Marxism, Ethics and Politics

Alasdair MacIntyre and Marxism

This book discusses Alasdair MacIntyre’s engagement with Marxism from the early 1950s to the present. It begins with his early writings on Marxism and Christianity, moving through his period in the New Left and the Socialist Labour League and International Socialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. It then discusses MacIntyre’s break with Marxism by developing the brief but telling five-point critique he gives of Marxism in his 1981 volume After Virtue. Marxism, Ethics and Politics highlights MacIntyre’s continuing admiration for much in Marx’s thought, noting that his contemporary project is developed in response to what he now sees as the inadequacies of Marxism, particularly Marxist politics. It concludes by examining the place of Marxism in the contemporary MacIntyrean debate and by pointing out the contested nature of the claims about Marxism that MacIntyre makes.