Alasdair MacIntyre

Critic of Modernity

Peter McMylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134950140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is the first full length account of the significance of MacIntyre's work for the social sciences. MacIntyre's moral philosophy is shown to provide the resources for a powerful crititque of liberalism. His dicussion of the managerist and emotivist roots of modern culture is seen as the inspiration for a critical social science of Modernity

Part I

MacIntyre—Christianity and/or Marxism?

Chapter 1
Christianity and Marxism
Acceptance and rejection

The first book ever written by Alasdair MacIntyre was entitled Marxism: An Interpretation.¹ It begins with the following words:

The division of human life into the sacred and the secular is one that comes naturally to Western thought. It is a division which at one and the same time bears the marks of its Christian origin and witnesses to the death of a properly religious culture. For when the sacred and the secular are divided, then religion becomes one more department of human life, one activity among others. This has in fact happened to bourgeois religion… Only a religion which is a way of living in every sphere either deserves to or can hope to survive. For the task of religion is to help see the secular as the sacred, the world as under God. When the sacred and the secular are separated, then the ritual becomes an end not the hallowing of the world, but in itself. Likewise if our religion is fundamentally irrelevant to our politics, then we are recognising the political as a realm outside the reign of God. To divide the sacred from the secular is to recognise God's action only within the narrowest limits. A religion which recognises such a division, as does our own, is one on the point of dying.²

Here we see presented to the world for the first time many of MacIntyre's familiar themes and concerns: the anxiety about the division and fragmentation of everyday life in relation to a great moral scheme and an absolutely distinctive certainty that this is a modern ‘bourgeois’ phenomenon. But what is perhaps most useful about seeing this very early passage is in the entirely theological character of its analysis. Anyone looking at MacIntyre's work must not only be struck by the remarkable consistency of his intellectual preoccupations but that in many respects he has turned full circle and in his later work returned to the theological issues and concerns that he began with. This is correct, yet also greatly to oversimplify, for the long journey of movement and return has been an enormously enriching one.³ However, the initial use of theological language is important even if we only note the original motivation that lies behind his sustained critique of western societies.

It is also the case that the theological nature of MacIntyre's stance is an essential conditioning factor in understanding his initial relationship to Marxism. In what follows, I will begin by charting MacIntyre's original characterisation of Marxism and Christianity and then examine his later partial rejection of both, but noting what he felt was always crucial to retain from each in his sociological understanding of western societies. It will I believe prove fruitful to examine in some detail MacIntyre's first sustained piece of argumentation, as well as his other early essays, so that we can begin to appreciate his relatively early theoretical sophistication and as an indication of the powerful and original vision that inspired his early and later work. It would, of course, be foolish to deny development and any discontinuity in MacIntyre's thought, but I am convinced that an excessively ‘textual’ approach, i.e. one that ignored the very particular values and dispositions present at an early stage of his intellectual formation, would miss something vital about the nature of his later thought. I shall emphasise, at first, the strong religious and theological nature of the original analysis (long out of print) in order to bring out both the continuity and the contrasts with the later and more ‘sociological’ analysis of the revised edition.

CHRISTIANITY AND MARXISM: THE ORIGINALPOSITION

Why did MacIntyre choose to begin his intellectual career with a book on Marxism? The answer lies in his view that Marxism is one of two really serious attempts to provide a clear rival world view to Christianity in the modern world, the other being positivism. Marxism is seen by MacIntyre as the more important of the two because of positivism's rather limited appeal, being largely limited to intellectuals who have had little interest in trying to provide a wide-ranging and popular positive account of the nature of religion itself. Marxism, in contrast, has a very clear and powerful account of the nature and function of religion within its own theoretical terms of reference, the key point being for MacIntyre that ‘Marxism envisages the whole of human life in terms that explicitly deny the God-given character of the world’.⁴ But what makes Marxism most paradoxical is that Marxist theory and hence Marxist atheism has religious roots.

How can this paradoxical claim of MacIntyre's be understood?⁵ In essence it lies in the continual instability and tension within the Christian tradition between Church and state, sacred and secular. This tension is the result of the fact that it was the established political and the old religious authorities that had Jesus killed and in so doing helped create a religious community that was for some time independent of the state and very often persecuted by it. But the Church did recognise the authority of the state as a power that was granted by God but separate from the Church. All political orders are sinful and stand in need of Christian judgement, but for the Church to identify itself too closely with any one particular order will lead it into failure and sin, as God is reduced in this process to the God of one limited and inadequate human order. It follows from this as MacIntyre suggests that

This means that one of the fruits of the gospel may be an anticlerical secularism and an atheism that rejects false gods. The gospel itself is atheistic where any god other than the one true God is concerned. Where he is not preached, atheism may be the surviving fruit of the gospel.⁶

Marxist atheism becomes then an almost necessary and even potentially a protective doctrine for Christianity, or at least for a Christianity that has become forgetful of the need for a full and rigorous negative theology, which ought to prevent the Church succumbing to the idolatry of identifying God with whatever images a particular society, at a particular time, has of him. But MacIntyre is prepared to argue, at this stage, that at least in part Marxism's critique of religion rests on a mistake, the mistake that it inherits from eighteenth-century rationalism which is all too ready to identify the superstitious representation in religion with the nature of the mythical dimension itself. The error, he suggests, lies in the assumption that mythical thought is failed scientific thought, that it is ‘would-be science distorted by human needs and emotions’.⁷ Instead MacIntyre wants to suggest that myth is attempting something different from science, in that it attempts a total picture of the world, albeit from a necessarily limited or partial view from within that world which means that a stretching of language via metaphor is crucial to myth. It follows from this, that unlike science, which seeks to separate out the emotive element from questions of cognition, myth prizes the connection between description and evaluation:

For myth and science both select certain facts as significant: they differ in their criterion of significance. A metaphysics is a rational myth. A superstition is a myth without the control and criticism of reasoning. A religion is a myth which claims both a foundation in history and to point beyond itself to God.⁸

For MacIntyre at this stage the weakness of Marxism, like that of eighteenth-century rationalism and certain versions of modern positivism, is that it mistakes religion for myth pure and simple. Marxism seeks social and indeed functional explanations of religion on the assumption that these will exhaust its meaning. But MacIntyre acknowledges the great advantage Marxism has over Christianity in view of its emphasis on science and the importance accorded to scientific method. Interestingly enough, he suggests the real advantage enjoyed by Marxism in relationship to science lies not in easier acceptance of science's ability to explain the world, for Christianity can justly claim to have encouraged the contemplation and understanding of the world, but rather the distinctiveness lies in Marxism's understanding and celebration of the active use of technique in relation to the manipulation of the material world. Modern science, MacIntyre suggests, urgently raises through the question of technology, the issue of power, an issue he believes Christians have all too often evaded by using the imagery of the servant as an apparent model for the renunciation of power. This will not do, he says, for the Christian is ‘a sinner and yet justified, always…in a tension between the power of God in Christ and the powers of this world’.⁹ Marxism, of course, has had a long engagement with the issue of power and its relationship to technology. This makes it very important for MacIntyre, who sees Marxism as a secularism formed by the Gospels committed to justice, and so charged with theological significance.

MacIntyre makes a strong theological claim to connect what he perceives as important in Marxism with Christianity. He does this by deriving five social and political principles implicit within Christianity from Jesus’ account of the last judgement in Matthew 25:31-5. These principles were:

1. That not only individuals but whole societies were to be redeemed ‘and before him shall be gathered all the nations’.
2. There are real forces of evil at work in the world which generate real pain and suffering and because of a lack of pity or compassion.
3. It is the business of God to judge, not of man here and now to distinguish sheep from goats.
4. It is the task of human beings to show mercy in practical ways in order to set some limit to the lack of mercy in the world—’I was in prison and ye came unto me’.
5. In this world we meet God in the shape of those in need and we can never know for certain when we are being so confronted.

For MacIntyre it is clearly in the area points 3 and 4 that Marxism presents its strongest challenge to Christianity, precisely because its stance and overarching imperatives are so close to that of the Gospels.¹⁰

When examining the differences in the two books MacIntyre wrote concerning Marxism and Christianity, one is bound to be struck very forcibly by one thing: that although in many respects the books are quite distinct, when it comes to the internal account of Marxism as a theory or doctrine, they differ hardly at all and in fact are virtually a word for word transcription. It seems therefore that what changed in the intervening fifteen years was not any significant shift in MacIntyre's understanding of the nature of Marxism as a body of thought, although there clearly is a shift in the significance that MacIntyre attaches to the truth status that Marxism is presumed to possess. What appears to happen is that in the second text all direct references that appear to endorse a Christian theological position are removed and replaced by a form of sociological analysis which is distanced from both Christianity and Marxism, but seeks to examine the cultural significance of both, a significance that is seen as vitally important, but also, in some respects, no longer available. I explore this sociological moment in MacIntyre's thought below. However, the picture of MacIntyre's intellectual development is further complicated by the fact that in the intervening years he produced essays of a clearer and perhaps more conventionally Marxist nature and, as is well known, was a member of the International Socialists (IS), one of the more intellectually open and creative of the Far Left groups.¹¹ We will have occasion to address these essays in Marxist philosophy shortly.

It seems clear that what impels MacIntyre towards Marxism, as it is to do a later generation of so-called Liberation Theologians,¹² is in the Christian commitment to practise and to encounter God in the world, amongst the poor. This sets up an ideological and often institutional tension, which as MacIntyre argues refuses ‘the identification of outward religion with inward righteousness’ as ‘just the source of that self-righteousness of religious believers which leads them to withdraw from the world for which Jesus died and to see the Church not as a community that redeems the world but rather as a fixed community of the redeemed’. To escape this danger means to turn to the secular world as a place of religious significance, ‘This is the search of Hegel's philosophy’.¹³ It is precisely this leap into the embrace of the secular which MacIntyre will later see as ultimately damaging for Christianity as a distinct current within society, a topic we will explore below.

The importance of Hegel lies in the way he injects into a historical understanding issues and concerns that ultimately have their source in theological concepts.¹⁴ Hegel's three key concepts: ‘self-estrangement’, ‘objectification’ and ‘coming to one's own’, are all seen by MacIntyre as the projection on to a historical narrative of a Christian account of the Fall, the sinfulness of the world, and the process of redemption. ‘Self-estrangement’ is seen as a description of the Fall. It appears both in relationships between human beings and as internal to the mental life of a person. Human beings fail to live up to the moral law that they themselves create; this itself is a marker of the selfishness and egoism in the life of society and results both in conflict and a bad conscience. This process of ‘self-estrangement’ from the products of one's own thought and behaviour produces what Hegel calls ‘objectification’, the failure to recognise the world as a product of a person's own thought and actions, and this failure of recognition is clearly the hallmark of the developed theory of the alienation of subject and object.

But, for Hegel the crucial move in the escape from this situation is the coming to see and understand one's homelessness in the world. The way back is seen as being through self-knowledge, an act that Hegel calls ‘appropriation’ or ‘coming to one's own’. This process of the growth of self-knowledge is what Hegel takes the substance of human history to be about, the gradual emergence of human freedom out of slavery. For Hegel, of course, religion and in particular Christianity are a transitional phase to be transcended by the emergence of a purer recognition of the nature of freedom in reason, i.e. as philosophy which in overcoming religion would also reveal its truth in the reconciliation of the finite and the absolute, as prefigured in the doctrine of the incarnation, as the unity of man and God in Christ. MacIntyre's account of Hegel is rather distant and external in the sense that he seems to see the work as providing a rich new vocabulary of transcendence and redemption,¹⁵ rather than as a system of thought to be completely accepted. MacIntyre is happy to accept the Marxist critique of the Hegelian system, seeing Hegel as a representative bourgeois in its heroic phase of overthrowing the remnants of feudalism, but who is ultimately idealist in substituting ideas and concepts for material reality.¹⁶

MacIntyre proceeds to rehearse the now familiar root of Marx's thought through the Left-Hegelians and Feuerbach, in an admirably clear and sympathetic manner. This, it is important to remember, was no mean achievement in 1953, when in Anglo-Saxon philosophy circles the attitude to Marxism, in an increasingly Cold War climate, had been set a few years earlier by Popper's harsh dismissal.¹⁷ Feuerbach like Hegel is seen by MacIntyre to be trying to fulfil Christianity in secular terms. Religion is seen to have arisen for Feuerbach by a process of the objectification of the human essence, so religion in reality is a massively distorted projection of the fundamental reality of what it is to be human. Christianity is a vision of humanity, but humanity as a loving community. Theological language about a powerful, loving God is in reality a projection of humanity's deepest needs. So religion must be humanised to overcome the processes of objectification which have produced such a gulf between humanity and the real human essence. But the question then arises as to how this process of necessary humanisation is to be achieved. The answer to this question once again raises for MacIntyre the limitations of this Left-Hegelian critique when compared with Christianity, as he puts it:

both of them (Hegel and Feuerbach)…see the path to our redemption as through hard thinking. This is an illusion that the Bible does not share. Feuerbach could say that ‘Politics must become our religion’, but he thinks of politics as an affair of rival theories… Thus Feuerbach loses his grip upon the Biblical doctrine of man in a way in which Marx, who exposes his illusion at this point, does not.¹⁸

Christianity is like Marxism in being a form of praxis, i.e. a unity of theory and practice and hence tying thought or commitments of a morally imperative kind to actions in the world. Hence it could never be purely idealist in outlook. MacIntyre then begins to tell the perhaps overfamiliar story of Marx's move from Hegel's philosophy to politics and political economy. He insists tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I: Maclntyre—Christianity and/or Marxism?
• Part II: Markets, managers andthe virtues
• Notes
• Bibliography