05.06.2025

Philosophy in the ordinary world

Alasdair MacIntyre died on May 21 2025. Though journeying from Calvinism to Marxism and then, finally, to Catholicism, he retained a gut commitment to the working class. Paul Demarty offers a critical appreciation of an extraordinary mind that opened so many doors

In 2007, Alasdair MacIntyre, found himself delivering a lecture at a British university at which, he was informed shortly before speaking, there was to be a student strike in protest against a poor pay deal for lecturers. As The Guardian reports in its obituary,

he prefaced his paper with an impromptu diatribe in support of trades unions and workers’ rights. The first to raise his hand after MacIntyre’s paper was the Socialist Worker party [sic] leader, Alex Callinicos, who accused him of not being a proper revolutionary. MacIntyre replied that he didn’t know how to make a revolution, but it was clear that Callinicos didn’t either.¹

The anecdote is telling, since the standard version of his life story in leftwing circles is a political biography, in which the young MacIntyre became an ‘official communist’, while an undergraduate at Queen Mary in London, and broke with the CPGB owing to its Stalinism. He drifted through Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League into the Socialist Review Group and International Socialists, predecessors of today’s SWP, and from there to the general intellectual milieu of the British ‘new left’.

By the early 1970s, his enthusiasm for the far left had cooled, and he bode his time in academic philosophy before producing his magnum opus, After virtue, which (so this story goes) offers a conservative critique of modern morality. He then became a Catholic, and a conservative communitarian.

Trading blows

This story has no room for his dialogue with Callinicos in 2007, the intensity of his commitment to the cause of the trade union movement, and his willingness to trade blows with a current leader of his former Trotskyist outfit in the language of the revolutionary socialist tradition. Nor does it leave much room for some of the other famous barbs of his late period - his argument that asking someone to die for the modern nation-state is like asking them “to die for the telephone company”², say; or, when asked what beliefs he held over from his Marxist period proper, quipping: “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamppost.” In the Q&A after a lecture on the proper role of a Catholic university, someone noted that MacIntyre seemed to find no role for business schools, and wondered what he would do with them. “Burn them,” he replied.

This is because of what the story most fundamentally lacks - his philosophy. Sure, to narrate his life without the politics would be otiose, and entirely un-MacIntyrean in spirit; but the same goes for any narrative that is only (or almost only) political. MacIntyre was above all a theorist of the unity of theory and practice in historically-situated individual lives. His mature work - spanning effectively from After virtue to his last major work, Ethics in the conflicts of modernity, published in 2016 - is littered with little biographies. Life stories were to MacIntyre what sublation was to Hegel.

So, back to the beginning, then. Born in Glasgow, but raised in London and the south-east by an extended Scots-Irish Protestant family, he went up to Queen Mary College to study classics. In the intellectual scene around him, he encountered, alongside the Marxism of the ‘official’ CPGB, the enormous excitement that still surrounded the logical positivist movement in philosophy - above all in the figure of AJ Ayer. He was later to have a brief dalliance with Sartrean existentialism. This was an unusually rich mix of influences, to which must be added the Calvinist tradition to which he adhered, and which he interpreted along the lines of the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth (who had himself been an anti-war socialist in his youth).

His academic interest drifted in the direction of philosophy. He obtained his masters degree from the University of Manchester and taught there for a time (he never bothered to obtain a doctorate). It was around then, aged 23, that he published his first book, Marxism: an interpretation, later republished in revised form as Marxism and Christianity. Its argument is that Marxism inherits large parts of its theory from Christian antecedents, and succeeds in offering the only secular interpretation of human existence with comparable power and scope. But - especially in the later, revised version - there are limits to each, in their failure to adequately historicise themselves. The book is therefore a kind of mutual critique of each in terms of the other, that does not shy away from the institutional forms (church and party) that bear these complicatedly related and rival doctrines.

The Marxism most commended in the book (at least in its revised form) is a typical product of the new left. Central to it is the concept of alienation, which for MacIntyre is a useful inheritance of Hegel.³ Later Marxists who draw on this (especially Lukács) are commended; Engels, on the other hand, is criticised as having replaced the Hegelian inheritance with a metaphysics based on the natural sciences⁴ - which in turn leads to Kautsky, and above all Stalin, producing a wholly deterministic account of history that ironically turns it into a sort of god.⁵

By the 1970s, he had lost faith in both Marxism and Christianity. Somewhat like Theodor Adorno in Germany, his attitude to the left hardened, when confronted with the radical student movement, for which he seems to have had considerable contempt. (His teaching style was always strict and brusque, though many of his students have oddly fond memories of it.) Concerned increasingly with moral philosophy, he became more and more clearly dissatisfied with the actual condition of the discipline.

Disorder

What was this condition? MacIntyre was a professional philosopher in the English, and later American academy. Moral philosophy in this setting was conducted largely in the tradition of analytical philosophy, which prized conceptual analysis, intense logical rigour, the practice of the thought experiment, and the building up of extensive literature, debating specific, long-running disputes.

In spite of his aforementioned adherence to Hegelian Marxism, MacIntyre was trained in this analytical tradition, and was an excellent practitioner of its characteristic activities. But he was increasingly concerned about a fact so obvious that few mentioned it: the debates were interminable, in the strictly literal sense of that word. Nobody was able to end them decisively, nor was it clear how the dispute between - say - Kantian and utilitarian ethical theories could be ended to the satisfaction of both contending parties.

There was another problem. The disputes of academic moral philosophers were hermetic. They had ever weaker bearing on the conduct of people outside the academy - what MacIntyre called, with no condescension intended, “plain persons”. There was, however, something like a moral philosophy out there in the ordinary world. It consisted of a series of apparently absolute rules - do not kill; do not lie - which seem a little like instances of Kant’s categorical imperative. Yet these rules all have exceptions made to them on essentially utilitarian grounds (“do not kill, unless in self-defence, or you are a soldier in a war”), and the lists of exceptions get ever longer. In practice, this means that people oscillate between pseudo-Kantian and pseudo-utilitarian conceptions of morality. For all that Marxism offered indispensable resources for understanding this strange situation, MacIntyre took it that the Marxist movement as it existed suffered from the same disordered moral conduct as every other institution in modern society.

It is to this situation that After virtue is addressed. It is divided roughly into halves: firstly, a history of 20th century moral philosophy’s inconclusive attempts to find a secure ground for morality with extensive philosophical critiques of impressive breadth; and, secondly, a longer historical narrative of the emergence of the concept of virtue in antiquity and its steady disappearance from the scene in the modern period. The virtues, according to the ancient Greeks and pre-eminently Aristotle, were habits of behaviour that had to be acquired through sustained practice; once acquired, they tended to direct one’s action towards the good, which for Aristotle meant participation in the life of the polis (the city-state).

As such, ethics was not to be understood primarily as a field of theoretical inquiry, but of practice: of pursuit of the good life, which was indissociable from participation in the normal activity of the wider society (thus Aristotle’s infamous opinion that the good life was closed to those who could not so participate, like slaves and women). The decline of the virtues as the ground of the good life followed on from the replacement of the polis and political societies roughly like it by the capitalist market and the modern bureaucratic state, which tend to produce compartmentalised lives (you are one person at work, another at home, and yet another in dealings with the council housing office).

Marxism provided an account of the mechanisms of the market and the state, which remained of decisive importance (a belief from which MacIntyre never wavered, commending the theory of surplus value as late as 2016’s Ethics⁶). Its practical commitments to building a revolutionary state, however, tended to ensure that, “as Marxists organise and move toward power, they always do and have become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric”.⁷ His conclusion is that Marxism “is exhausted as a political tradition”⁸ - though the same is true of every other major political tradition - and “what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community, within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us … We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another - doubtless very different - St Benedict.”⁹

Despite the reference to St Benedict, MacIntyre had not become a Catholic, and did not for another three years, by his own account when his students succeeded in convincing him that his criticisms of Thomas Aquinas in After virtue were unwarranted. That aside, After virtue is something of a decisive statement of his philosophy. His subsequent work - voluminous though it is - consists largely in filling out the picture. Three rival versions of moral inquiry attempts to sketch the way that such rival theories can, in fact, really put each other in question (an activity that he had, of course, been in some form engaged in since Marxism: an interpretation). Dependent rational animals offers a modernised Thomist account of human species being. Both provide ancillary support for the theses on ethics and politics in After virtue.

Politics

His conception of the political tasks before us, such as it was, barely changed; it was local initiatives, rooted in the common life of families, workplaces and schools, that held what hope existed for progress in a world dominated by the market and the bureaucratic nation-state. His later work reconceived those initiatives in terms of the idea of the common good, which for him referred precisely to those goods that can only be obtained and enjoyed collectively, and needed to be distinguished from individual goods, which involve purely transactional relations between individuals to obtain some individual benefit, or public goods, which were procured collectively (say, by the state), but enjoyed individually.

Education, for example, is a common good, because it irreducibly involves teachers, students and parents together, with the education being enjoyed not only by the student, but the communities of which he or she is a member. The same may be said for football teams or string quartets. Yet there are ambiguous cases - consider the workers in a Taylorist-type factory, who go to work to collect their paycheque, and are exploited and alienated from the products of their labour. Though they are involved in a collective activity, it is such that they are separated from the good that results, and indeed separated from each other paradoxically by the work process. In this case, both the worker and the capitalist are engaged in pursuit of individual goods (not equivalent goods - MacIntyre, again, continued to endorse the theory of surplus value).

Public goods are a trickier proposition. Let us combine our two previous examples: a school is set up to educate children, but the education is solely in technical functions that will allow the students to assimilate directly into the workforce of a nearby factory. They are taught nothing of the humanities or the natural sciences - only narrow competences of this sort. This would be a kind of public good: though it is obtained collectively, its outcome can only be the pursuit of individual goods.

The line between common goods and public goods is fuzzy. I think there are strong grounds for supposing that no conceptually rigorous distinction could ever be determined, as the technical-school example illustrates - whether or not some form of education or another has in fact succeeded in yielding a common good is contingent on what happens after the fact. Yet that need not be fatal to MacIntyre’s overall theory; indeed, his overarching point is exactly that. It is in the whole form of life that particular practices find their overall meaning and significance; and the bureaucratic-capitalist rationality of contemporary society tends to replace common goods with more degraded alternatives, mediated through the market and the state.

From the political point of view, the problems really arise when we think about the models that MacIntyre offered for political activity - the local coalitions pursuing their common goods. If he maintained a commitment to the economic and political critiques of Marxism, as indeed he did, these were partial. He was not straightforwardly deluded on the point of the chances of success of such local campaigning, but all the same, while he certainly could come up with examples of success, he confronted many more of ultimate failure. The question then becomes: are the failures unfortunate accidents, or the successes fortunate accidents?

The driving point of Marxist political economy is precisely that, by the relentless pressure of the economic process, activities will tend to become more centralised, small firms will become large firms, which will become monopolies. Such larger concerns are more capable of absorbing smaller ones, which include the kinds of cooperative enterprises MacIntyre favoured. This must, surely, enter into our assessment of how likely they are to become institutions where the virtues can be established and passed on, since the passing on of the virtues is a matter of generational replacement in good order. If the very sites of such replacement are vulnerable to absorption into either large capitalist enterprises or the bureaucratic state demanded by capitalism, then we have a problem.

In this respect, he massively underplayed the dangers. The deindustrialisation he bemoaned in working class American towns is, after all, a matter of their local firms’ exposure to the demands of international competition and the predations of international finance capital. He supposed that the nation-state was too large and heterogeneous to be the stage of the common good; but how much larger is the stage of the world market!

MacIntyrean localism seems, to me, a legitimate form of utopian socialism, indebted as it openly is to trends like distributism, the early 20th century fashion that saw the way forward as the production through redistribution of a society of smallholders. For environmental reasons, if for no others, supply chains should probably be shorter; and in a democratic society one vote means more in a smaller electorate, so moving as many decisions as possible to the localities would be preferable. It is a serviceable recipe, to use Marx’s phrase, for the cook shops of the future.

Public virtue

We are, today, confronted with capitalism as a globally organised and integrated power. If he did not know how to make a revolution, that is too bad, since the recovery of any conception of public virtue - distributist, state-socialist, revolutionary-democratic-socialist - depends on the revolutionary overthrow of that state of affairs.

Such a revolution depends in turn on the ability of the masses to organise not only as local community groups, but a large-scale structure that is called a party. For MacIntyre, parties are simply one aspect of the overall structure of political life in modern states, whereby the masses are subordinated to what he called “agenda-setting elites”, and are thus doomed to a cynical clientelism. It is not clear, however, why it should be possible to obtain democratic self-government in a polis and not in a voluntary organisation of militants of roughly the same population.

That parties typically do play the role primarily of agenda-setting on the part of elites in our society can scarcely be denied. Yet local community groups typically also devolve into such games, turning into canvassing operations for some party or another. If there is a way out, it is not clear why one institution would succeed and not the other in avoiding this danger. It certainly is clear why party organisation stands a snowflake’s chance in hell of succeeding against the forces arrayed against the masses, and strictly local operations do not: because those forces are themselves organised at a higher level than the local.

It is on the party question, ultimately, that MacIntyre’s view of Marxism as politically exhausted turns. In a certain respect, this problem is already there in Marxism and Christianity: his adherence to the new left line that the two real alternatives available to classical social democracy were the rightist revisionism of Eduard Bernstein and the leftism of Rosa Luxemburg is notably consonant with the idea of Robert Michels - a leftist-syndicalist social democrat who repented and became a fascist - that mass parties were intrinsically doomed to become oligarchies.

The actual history of the mass social democratic parties in their revolutionary period - in particular the way they were able to bind together innumerable local political and cultural initiatives as national political forces - is absent from his account: there is merely the story of bureaucracy, presented as if it were inevitable. Marxists may or may not become Weberians, as they approach power; but MacIntyre became a Weberian just insomuch as he distanced himself from Marxist politics.

Morality

If the positive political proposals that MacIntyre’s project yielded were hopeless - and they were, in spite of his protestations - then there remains the question of why his life and work demands two pages of the Weekly Worker on the occasion of his death. What does he have to say to us?

For this, we must return to the matter for which he is more widely remembered: his contributions to moral philosophy, and his attempts to return morality to its only true centre: the conduct of ‘plain persons’ in their relations with each other. There is often an awkwardness - an embarrassment, even - in Marxist forays into matters of morality. A certain more naive mindset can tell a story like this: morality is just the ideology of bourgeois society, and it is superseded by the scientific analysis of social relations. A recent example of this outlook was provided by Enzo Rossi in Damage magazine, criticising attempts to base socialist politics on liberal moralism of the John Rawls sort:

If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works and how present dynamics limit our imaginations, to improve the position from which we make political choices. This is the sense in which our conception of emancipation is different from the liberal one: rather than striving for the freedom to get whatever we want here and now, we try to create conditions under which our desires are truly our own …

Power distorts our desires and our moral values more than it distorts our faculties of observation, because the former two are more important to social control than the latter. That is why, until we are in a position of lesser subjection, we should stick to a sober, if radical, realism, limiting ourselves to figuring out how things work. In turn, that will tell us which distorted commitments to discard, and what alternatives may be open to us.¹⁰

We can respond to this by telling a MacIntyrian story: Enzo Rossi was born in the year X. At the age of 16, he realised it was time for him to have a political world view. He therefore undertook an exhaustive study of his own material interests and, having done so, moved on to studying all the various major political world views. He concluded that Marxism best served his interests, and therefore became a Marxist.

This story, obviously, is false. Why obviously? Because everyone involved in the socialist movement knows some other people so involved, and we all know of each other that we were not motivated to become militants on the basis of such calculations. For me, it was the Iraq war; for others, the Vietnam war or the 2008 crisis or the rise of the modern right. When the movement really did reach into the working class, direct individual interests were more pertinent, of course, but working class people became socialists or communists rather than just good union militants, because they grasped their own struggles as part of a larger moral campaign for radically more egalitarian social relations.

That is the trouble with a Marxist politics that simply disclaims moral reasoning - it is left, implicitly, with a theory of political motivation that is straightforwardly false in the case of basically every Marxist. This is a problem.

MacIntyre offers us much to think about here. He reminds us that our material lives are always/already articulated with our idea of the good life. If we are to be more than mere mechanical materialists, we must acknowledge that human beings are characterised materially by their ability to reflect on their actions and interpret them as meaningful. We cannot understand human action at all without so doing. It is on this point, after all, that MacIntyre was able to put the Marxist organisations of his acquaintance to the question, alleging that their practice entailed a degraded and ‘Weberian’ view of human action.

This in turn entails that there are right and wrong ways to organise politically to create a radically more just world. We cannot, like the ‘official communist’ parties, traffic endlessly in lies about the ‘actually existing socialist’ countries, because in so doing we degrade ourselves and deprive ourselves of those virtues that allow ourselves to do our actual work. In the same way, the SLL under Healy and the SWP under Callinicos were and are characterised by relentless and mendacious official optimism; and so ordinary members are degraded. We need Rossi’s “sober realism”, but we need it precisely because the raw materials of socialist organisations are people, who must in the end be able to deal honestly with their colleagues in the workplace, or neighbours or family.

In order to do so, MacIntyre would argue, we need the virtues: of justice (giving to each what is their due), temperance (rational self-restraint), and many others, but above all what Aristotle calls phronesis and Aquinas prudentia - the ability to reason practically about which virtues are decisive in a particular situation. We cannot learn to exercise these virtues by reading a textbook on them, and so MacIntyre did not write textbooks: we learn from others, by following examples or receiving criticism. If a left organisation really were to obtain a recruit of the strictly cynical sort I described above in my hypothetical biography of Enzo Rossi, it would have a job of work on its hands to inculcate the virtues.

What I think is unanswerable in this challenge is not so much the particular tabulation of virtues - on this point, in any case, Aquinas departs from Aristotle, and MacIntyre was no dogmatist - but that the particular unity of theory and practice that is the Marxist movement is indeed a special case of the pursuit of the common good and therefore makes these kinds of demands on us as individuals. The cardinal virtue in our case, I would suggest, is a scrupulous intellectual honesty that does not make easy work of making friends, but ensures the friendships that do result truly answer to the name of comradeship.

More awkward is the emphasis MacIntyre places on the final ends of human life - which is, of course, where his Catholicism is most strongly in evidence. It is unproblematic for a Catholic - especially a Thomist - to lean on this idea: Catholicism, like most major religious traditions, leans strongly on a teleological conception of human life. It is unproblematic in a different way for a typical liberal, for whom there are simply no such final ends (MacIntyre’s foil on this point was typically Isaiah Berlin or one of his disciples).

Marxism is in a more awkward spot, since it is committed generally to naturalistic explanation, but is simply unintelligible politically without at least constraints on human ends that exclude the idea that, for example, slavery is a perfectly good condition for some people, if not all. In this respect, it is irreducibly, if perhaps cautiously, teleological. A truly value-free ‘Marxism’ would be unable to recommend socialist revolution over some other possible outcome of capitalist society - say, the division of humanity, through eugenics and genetic engineering, into separate master and slave species; or, more prosaically, reversion to warlordism or nuclear armageddon - except as essentially contingent matters of preference; but if we really thought it was just a matter of preference, we would not bother to be Marxists.

It does not seem to me that the problem is insoluble, but the movement as it is has not - yet - provided the solution; and even if a rigorous theoretical answer was to be provided, it would still, once more, have to be put to the test of the practical activity of the movement. MacIntyre’s indictment of the moral reflection of the Marxist tradition, and its inability to escape the quagmire of modern moral inquiry more generally, is, alas, all too true of our history thus far.

Characters

In After virtue, MacIntyre - almost in passing - argues that ages are exemplified by certain ‘characters’. So Victorian England might be glimpsed in the figure of the public schoolmaster, or post-war Britain in the bureaucratic manager. This idea has its most obvious provenance in Weber’s “ideal types”, but more distantly in certain archetypes of Jewish and Christian religion - prophet, priest and king.

In that typology, MacIntyre was certainly a prophet. His assessment of the moral exhaustion of the civilisation around him has the doomy air of a Jeremiah or Hosea, at any rate. Prophets are famously unwelcome in their own country; MacIntyre was never much at home anywhere - a critic of academia and especially of his own field of academic philosophy, and of the manifest injustices of the countries where he lived, principally Britain and the United States; an uneasy Marxist at the best of times; a Catholic who routinely ridiculed the church’s inability to see any political issue as pertinent except the legality of abortion (though he agreed that it should be illegal).

As a more modern ‘character’, MacIntyre played the role of a public intellectual, albeit again uneasily. His encyclopaedically wide-ranging interests are so many doors into his thought, and so a strange old crowd now competes for ownership of his memory - from ultra-reactionaries who suppose his localism authorised the formation of heavily armed trad-Catholic madrasas, to Marxists who are forced into reflection on the matter of what the point of it all is.

Those sorts of ‘big’ questions were once thought to be the very stuff of philosophy; alas, academia is so desiccated that we are running out of people who even bother with them. And we have now lost one of the best.

1. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/25/alasdair-macintyre-obituary.↩︎

2. A MacIntyre, ‘Poetry and political philosophy: notes on Burke and Yeats’ Ethics and politics Cambridge 2006, p163.↩︎

3. A MacIntyre Marxism and Christianity Notre Dame, Indiana, 1984 - especially pp29-45.↩︎

4. Ibid p87.↩︎

5. Ibid p101.↩︎

6. A MacIntyre Ethics in the conflicts of modernity Cambridge 2016, pp93-101. In this respect he was more traditional in his Marxism than the analytical Marxists of the 1970s and 80s, who largely adopted neo-classical critiques of Marx’s theory of value.↩︎

7. A MacIntyre After virtue Bloomsbury 2007, p181.↩︎

8. Ibid p404 (MacIntyre’s emphasis).↩︎

9. Ibid pp405-06.↩︎

10. damagemag.com/2025/02/25/socialism-is-not-liberal-moralism-on-steroids.↩︎