1953. MacIntyre’s own confessional journey from a Barthian Anglican, through atheism, to becoming a Roman Catholic is, at least on MacIntyre’s account, a separate matter from his consistent philosophical engagements at the intersection of Christianity and Marxism. Even more tumultuous is his relationship with Marxism, having adhered to multiple iterations of it and disavowed them and Marxism as a whole at various point over the course of his life. Again, his political commitments do not necessarily track his consistent turn to Marx and various Marxist interlocutors as a resource for his philosophical work. Given MacIntyre’s own insistence on the relationship between theory and practice, or in his later terms, practical rationality and being embedded in social practices, the disconnect between them he evidences in his own life inevitably invites speculation as to how they are related for him. One such example is the detailed reading of the twists and turns of when MacIntyre’s Marxism did most closely track his investments in Marxist forms of politics by Blackledge and Davidson, “Introduction: the Unknown Alasdair MacIntyre.”
29 MacIntyre summarizes his rationale for drawing on these interlocutors as follows:
[I]t is because Marxism and Thomism contribute to the best accounts that we have so far of the moral confusions and the economic deprivations and inequalities of contemporary liberal modernity that I take Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx to be indispensable moral and political thinkers.
30 There is some direct engagement, but never in the systematic and on-going way developed elsewhere. What engagement with Marxism there was among White theologians and Christian intellectuals came mediated through responding to Latin American liberation theology. Bracketing the work of European emigres, notably, Paul Tillich, Louis Dupré, and later, Kenneth Surin, the exceptions are West, Communism and the Theologians, and McGovern, Marxism: An American Christian Perspective. My predecessor at Duke Divinity School, Frederick Herzog, represents a rare point of intersection between a direct engagement with Marx and the emergence of Black liberation theology. See Herzog, “Theology at the Crossroads,” 7–15; “The Bible and the Marxist Revolution,” 7–15.
31 Floyd-Thomas, “Seeing Red in the Black Church.”
32 Robinson, Black Marxism, 185–240.
33 This aspect of James’s work was to be developed theoretically by the first editor of the New Left Review, Stuart Hall. Politically, there was ongoing involvement in antiracist struggles, beginning with the response to the 1958 riot in Notting Hill.
34 Chattopadhyaya, “Talking History,” 115. This encounter marked the beginning of a lifelong correspondence.
35 MacIntyre, “Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We Need to Be,” 331. It must be noted that one aspect of the work MacIntyre did not take up was the critique of racial capitalism. He condemns racism and actively supported anti-colonial struggles but beyond that he never examines in detail the relationship between racism and capitalism, this is despite it being central to a key concern in his work; that is, the nature of and relationship between capitalism and the nation-state in preventing the formation of moral agents. My point here is not that his failure to discuss racism, along with a laundry list of other issues, makes his work suspect. That would be a tedious and trivial one. Rather, it is that to do the work he sought to do necessitated such an analysis and the analyses developed by Black Marxists would have aided him in this task. For example, in his account of the collapse of the “first modern communist society” organized by Jesuits among the Tupi-Guarani people he never considers racism as a causal factor in the failure of the Jesuits to develop indigenous leaders or whether the endeavor itself was colonial in its inception. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 99. For an application of MacIntyre’s framework to racism, see Williams, “After Racism.”
36 MacIntyre, “The Algebra of the Revolution,” 41–4; Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 273–96.
37 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 290.
38 Boggs, Living for Change.
39 Scott, Refashioning Futures, 14–15. See also, Mignolo, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?” 105–34.
40 Furtado, Documentary Filmaking in Contemporary Brazil, 175.
41 Scott, Omens of Adversity, 126.
42 He is accused of something like this by Peter McMylor, who states that for MacIntyre it is “not yet too late to be medieval.” McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity, 46.
43 Žižek, Courage of Hopelessness.
44 De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness, 142.
45 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 30–31; 118–19.
46 Derrida, Politics of Friendship; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality.
47 MacIntyre, “Replies,” 204.
48 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 178.
49 MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, xxii; Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 237–8.
50 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 129–30.
51 McCabe, “Class Struggle and Christian Love,” 195.
52 My own recent work is as an attempt to articulate what a Christian vision of democratic politics that is alive to the challenges wrestled with by the likes of the British New Left, C. L. R. James, and Grace Lee Boggs. Echoing an earlier stream of political theology outlined above, I contend that a consociational conception of sovereignty and economic democracy is a crucial next step in connecting a turn to tradition and virtue to a meaningful democratic politics fitting to contemporary conditions.
53 MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness [1958],” 215–25.
54 Vermeule, “A Christian Strategy”; “Integration from Within.” Vermeule advocates what kind can best be described as Catholic integralism with a Trotskyist face, advocating as he does the use of entryist tactics to subvert liberal norms. And in keeping with much reactionary Christian political theology, Vermeule has nothing critical to say about capitalism, even as capitalism subverts and commodifies the very goods he claims to hold sacred. Vermeule’s conception of integralism is fundamentally different in form and substance to Maritain’s integral humanism, Gustavo Guttiérrez’s integral liberation, and Pope Francis’s integral ecology.
55 Dreher, Benedict Option.
56 Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 28–9.
57 On this see Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 195–96; 305–6.
58 MacIntyre, “Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We Need to Be,” 320; “Replies,” 204.
59 MacIntyre, “Replies,” 211.
60 As MacIntyre notes:
The political dimension of human life receives its expression in those institutionalized forms of deliberation through which human agents are able to direct themselves, and to educate others as to how to direct themselves towards the achievement of those goods and that good [that enable them to flourish]. MacIntyre, “Replies,” 206.
61 See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 79–108.
62 MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, vii.
63 On the nature of such action see MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 291–2.
64 MacIntyre, “Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We Need to Be,” 320.
65 West, American Evasion of Philosophy; Shiva, Earth Democracy; Tessman, Burdened Virtues; Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic and the Re-enchantment of Humanism”; “Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human.”
66 Buen vivir is the Spanish translation and some would say political and philosophical elaboration of the Quechua and Aymara words Sumac kawsay and Suma qamaña. For a summary of its multiple iterations and genealogy, see Hidalgo-Capitán and A Cubillo-Guevara, “Deconstruction and Genealogy of Latin American Good Living (Buen Vivir),” 23–50. These indigenous concepts broadly converge on the idea that the good life is one lived in convivial, reciprocal relations and mutual care between human and other-than-human beings, rather than in pursuit of some combination of capital accumulation and the technocratic administration of life. See Quick and Spartz, “On the Pursuit of Good Living in Highland Ecuador”; Vanhulst and Beling, “Buen vivir”; Gudynas, “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.”
67 An example of such a misreading is given by Stout. See Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 118–39. Whether my colleague Stanley Hauerwas’s interpretation of MacIntyre is a different but parallel kind of misreading is a complicated matter. Hauerwas does address the concerns I identify and attending to how he does enables a generative reading of Hauerwas’s work. But, in his writing, rather than in conversation, Hauerwas does not explicitly attend to MacIntyre’s Marxism and draws on MacIntyre’s account of the virtues in a way that divorces it from MacIntyre’s concerns about the historicity and material conditions of virtue formation. The overall effect is that questions of ecclesiology replace those of political economy. His is not so much a misreading as a displaced, ecclesially directed one that has the effect of generating misreading’s by others who read MacIntyre through Hauerwas.
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Luke Bretherton
Luke Bretherton is Robert E. Cushman Professor of Moral & Political Theology, Duke University.