Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism ed. by Paul Blackledge, Kelvin Knight (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 307 Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism. Edited by PAUL BLACKLEDGE and KELVIN KNIGHT. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Pp. 384. $40.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-268-02225-9. Alasdair MacIntyre has been instrumental in the revival of an Aristotelian approach to ethics over the last few decades. Moreover, his intellectual and spiritual journey has been remarkable, from Marxism, to Aristotelianism, to Thomism. One of the constants throughout this journey is the fact that MacIntyre has always abided in traditions that insist that ethics cannot be divorced from politics. This leads us to wonder about the political content of MacIntyre’s ethical thought. At the same time, the arc of his development prompts questions about the relationship of his current position to his previous ones: how do MacIntyre’s current Thomism and Aristotelianism relate to his Marxism, for example? Does Marxism persist in his current thought, and if so what are its political implications? In turn, the appearance of After Virtue led some commentators to brand MacIntyre a communitarian whose main interest is in combating liberal democratic individualism with a conservative emphasis on community and a concomitant, impractical rejection of modernity. This point, along with his famous conclusion at the end of After Virtue, has led to the charge of political pessimism. Some of the contributors to the present volume have been instrumental in bringing to light a more accurate and nuanced reading of MacIntyre’s thought, one that could be labeled “revolutionary Thomism” (290). This point leads to a final question: in what way (if at all) can we describe MacIntyre’s political thought as revolutionary? Virtue and Politics explores all these questions from a variety of perspectives. It also contains MacIntyre’s illuminating response to the volume’s essays, which helps us understand his own sense of these questions. It is difficult to give an adequate sense of the richness and diversity of the essays in this volume, which wrestles with all of these questions. In their introduction, the editors argue that what unites the volume’s contributors is the belief that “MacIntyre’s focus on ethical forms of resistance to capitalism and the state has created a space for a dialogue about the relevance of his thought to contemporary progressive politics” (6). Much also divides them, including not only different assessments of MacIntyre’s ability to advance the goals of progressive politics but also their divergent assessments of the relationship among the different streams of thought that inform that politics: Marxism to the Enlightenment; Stalinism to Leninism; Trotskyism to other strands of Marxism including Marxist Humanism; liberalism to libertarianism; as well as liberalism to Pocock’s and Skinner’s different republicanisms. Reading this volume opens a window not only onto the debates around MacIntyre’s political thought, but also onto many of the important political doctrines of the last century. 308 BOOK REVIEWS The contributions are uniformly excellent, but not uniform in their judgment about the worth of MacIntyre’s project. Alex Callinicos (“Two Cheers for Enlightenment Universalism: Or, Why It’s Hard to Be an Aristotelian Revolutionary”) criticizes MacIntyre from an Enlightenment perspective. Sean Sayers (“MacIntyre and Modernity”) criticizes him from the perspective of modernity and argues that the different strands of his thought cannot “satisfactorily be combined together” (79). For reasons of space I will limit my summary to a few of the most outstanding sympathetic contributions. Kelvin Knight’s “Revolutionary Aristotelianism” is noteworthy, not least for its ability to convince people to read MacIntyre as something more than a conservative communitarian who rejects modernity. Knight articulates MacIntyre’s conception of practices on the way to arguing that he is a revolutionary Aristotelian who articulates a politics that resists capitalism and clears a space for virtue. Virtue should be understood as embodied in practices, and practices always have internal goods associated with them. Practices also are sustained by goods external to them (including money, power, and status), doled out as rewards. Institutions often deal only with external goods and for that reason undermine a practice’s internal goods. According to Knight, MacIntyre believes that in contemporary Western societies both the state and its economic system promote...