Emile Perreau-Saussine

Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Centre Raymond Aron, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
eperreau@midway.uchicago.edu

Alasdair MacIntyre between

Aristotle and Marx

I. From Marx to Aristotle

- Exposition Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed they could economize on Marxs theory of history,
skipping the stage of liberal or bourgeois society by going directly from an agrarian society to
the dictatorship of the proletariat. This heterodoxy of Lenin's revolutionary beliefs and tactics
can be best understood by taking into account the influence of Slavophile thought1. More
important for our current purposes is that this strange relation between Marx, Lenin, and
sentimental nationalism may help us characterize the thought of someone who appears to come
from a rather different quarter - Alasdair MacIntyre.
The hero of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? - for there is a hero in this history of
philosophy - is Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, an Aristotelian opposed to the 1707 Act of Union
between Scotland and England, and therefore to the integration of Scotland in modern
commercial society2. Assuredly, as a proclaimed follower of Fletcher, MacIntyre is
conspicuously departing from the Marxism of his youth; but one wonders whether he did not
embrace (as if in spite of himself) one aspect of Leninism. Lenin had transformed Slavophilia
into a revolutionary doctrine; MacIntyre transforms Marxism-Leninism into Scottish and
Aristotelian Slavophilia.
MacIntyres intellectual career has a coherence that is not readily apparent. Having
forsaken his early dreams of revolution, he sought norms for a restored communal society in
pre-modern forms of social life. He can be understood as part of the larger climate of ideas
defended by the British "New" Left, a movement somehow haunted by the theme of
community and steeped in nostalgia for pre-industrial society. These ideas were not as new as
their proponents thought3. The Labour Party had become statist under the influence of
Fabianism; but British socialism had had a persistent anarcho-syndicalist tendency, freely

Alain Besanon: The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism [1977] (New York: Continuum,
1981), trans. by S. Matthews, 329 p.
2 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre-Dame U.P., 1988), p. 258. Also "The idea of an educated public",
in G. Haydon (d.): Education and Values, (London: Institute of Education, 1987), p. 35.
3 Raphael Samuel: "Born-again Socialism", in R. Archer et alii: Out of Apathy. Voices of the New Left Thirty
Years On (London: Verso, 1989), p. 39-57. Peter Worsley, ibidem., p. 88.

romantic, oriented towards he pre-industrial era4. Guild Socialism, popular at the beginning of
the Twentieth century, offers a good illustration of that spirit. E.P. Thompson, one of the
guiding lights of the New Left, was inspired by these currents of thought through the
intermediary of William Morris, one of the leaders of the movement, about whom he wrote an
important monograph. In one of the Manifestos of the movement, Thompson called for the
creation of a socialist "community". MacIntyre, who was to become an activist of the first
New Left, had concluded Marxism: an Interpretation, published some years earlier, in the
same spirit5.
It is considered, in critical circles, good form to point out MacIntyre's changing
positions and hence to expose the alleged incoherence of his thought; but I would like to show
that he kept throughout his life, both a consistent philosophical problematic and the political
radicalism of his youth. This problematic grew out of the situation of modern political
philosophy, a situation best understood by reference to Hegel.

Contemporary philosophy proceeds from the Hegelian synthesis, whether it critiques it

or whether it takes it for granted, although the official reign of Hegel over European thought
came to an end in 1848. In politics, the Hegelian position was attacked by revolutionary
communism, while Kierkegaard opened a second front in philosophy, and blamed Hegel for
reducing existence to a concept. Under siege on one side by Marxism and the other by
Existentialism, the Hegelian synthesis split up. The point of view of the individual and the
point of view of society, which Hegel had reconciled, were again separated. Moral philosophy
by degrees enshrined an ever more absolute idea of liberty, while the social sciences came to
propound a more and more inexorable determinism: on the one hand, man was presented as a
subject, and on the other hand as an object. But the desire for unity which the Hegelian system
had tried to satisfy remained.
In 1945, during the heyday of both Marxism and Existentialism, a new formulation
seemed to offer itself with the force of inevitability: Existentialist Marxism. Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty put forward the existentialist theses found in the early Marx in order to save
Das Kapital from its materialism, and to add to it a philosophy of liberty. By so doing, they
hoped to conserve the best of the philosophy of history and of the philosophy of the subject.
Like Jrgen Habermas, Stanley Rosen and Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre was
born in 1929. His university education being in the post-war era, it is not surprising that he
embraced the ambition to reformulate the Hegelian synthesis. This ambition was not just the
result of the situation of philosophy, however; another of its sources was the political situation
of the Left.
In the name of the absolute primacy of the political, the communists had sacrificed to
the cult of the Party both conscience and truth. The British First New Left, which was born in
4 W. H. Greenleaf: The British Political Tradition, vol. II: The Ideological Heritage (London: Methuen, 1983),
p. 349-539
5 E. P. Thompson: "Socialist Humanism. An Epistle to the Philistines", summer 1957, 1, The New Reasoner, p.
142. MacIntyre: Marxism: an Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 1953), p. 121-2. "Politics, Philosophy and
the Common Good" [1997], The MacIntyre Reader, K. Knight (d.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 23552. On the theme of community in the New Left, one may read the work of Raymond Williams; see for
instance, "Knowable Communities", in The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 165181.

reaction to the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as well as to the
Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956, wanted to denounce the horrors of Stalinism by
underscoring the importance of ethics. In the dispensation of the New Left, one could not
reduce morality to something simply relative to class, nor should individual conscience be
sacrificed to ideology. Philosophically speaking, this critique is grounded in an analysis of the
relation of the agent and the social structure, an analysis prominent in the work of both
MacIntyre and Thompson6. This revisionist Marxism, which calls itself humanist socialism,
inserted itself into the existentialist climate of the time.
In the sixties, Freudianism replaced Existentialism as the orthodoxy du jour. The
fashion switched to Freudian Marxist syntheses, popularized by Herbert Marcuse and written
for the happy few by Gilles Deleuze, who reconciled political economy with libidinal economy
by assimilating Freudian repression to social repression.
These Existentialist- and Freudian-Marxist fusions did not seduce MacIntyre, however,
who favored their problematics but not their conclusions. The Critique of Dialectical Reason,
in which Sartre made his most thorough conciliation of Existentialism and Marxism did not
convince him. Indeed, MacIntyre did not have much sympathy for these "strange attempts to
unite historical necessity and absolute freedom"7.
"If we start with Marx and the sociologists we find ourselves seeing the individual as formed by
socially prefabricated roles into which he has to fit. His private motives are only a shadow behind
his public life. If we start with Freud and the psychologists we find public life merely a screen on
to which private motives project their images. [...] Both taken by themselves are fatal to our
understanding of human beings as human beings, and merely adding them together will not solve
our problem"8.

Hence, the Freudian-Marxist synthesis did not appeal to him any more than ExistentialistMarxism. Against Marcuse, he wrote a virulent pamphlet in which he denounced the former's
pretentions and incoherence, ironically publishing the book in a series called "Modern
Masters"9.
MacIntyre incorporated the problematic of Hegel, but adopted neither his system, nor
the subsequent developments of his epigones. In 1959, he distanced himself from the New Left
and became a Trotskyite, and joined various small organizations such as the Socialist Labour
League, and the Socialist Review Group, which in Autumn 1960 began publishing the review
International Socialism, of which MacIntyre later became assistant chief editor10. For him,

E. P. Thompson: "Socialist Humanism. An Epistle to the Philistines", p. 119-129. A. MacIntyre: "Notes from
the Moral Wilderness I and II", The New Reasoner, 7 and 8, 1958-9, in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 31-49.
7 Againt the Self-Images of the Age (London: Duckworth, 1971) p. 72. Also "Freedom and Revolution", Labour
Review, vol. 5 (1), Feb.-March 1960, p. 19-24, and "Emasculating history: on Mazlish's "riddle"", Encounter,
vol. 29, august 1967, p. 80
8 "Sartre as a Social Theorist", The Listener, March 22nd, 1962, p. 513.
9 Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (New York: Viking, 1970), 114 p.
10 J. Callaghan: British Trotskyism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 72 & p. 222. See, for example, MacIntyre:
From MacDonald to Gaitskell (London: Socialist Labour League Pamphlet, Plough Press, 1960, 8 p.). Cf.
George Thayer: The British Political Fringe. A Profile (London: A. Blond, 1965), p. 142.

Trotskyism was no doubt less a manner to join the posterity of Hegel than a way of challenging
both Washington and Moscow11.
Kojve liked to emphasize that nothing important had been written since Hegel - the
proof being the separation of the world between Washington and Moscow, that is to say
between hgliens de droite and hgliens de gauche. In this perspective, American liberalism
embodied the supposed coincidence of reason and reality, while the Bolshevik revolution
became the illustration of the gap between them. Moscow sacrificed the individual to the
community, and Washington the community to the individual. MacIntyre's Trotskyism is a
strategic withdrawal resulting from his growing dissatisfaction with an Hegelian tradition
which he will eventually reject.
In 1971, he published a collection of essays with an eloquent title: Against the Self-Images of
the Age. Essays on Ideology and Philosophy. This rather pessimistic book brings together two
parts about which MacIntyre himself admits in the introduction that he does not know "how to
tie these arguments together into a substantial whole"12. Instead, he superimposes a political
approach onto moral theories in the philosophy of action. Against the Self-Images of the Age
is an important work, because by merely observing its structure, one can see that MacIntyre is
aware that he fails in his attempt to accomplish the synthesis which he seeks. Neither Sartre
nor Marcuse offered the appropriate solution, but MacIntyre comes up short as well.
No doubt it is the awareness of this failure which led him to emigrate to the UnitedStates and to re-read Aristotle in a new light and to take him more seriously. Beginning in
1971, he reconsidered in a systematic manner and from an Aristotelian point of view the
problems of ethics and of the social sciences13. It is on this basis that, gradually, he reconciled
the philosophy of action and the philosophy of the social sciences which had remained up to
then irreconcilable - at least in his mind.
During the seventies, MacIntyre threw himself in the task of reinterpreting his former
philosophical convictions, which he reworked in order to achieve this synthesis. After Virtue,
published in 1981, is the fruit of this work.
"After Virtue took me more than eight years to write. [...] My plan had originally been to write
two quite independent books: one on the fate of morality in the modern world, another on the
philosophy of the social sciences. But the argument of each book turned out to require the
argument of the other"14.

After Virtue thus purports to provide the synthesis of the two viewpoints: the chapters
on the social sciences (7, 8 & 15) are interwoven with the chapters on moral philosophy (2, 3,
11

Michael Kenny: "Neither Washington nor Moscow: Positive Neutralism and the Peace Movement", in The
First New Left. British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), p. 168-196. Peter
Shipley: "Neither Washington nor Moscow...", in Revolutionaries in Modern Britain (London: The Bodley
Head, 1976), p. 130-150.
12 Against the Self-Images of the Age, p. x. Cf. the book reviews by Richard Wolheim: "The end of the end of
ideology", Guardian Weekly, 105, jul. 31st, 1971, p. 18, and Terry Eagleton: "Absent Center", New Statesman,
82, august 20th, 1971, p. 241-2.
13 "An interview for Cogito", in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 268. "Introduction", in Marxism and Christianity
[1968] (London: Duckworth, 1995), p. xxvii-xxviii
14 "Moral rationality, tradition, and Aristotle: a reply to Onora O'Neill, Raimond Gaita, and Stephen R. L.
Clark", Inquiry, vol. 26, 1983, p. 447. Also "How Moral Agents Became Ghosts or Why the History of Ethics
Diverged from that of the Philosophy of Mind", Synthese, vol. 53 (2), 1982, p. 295-312, and "Combining Social
Science with Moral Theory", in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 51-101

4 & 17). In this book, MacIntyre affirms the necessity of returning to the Aristotelian
conception of justice, which is inherently both political and moral. It is on this basis that he
believed he could avoid the oscillation, characteristic of modern politics, "between a freedom
which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control
designed only to limit the anarchy of private interests"15.
By its title alone, his next work - Whose justice? Which Rationality? - announced the
completion of the program which MacIntyre had set for himself: the political dimension
(justice) and the moral dimension (practical rationality) were finally brought together and
reconciled. MacIntyre's Aristotelianism did not claim to refute Marxism, but rather to answer
some of the questions raised by the New Left. Aristotle, in MacIntyre's mind, became the flag
which enabled him to remain faithful to his anti-bourgeois youth and yet avoid the pitfalls of
the Marxist tradition.
That the author of the Nicomachean Ethics is not a modern would seem to prove he is
not a liberal, which, strangely, has made the Stagirite an alternative to disappointed Marxists.
MacIntyre treats Aristotle as the spokesman for the time of "once upon a time", as the target
which XVIIth century thinkers never ceased to attack. The Cold War finished, and having been
fought without panache nor success, the last possibility seems to replace it with a renewed
quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.
"The ambivalence of the New Left", one could write in 1960, "is that it has not yet
chosen between Prometheus and Adam. While Mr. Charles Taylor hankers after a return ticket
to Eden, there are others, like Mr. MacIntyre, who plot to storm heaven"16. The proximity of
their interests is remarkable, both having sought, through the reconciliation of the philosophy
of action with the philosophy of the social sciences, to avoid the alternatives of Weber and
Durkheim, of structuralism and individualism17.
Looking back on the history of the New Left, Charles Taylor, who eventually rallied to
a moderate liberalism, concludes that it was necessary to recant any dependence on Marx,
whom he had, admittedly followed assiduously at Oxford at the end of the fifties and beginning
of the sixties18. In 1981, although he was an Aristotelian, MacIntyre believed he could claim
he was faithful to the issues raised by the first New Left19. When Marxism and Christianity
was republished in 1995, with a new preface, MacIntyre bemoaned the absence of the concepts
of just price and of just wage in modern societies20. By turning to the Aristotelian-Thomist
tradition, he found again the means to express anew the preoccupation he had as a young
activist of the New Left. He reaffirmed his allegiance to Marx, and in order to scare the
bourgeois, no longer concerned by Marx's specter, MacIntyre declared "subversive" natural
law, and "seditious" the virtue of temperance21. He claimed to follow Saint Benedict; the chill

15

After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (Notre-Dame U.P., 1981), p. 33

Ken Coates, in The Listener, Oct. 6th, 1960, vol. 64, p. 563-4
17 In 1985, Taylor published two collections of essays. The first one's title is Human agency and language, and
the second one's Philosophy and the human sciences (Cambridge U.P., 1985).
18 C. Taylor: "Marxism and Socialist Humanism", in R. Archer et alii: Out of Apathy, p. 59-70.
19 After Virtue, p. vii
20 Marxism and Christianity, 1995, p. i-xxxi. Also Whose Justice?..., p. 112, and "The Theses on Feuerbach: A
Road not Taken" [1994], in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 225-6
21 "Sophrosune: How a Virtue Can Become Socially Disruptive", in P.A. French et alii: Ethical Theory:
Character and Virtue (Notre-Dame U.P., 1988), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13, p. 1-11. "Natural Law
16

which this name provoked in the academic community of Britain and North America proves
that MacIntyre has touched a nerve. While MacIntyre denounces any participation in modern
civic life, Taylor, a moderate among moderates, wanted to be a universal conciliator; he has
taken an active part in Canadian political life22.
Critics often emphasize the wanderings within the intellectual journey of MacIntyre,
but such objections show a lack of critical distance. The peculiar character of his evolution
makes one forget how intellectually mobile most former New Left activists have been. Taylor
is a good example of this. Through his intransigence, MacIntyre has in a way remained more
faithful to the radicalism of the New Left and to the Marxist denunciation of liberal politics.

What distillation will give us the essence of "liberalism"? Should one distinguish
between a generic and a partisan sense of the word "liberal"? Should one only use it in
quotation marks?
Some liberals define themselves as partisans of the separation of politics from religion,
of politics from morals, or of the man from the citizen. Others favor the separation of politics
from economics. Some want to separate power from opinion in order to found a political
science. Some Neo-Kantians wish to separate the just from the good. Finally, others put
forward the separation of the state from civil society. But one should probably add, in order to
complete the list, the separation of nature from law, of art from politics, as well as the
constitutional separation of powers.
The emphasis is each time on a new dimension - economic, epistemological, social,
moral, religious, esthetic, political. How can one finds one's way among so many different
definitions? It seems that the only certain thing about the liberals is that they all agree on the
need to separate. Liberalism splits up the human world into categories, into fields of analysis,
in order to create the figure of the "individual". "Liberalism" is defined by this process of
differentiation and classification.
The synthesis which MacIntyre pursues becomes clearer when it is considered in the
light of this definition23. When he wants to conciliate the philosophy of the social sciences
with the philosophy of action, it is these philosophical distinctions which he attacks, just as
Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Marcuse did before him. His effort to reunite diverging viewpoints
forms part of a critique of the dismembering of the human world achieved by liberalism. To
"the age of separations"24, MacIntyre opposes the rule of the One.
Liberalism is often understood as neutral with respect to moral choices. The separation
of politics from the contents of life, is supposed to leave these content of life "as is". But

as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas", Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 26 (1), 1996, p. 6183. After Virtue, p. 244-5
22 A. MacIntyre interviewed by A. Brown: "Of Aristotle and the way we leave now", The Independent, March
23rd, 1989, p. 27. "Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good", and "An interview for Cogito", [1991], in
The MacIntyre Reader, p. 237 & p. 272. "I'm not a communitarian, but ...", The Responsive Community, vol. 1
(3), 1991, p. 91-2. C. Taylor: Reconciling the solitudes: essays on Canadian federalism and nationalism
(Montral: McGill-Queen's U.P., 1993), 208 p.
23 Cf. Marxism: an Interpretation, 1953, p. 9
24 Adam Ferguson: An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1767), p. 183

MacIntyre, like most critiques of liberalism, denounces the deception of this neutrality25. Both
as Marxist and as Aristotelian, he emphasizes the essentially political nature of man, and the
deleterious influence which the privatization of his existence performs both on ethics and on
religion. The philosophy of action cannot be separated from the philosophy of the social
sciences, and the same is true of individual life with regard to the collective life.
One can surely distinguish a "proto-MacIntyre" from a "deutero-MacIntyre", but only if
one does not underestimate the continuity of his intellectual journey. The critique of liberalism
constitutes the unity of his work. Whether he says he follows Marx or Aristotle, the enemy
remains the same: the bourgeois, the market economy, individualism, relativism, the nationstate, intellectual disorder, secularization, the Enlightenment, positivism, nihilism, high finance,
loss of roots...
It would probably be more pertinent to criticize MacIntyre for his continuity than for
his alleged intellectual restlessness.

25

"The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology", in Against the Self-Images of the Age, p. 3-11. "
Marx", in Maurice Cranston (d.): Western Political Philosophers, (London: Bodley Head, 1964), p. 103.
"Justice: a new theory and some old questions" [book review of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice], Boston
University Law Review, vol. 52, 1972, p. 332. Whose Justice?... p. 144. How to seem virtuous without actually
being so (Lancaster University, 1991), p. 12-3. The Objectivity of the Good (St. Lawrence University, 1993), p.
17

II. From Aristotle to Marx

- Discussion .- Under-politicization
The project of integrating into a coherent whole a scientific understanding of society
and a philosophy of action - "philosophy of social science" and "moral philosophy" - is not as
recent as these terms would suggest. In the Republic, Plato compares the organization of the
"parts" of the soul to the structure of the city. In the Politics, Aristotle analyzes the relation of
the "good man" and the "good citizen" through a classification and ranking of the different
types of regimes.
The conflict between the democrats and the oligarchs has in Aristotle's political science
a role in some ways similar to that of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
in Marxism. Of course, the Aristotelian demos is not the proletarian of the Communist
Manifesto, nor is the Greek oligarch a bourgeois. Nonetheless, in a manner of speaking, Marx
and Aristotle both see "class struggle" as fundamental to politics26. It is striking, then, that
MacIntyre, who claims to follow both thinkers, remains on the whole rather indifferent to the
importance of the quarrel between the oligarch and the democrat. Book III of the Politics,
which takes this quarrel as a point of departure for a classification of regimes, constitutes the
heart of Aristotle's political science. It seems that a neo-Aristotelian political philosophy would
have to take this into account27. However, MacIntyre makes almost no reference to it.
One of the reasons for this peculiarity, it seems to me, is that MacIntyre never
discovered how he could reconcile the Marxist preference for the rule of the workers with the
Aristotelian inclination towards "aristocracy", in its literal sense as rule of the best - for
Aristotle, a regime based on virtue cannot be simply egalitarian. But I would like to offer
another possible source of MacIntyre's departure from Aristotle.

The classification of the regimes in book III of the Politics distinguishes the "best
regime," in which there is a identity of the good man and the good citizen, from other less
satisfactory, albeit legitimate, regimes. Lacking such a classification leads MacIntyre to ignore
the distinction between "best" and legitimate; he thus allows only one regime as desirable, the
best. One could say that he tries to deduce a political philosophy from the Nicomachean
Ethics, rather than from the Politics. From this, MacIntyre condemns liberal democracy as
based on utilitarianism, a principle antithetical to an ethics based on "virtue" or excellence.
Aristotle wrote three political treatises, The Rhetoric, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the
Politics. If the theoreticians of "deliberative democracy" felt obliged to ground themselves on
Aristotle, they would probably focus on The Rhetoric rather than on the two other treatises28.
MacIntyre seems to make a symmetrical error. One could characterize After Virtue and Whose
26

G.E.M. de Ste Croix: The class struggle in the ancient Greek world (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1981), p. 69-80
See, for example, Harvey Mansfield: "Liberal Democracy as a Mixed Regime", in The Spirit of Liberalism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1978), p. 1-15, or Bernard Manin: "A Democratic Aristocracy", in The
Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge U.P., 1997), p. 132-160.
28 I am thinking of someone like Jrgen Habermas.
27

justice? Which Rationality? as attempts to find practical applications of Aristotelian ethics

while avoiding Aristotle's own understanding of politics as architectonic and hence prior to
ethics. For similar reasons - namely a certain "idealism" - in his borrowing from Marx he
draws more on the theory of alienation rather than the theory of class struggle. Even so,
MacIntyre tries to look to Aristotle, not Hegel, for his understanding of human perfection.
Aristotle teaches that politics neither can be absorbed into ethics, nor can it entirely
separate from it. Liberalism, on the other hand, leaves to individuals the prerogative of
deciding how to live their "private lives", including even how to seek their salvation. To
reduce the political thought of the Stagirite to the Nicomachean Ethics is only the inversion of
the liberal separation of public and private. It is as anti-Aristotelian to conflate the moral and
the political as it is to sever them. Victim of an all too well known process, MacIntyre winds
up doing battle on the terms set out by his adversary, and thus unintentionally accepting his
opponents' presuppositions. The responsibility for such a confusion can be traced to the
historicist character of MacIntyre's argument.

After Virtue defends the thesis that contemporary moral life is intelligible only in the
light of the history of its decadence29. MacIntyre reminds us that to give an account of the
origin and of the evolution of a problem often proves more useful than a simple semantic
analysis. Indeed, he faults analytical philosophy for its a-historicism. Moral philosophy can
understand the nature of the problems it contemplates only insofar as it uses historical science.
Rousseau claims that the "natural" is neither directly known nor intelligible to us. The
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men is the ancestor of the history of ethics as
MacIntyre understands it: the history of philosophy has now become an essential part of
philosophy. Of course, Aristotle had collected the ideas of his predecessors, but out of a
doxographic concern rather than a historical one; for him, philosophy, not its history gives
access to the truth. From his point of view, one can best contemplate human nature in the most
highly realized man living in the best form of political community. This becomes especially
clear when one realizes that he sees the question of the origins and of genesis, so important to
Rousseau, as only secondary.
The Nietzschean concept of "genealogy" conceptualizes the Rousseauan viewpoint.
Despite his own claims, the histories of ethics written by MacIntyre echo the Genealogy of
Morals more than the Nicomachean Ethics.
MacIntyre returns at all times to the question of the historicity of practical reason. One
could describe it as the main theme of his work. His fascination with this theme makes him
subordinate reason to history, nature to convention, and eventually condemn Aristotle's
"metaphysical biology"30.
In an Aristotelian perspective, the main distinction between man and the animals is
logos, which makes man a political being by nature; the relative historicity of his condition is
subordinate to his rationality. Liberal individualism neglects the social character of human
nature, and therefore the primacy of logos as well as the authority of tradition. But MacIntyre
opposes this individualism because of the autonomy it demands from tradition, and
29
30

After Virtue, p. 1-5.

After Virtue, p. 152. Also A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966) p. 17-8, and p. 268.

consequently, because of the anti-historicism it presupposes. Man is a historical, and therefore

a social animal.
One could object to this hypothesis by pointing to the interest MacIntyre shows in
conflict, and therefore in politics, were it not for the fact that he considers conflict as being
historically determined. The tacit horizon of his reflection is a society in which the reign of
philosophy over enlightened minds will promote a relative harmony, and, consequently, the
Marxist abolition of the use of legitimate violence.
When he explains the evolution of moral philosophy by using history rather than
constitution of regimes, MacIntyre implies that politics cannot decide the question of the soul,
and therefore ratifies the liberal separation of state and civil society. This is probably the reason
why MacIntyre progressively retired from politics since the sixties.
MacIntyre wanted to defend the autonomy of the human agent against social
structures, and to assert a form of liberty. This was the source of his moral critique of
Stalinism, as it was the source of his return to the Nicomachean Ethics. Thus he criticized
economic31, sociological32, and psychological33 determinism. But through historicism, he
reintroduces the very determinism which he had rejected. It is now necessity, and no longer
prudence, which determines for men their collective action. MacIntyre can only dispense with
the politics of Aristotle by truncating his ethics. Historicism drastically limits the possibility of
politics and, consequently, the importance of practical reason.
Historicism has been a way of relegating liberalism to the past; the critics of modernity
have tended to radicalize modernity, and not to negate it all together; Marx himself opposes to
liberal individualism only a "socialized Robinson Crusoe"34. Similarly, when MacIntyre
criticizes the anhistoricism of some liberal thinkers, he seems not to notice that he falls into the
individualist presuppositions which he fights.

The question of the "regime" now falls under "social science". The difference in
vocabulary, however, is not the effect of chance: the philosophical project of a classification of
the regimes has been abandoned and replaced by sociology and history (in the modern sense of
the word), because both ratify the liberal separation of public and private. Montesquieu, who
may be the founder of these two sciences, is also one of the first to expose the limits of analysis
based on regimes35. In The Spirit of the Laws, England is neither an aristocracy nor a
monarchy, nor a democracy, nor even a mixed regime.
31

"Marxist tracts", Philosophical Quartely, vol. 6, 1956, p. 368. "Prediction and Politics", International
Socialism, 13, summer 1963, p. 15-19. Also E.P. Thompson: "The Long Revolution, II", New Left Review, 10,
Jul.-Aug. 1961, p. 28-9
32 After Virtue, p. 84-102. "A Mistake about causality in social sciences", in P. Laslett & W.G. Runciman
(ds.): Philosophy, Politics and Society, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 48-70. "Predictability and Explanation
in the Social Sciences", Philosophic Exchange, vol. 1, 1972, p. 5-13. Cf. C. Taylor: "A Response to
MacIntyre", ibidem, p. 15-20
33 The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), 100 p. Cf. V. Descombes:
"L'inconscient adverbial", Critique, vol. 40, 1984, p. 775-796
34 After Virtue, p. 243
35 Emile Durkheim: Montesquieu and Rousseau, Forerunners of Sociology [1892] (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 1-64. Pierre Manent: "The Authority of History", in The City of Man [1994]
(Princeton U.P., 1998), trans. by M. LePain, p. 11-49

Sociology, which presupposes the separation of the state and of civil society, describes
the laws which govern the way civil society works, juridical norms put aside. Law, having
become merely political, is separated from the contents of life. The sociological viewpoint
takes "mores" as its proper object, and itself becomes a part of this dismembered human world.
By relating human types to social forms, the Weberian theory of ideal-types forms the
sociological equivalent of the Aristotelian classification of the regimes, with the important
difference that it deprives it of its dialectical character.
The same could be said of the modern conception of history. From the point of view of
the Republic or of the Politics, the history of morals has to be interpreted in the light of the
cyclical transformation of regimes or constitutions. The Moderns, on the other hand, do not
explain the variety of mores by the political character of human nature. The diversity of
behaviors is less understood in their relation to the diversity of political forms than in reference
to the malleability of a humanity defined by its historicity.
The liberal separation, by ensuring the autonomy of society, puts an end to the dialectic of man
and citizen.
Although he attempts to treat ethics and society in relation to each other, MacIntyre
never poses these questions in terms of the "political regime", thus neglecting the dialectic of
book III of the Politics. Instead, he favors the Weberian theory of ideal-types, which he freely
uses at the beginning of After Virtue. In his eyes, there is no better depiction of Victorian
England than the figure of the Explorer, of the Engineer, and of the Headmaster, and in
Wilhelmian Germany, the Prussian officer, the Professor, and the Social-Democrat. MacIntyre
sees the Twentieth century under the traits of the Bureaucrat and of the Psychoanalyst36. These
characters reveal the spirit of the time, even if it is impossible to relate them directly to
Victorian constitutional monarchy, to the second Reich, or to today's democracies; they
characterize a culture rather than a regime. In spite of his supposed Aristotelianism, MacIntyre
adopts the point of view of the social sciences.
A Short History of Ethics, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? are
three histories of moral philosophy37. In them, MacIntyre describes the evolution of the
concept of virtue, which he systematically relates to historical context - the decline of the
Greek city, the coming into being of the market economy. The organization and the contents
of these works differ, but the principle of analysis remains always the same. MacIntyre
articulates a history of thought around the contrast modernity-antiquity. The vicissitudes of a
word that has meant many things in different times and places - virtue - are not analyzed in
the light of the question of regime. Moral life is not a function of an aristocratic or democratic
ethos, but of such or such particular sociology. It does not evolve under the influence of
interpretations of justice, but under that of various of changes of context. By concentrating his
attention on the historiography of moral philosophy, rather than on political philosophy,
MacIntyre ensures the primacy of History over civic life.
Therefore, he does not see the relationship between the human type and the regime in a
dialectical manner, but a posteriori, at a level more empirical than philosophical. Through
Marx, whose sociologism and historicism he keeps, MacIntyre reveals himself to be a disciple

36
37

After Virtue, p. 22-34.

MacIntyre promises, perhaps seriously, A Very Long History of Ethics.

of Montesquieu, not of Aristotle38. However, unlike Montesquieu, MacIntyre refuses to

specify the political preconditions of his notion of moral virtue, a lacuna related to his
abstraction from virtue's inegalitarian side.
I would like to argue that it is the confusion of the theoretical with the practical, of the
philosophical with the ideological, which eventually makes sense of MacIntyre's historicism.

.- Over-politicization
MacIntyre presents Thomas Aquinas as an enemy of nascent bureaucracy - concerned,
under Saint Louis, about the confiscation of administration by specialists having a monopoly of
expertise -, and as a friend of local custom, against the great barons, the king, the ecclesiastical
authorities, Frederick II, and more generally, I daresay, imperialism39. To the nationalist and
monarchist Saint Thomas of Action Franaise, he substitutes a crypto-marxist Aquinas!
A contrario, one is no less surprised to discover MacIntyre's rather naive denunciations
of Aristotle. "Aristotle's mistake", he writes, "was not to understand how domination of a
certain kind is in fact the cause of those characteristics of the dominated which are then
invoked to justify unjustified domination"40. Elsewhere, MacIntyre protests against the elitist
prejudices of the Philosopher41. The ideological character of these interpretations is a bit
disconcerting.
"No practical rationality outside the polis is the Aristotelian counterpart to extra
ecclesiam nulla sallus", writes MacIntyre42. However one cannot help but find the comparison
awkward. Is the polis a Church, for Plato or Aristotle? Neither of them has ever held civic life
in a very high esteem. As Pascal emphasizes,
"when they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and Politics, they did it as an
amusement. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most
philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules
for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was
because they knew that the madmen to whom they spoke thought they were kings and
emperors"43.

It is curious that MacIntyre manages at the same time to de-politicize and to over-politicize
Aristotle. In other words, MacIntyre ignores Aristotle's most clearly political treatise, and
interjects into his work something of an ideological character. I see two reasons for this. The
first one, already mentioned, is historicism, which confers to any thought a dimension which is
profoundly social, and which at the same time denies the ultimate truth of any political
perspective. The second reason is the confusion of the theoretical with the practical, which
38

Cf., for instance, Alan Ryan: "Liberal anti-liberalism" [book review of Three Rival versions of Moral
Enquiry], New Statesman and Society, 3, August 17th 1990, p. 37-8
39 "Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas", ibid.
40 Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 105.
41 A Short History of Ethics, p. 68, p. 80, p. 83. "Plain persons and moral philosophy: rules, virtues and goods"
[1992], in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 150.
42 Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 141
43 Pascal: Penses, Br. 331

Plato and Aristotle are very careful to distinguish, as Pascal emphasizes. Actually, this
confusion is at the heart of historicism.

MacIntyre never succeeded in treating the question of the relationship between theory
and practice in a satisfying manner44. Here and there, he claims that such a view,
philosophically doubtful, is nevertheless sociologically exact: emotivism, for instance, is
supposed to describe adequately our world, while remaining non-aristotelian, and therefore
wrong. He tends to confuse the real and the nominal, and keeps wondering whether he should
give the primacy to the real or to the speculative life, or to take advantage of the descriptive
virtue of the history of thought45. Is he relying on Weber's theory of the ideal type because the
separation of the state and of civil society is an empirical reality, or because he thinks that it is
always and everywhere the proper way of relating politics to dealing the question of the soul?
Is his historicism just a way of adapting himself to a social reality which has itself "become"
historicist?
These oscillations lead us to an ambiguity peculiar to the concept of a "history of
ethics". Does this type of history bear on the condition of the possibility of the object of ethics;
that is, does it offer to explain causally the phenomena it studies? Or does this history aim at a
conceptual analysis which bears on the project or the intention of the philosopher, as opposed
to on the subject matter of moral philosophy? Does it have as an object the history of moral life
in its phenomenological reality, or rather the history of moral philosophy? MacIntyre confuses
history and philosophy so much that he prevents himself from distinguishing the content from
the success of an argument, the capacity to convince a public and the logical capacity to imply
consequences46.
Aristotle divides the sciences between the theoretical (knowledge, truth), the practical
(action) and the poetical (the production of external works)47. MacIntyre, on the other hand,
tends to discard these distinctions.
He relates virtue to "practices", such as agriculture, war poetry, theater, gymnastics,
architecture, sculpture, painting, mathematics, theology48. But most of these "practices" are,
properly speaking, "arts". From the marxist polemic against the New Left, MacIntyre preserves
a peculiar taste for skilled work. Against the bourgeois man, he extols the artisan, not the
artist. But Aristotle never disclosed any particular esteem for the shoemaker. MacIntyre
concedes this, not without regret, "the peculiar excellences of the exercise of craft skill and
manual labor are invisible from the standpoint of Aristotle's catalogue of the virtues"49. He
eventually mixes the character of the Homo Sapiens and of the Homo Faber, obscuring the

44

Marxism and Christianity, 1995, p. xv-xvi. Also "Marxism as Theory and Practice", in Marxism, 1953, p.
92-109, "Theory and Activity", in What is Marxist Theory For? (London: Plough Press, 1960), p. 5-7. "The
Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken" [1994], in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 223-234
45 Cora Diamond: "Losing your Concepts", Ethics, 98, 1988, p. 255-77
46 "The relationship of philosophy to its past", in R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind & Q. Skinner: Philosophy in
History, (Cambridge U.P., 1984), p. 31-48.
47 Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a27. Topics, 145a15 & 157a10. Metaphysics, E, 1 and K, 7
48 "Practical rationalities as forms of social structure" [1987], in The MacIntyre Reader, p. 121
49 After Virtue, p. 149. Also Whose Justice?..., p. 104. "Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good" [1997],
The MacIntyre Reader, p. 250.

distinction between phronesis and techne, between praxis and poesis, between action and
production50.
What does he do with the distinction between moral virtue and intellectual virtue,
around which the Nicomachean Ethics is organized? Does he see a difference between the
nature of the practical character of war, and the theoretical character of mathematics? In A
short History of Ethics, MacIntyre briefly refers to book X, and then concludes, apparently
relieved, that "very little in Aristotle's argument is affected by this". In After virtue, he adds
that "in many passages where Aristotle discusses individual virtues, the notion that their
possession and practice is in the end subordinate to metaphysical contemplation would seem
oddly out of place"51. Neither science nor esthetics seem to interest him. With MacIntyre,
eudaimonia becomes resolutely political.
The irony and death of Socrates, which seal the antagonism between philosophy and
the city, are absent from the tales of MacIntyre52. Are this death and irony the result of a mere
misunderstanding? We are not told. MacIntyre offers an interpretation of the Republic in
which the myth of the cave plays only a small role53. His notion of "tradition of thought"
abolishes the opposition between reason and tradition, which is at the foundation of the
speculative life54.
By undermining the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, MacIntyre
questions the distinction between the philosophical life and the political life, between nature
and convention, between time and eternity. Therefore, Aristotelianism stands to be corrected,
that is, modernized. Isn't it true that Aristotle "had little or no understanding of historicity in
general"55? His views must be completed by the truly modern discovery: the sense of history,
which MacIntyre ranks among the virtues.
But, ignoring the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, and between
action and production, MacIntyre blurs the distinction between the philosophical and the
ideological. Action becomes quasi-philosophical, and philosophy, quasi-practical. Politics,
which is not circumscribed anymore within a sphere peculiar to it, eventually becomes
contaminated by the other spheres. An apolitical approach is transformed into an
ideologicalization of the human sphere.
The author of After Virtue attacks the diminitio capitis of philosophy that the analytical
thinkers would have accepted56. Curiously, this attack does not so much seek to confer to
50

Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a-1140b25. Also J.L. Ackrill: "Aristotle on Action", in A.O. Rorty (d.): Essays
on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 93-101. In After Virtue (p. 180-1),
MacIntyre tries to acquit himself, but his defense is rather awkward.
51 A Short History of Ethics, p. 63. After Virtue, p. 148.
52 A Short History of Ethics, p. 18-25. Whose Justice?..., p. 71-3
53 A Short History of Ethics, p. 33-50. Whose Justice?..., p. 72-84
54 In "Persons and Human Beings, ed. Christopher Gill", Arion, 3rd series, vol. 1 (3), 1991, p. 188-94, as well
as in his 1997 Carus Lectures, "Dependant Rational Animals", MacIntyre withdraws his condemnation of
Aristotle's "metaphysical biology". But one can hardly see how he can admit the idea of nature, and therefore
the distinction of the eternal and the temporal, the theoretical and the practical, without renouncing his two
most important concepts: "tradition of thought" and "practice".
55 After Virtue, p. 149
56 Marxism: an Interpretation, 1953, p. 110-8. Against the Self-Images of the Age, p. viii-ix. After Virtue, p. 2.
"The indispensability of political theory", in D. Miller and L. Siedentop (ds.): The Nature of Political Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 17 & p. 23-4.

philosophy the luster of an aristocratic disinterest, but rather to remind us of the demands of
praxis. MacIntyre desires a powerful philosophy, taking up the child in school, guiding man
through life, providing him, throughout the moral, social, and political difficulties of his life,
with a rule of conduct marked by the seal of theory57.
But the parallel of this politicization of the philosophic life is the disappearance of
philosophy in the sense Plato and Aristotle gave it. Marx announced the end of philosophy.
Collingwood tended to reduce it to history, and Wittgenstein to a "therapeutic activity" - all
three leave out its contemplative dimension. Under the converging influences of the Tolstoism
of Wittgenstein, of the historicism of Collingwood, and of the activism of Marx, MacIntyre
ends up denying the autonomy of the intellectual life.
The best regime, as a consequence, is not so much given by philosophy, as it is by
poetry. MacIntyre is fascinated by those "heroic societies" depicted by Homer and the Islandic
Sagas, where morality appears to be identical to community roles, and therefore, the good
citizen to the good man58. MacIntyre, whose romanticism echoes Lenin's voluntarism and
Slavophilia, subordinates political philosophy to these epic narrations.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre refers to the Aristotelian character of Jacobinism; in Whose
justice? Which rationality? he insists on the Aristotelianism of Fletcher of Saltoun; elsewhere
still, he emphasizes the Aristotelianism of the Founders of the United States of America. It is
true that these different figures have in common a taste for "virtue"59. But which virtue is at
stake? MacIntyre does not seem to take into account the strange specificity of this virtue
which, if it comes from Aristotle, does so through Machiavelli... Is it enough to allude to the
concept of virtue to remain faithful to Aristotle? Although MacIntyre seems unwilling to
acknowledge it, it is important to remind us that virtue, as Fletcher, the Jacobins, and the
Founding Fathers understood it, is political and not moral, and that it comes directly from the
civic humanism of the Italian Renaissance60.
The list of the practices MacIntyre offers is so wide-ranging that one is less surprised to
notice what it includes than what it excludes - in particular industry and bureaucracy. The
transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries, the industrial revolution and the advent of the
service economy are incompatible with the exercise of virtue. MacIntyre leaves in limbo the
secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, in spite of their constituting most of modern
life. Although this "ethics of virtue" claims to be Aristotelian, it nevertheless echoes the
Marxist critique of the bourgeoisie. MacIntyre ranks among those who have taken part in the
so-called Betrayal of the Intellectuals61. His work is the expression of the anger of a man who
passionately hates liberalism; it has little of the serenity of Aristotle.

57

"The idea of an educated public", p. 15-36. "Philosophy in the Scottish Social Order", in Whose Justice?...,
p. 241-259
58 "The Virtues in Heroic Societies ", in After Virtue, p. 114-122
59 After Virtue, p. 221. Whose Justice?..., p. 256-7. "How Moral Education Came to Find its Place in the
Schools", Ethics and Moral Education (National Humanities Center, 1980), p. 6-12
60 John Pocock: The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton U.P., 1975), p. 426-32. The disciples of H. Arendt,
such as J. Pocock, do not have any difficulty in considering Aristotle's Politics as the key text for civic
humanism, since Arendt, like MacIntyre, ignores willfully Aristotle's contemplative dimension.
61 Julien Benda: The Betrayal of the Intellectuals [1927] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), trans. by R. Aldington,
188 p.

Today, liberal democracy is taken to be the only legitimate regime - a State which does
not respect the rights of man is not merely different, it is also criminal. This intransigence
presupposes that it is possible for liberalism to become universal; but this political optimism is
compensated by a moral pessimism: modern political philosophy expects a lot from the city,
and very little from the individual. A contrario, Aristotle's very demanding views in ethical
matters has as a counterpart a great flexibility in politics; he expects little from the people, and
balances his moral "idealism" with a caveat - prudence and moderation are the most important
political virtues.
MacIntyre does not bother to evaluate the merits claimed by liberal democracy,
because it gladly admits its indifference towards virtue, and takes itself for the least worst of
regimes. Like Aristotle, MacIntyre refuses to denigrate humanity, but he neglects the attempts
of the Philosopher to caution us. By drawing a political philosophy from the Nicomachean
Ethics, he yokes together the moral ambition of the ancients with the political ambition of the
moderns. He uses Aristotle, more than he learns from him.
Under cover of this "revolutionary Aristotelianism", one will not find it difficult to find
the Marxist Christianity which the young MacIntyre claimed to follow - Thomism making the
transition between the Christian ethics to that of the Stagirite. "If the Christian hope is to be
realized in history, it must assume the form of a political hope [...]. Marxism is in essence a
complete realization of Christian eschatology"62. By ignoring the Politics, MacIntyre loses the
idea of politics as architectonic, and replaces it unwittingly by the Marxist claim that
"everything is political". De-politicization paradoxically implies an over-politicization: Marx
wanted revolution only in order to end politics. MacIntyre associates Aristotelian
perfectionism with Marx's impatience; his thoughts are born from the mating of an animal and
a god. The desire for truth bows before a concern for justice.
February 1999
Translated from the French by Stephane Douard and Jonathan Hand

62

Marxism: an Interpretation, 1953, p. 120