Alasdair MacIntyre, Utopianism, and the Politics of Social Institutions

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between two aspects of the social and political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. The first is what MacIntyre has to say about the politics of social institutions, especially the distinction which MacIntyre makes in After Virtue between practices and institutions. The second is MacIntyre’s views regarding utopianism in politics. I argue that MacIntyre’s assessment of the merits and demerits of utopianism in politics has changed significantly between the publication of After Virtue in 1981 and the publication of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity in 2016. From being a pessimistic critic of utopianism in politics (“utopianism of the future”), MacIntyre has come to support a specific form of utopianism, which he has called “utopianism of the present,” but which might better be described as “realistic utopianism.” This form of utopianism is practical and small-scale. It focuses on the institutions of civil society rather than on the state, or on an attempt to initiate large-scale social and political transformation of society as a whole, of the kind that is traditionally associated with radical politics. MacIntyre’s most recent views might also, therefore, be associated with the idea of prefigurative utopianism, as this is understood by scholars who work in the area of utopian studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Alasdair MacIntyre
• utopianism
• politics of social institutions
• practices and institutions
• corporatism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Tony Burns is a member of staff in the School of Politics and International relations at the University of Nottingham, and a Co-Director of the School’s Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ). He works in the broad area of intellectual history, especially the history of political thought. He has a particular interest in natural law theory and the Aristotelian political tradition, from the time of Aristotle himself down to Hegel and Marx, and on to the Aristotelian thinkers of the present day, including Alasdair MacIntyre. His publications in this area include Aristotle and Natural Law (Continuum Books, 2011); and Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel (Avebury Press, 1996). He contributed the chapter on “Aristotelianism” to Sage Encyclopaedia of Political Theory (edited by Mark Bevir; Sage, 2010); and the chapter on Aristotle to Political Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present (edited by David Boucher and Paul Kelly; Oxford University Press, 2017). Earlier works which touch on the ideas of Alasdair MacIntyre include “Whose Aristotle? Which Marx? Ethics, Law and Justice in Aristotle and Marx” (Imprints: Egalitarian Theory and Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 2005); and “Revolutionary Aristotelianism? The Political Thought of Aristotle, Marx and MacIntyre” in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism (edited by P. Blackledge and K. Knight; University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). He is currently working on the first volume of a two volume work entitled Social Institutions and the Politics of Recognition (Volume 1: From Plato to Wollstonecraft; Volume 2: From Hegel to the Present).

Notes

1 There are one or two exceptions. See, for example, Bielskis (2008, 48–59), and Dobson (2008).

2 I have in mind St. Augustine’s influence on the ideas of those anarchist and utopian members of the Christian sects of the late medieval and early modern periods. For this see Cohn (1957), and Baylor (1991).

3 My thanks to Peter McMylor for drawing my attention to the work of Illich.

4 Otto von Gierke, The German Law of Associations, was published in four volumes between 1868 and 1913. There is no complete English translation. There are, however, translations of sections of it. For the first two volumes, see von Gierke (1990); for Chapter11 of Volume 3, see von Gierke (1958); for Chapters 14–18 of Volume 4, see von Gierke (1957).

5 For secondary literature on Gierke, see Black (1984) and Lewis (1935).

6 For recent literature that follows Gierke, see Figgis (1997), Hirst (1993), Nicholls (2015), and Runciman (2005).