Alasdair MacIntyre as a Marxist and as a critic of Marxism

In his 1995 introduction to Marxism and Christianity, Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that Marxism ‘is the only secular post-enlightenment doctrine to have’ a metaphysical and moral scope comparable to that of Christianity. This was not meant as a mere academic point, for Marxism: An Interpretation (the title of the first, 1953, edition of Marxism and Christianity) was written as a contribution to what he hoped would be a renewal of Christianity. MacIntyre was drawn towards Marxism because, as he saw it, Marx’s political theory converged with his vision of critical Christian ethics: ‘Marxism is of first-class theological significance as a secularism formed by the gospel which is committed to the problem of power and justice and therefore to themes of redemption and renewal which its history cannot but illuminate’. Moreover, he perceived a parallel between the situation faced by Marx in the early 1840s and that encountered by contemporary [1950s] Christians. Whereas Marx ‘was faced with a stark antithesis’ between both Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s visions of human freedom, and the reality of the world of work and suffering, contemporary Christianity accepted a split between the sacred and the secular such that it had lost any critical perspective on the world. Indeed, because modern Christianity had reduced faith to a matter of personal taste, it no longer concretely criticised social injustice and thus did not interfere with daily secular existence. MacIntyre believed that Christians would do well to learn from Marx’s turn to politics in his attempt to overcome the gap between reality and the vision of freedom in Hegel’s system. It is important that this argument informs a reading of MacIntye’s claim that ‘my critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my whole life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it – and that was when I was seventeen years old’. MacIntyre critique of liberalism was profoundly influenced by Marx, and his intellectual evolution over the past six decades has been marked by this influence alongside his Christianity. Indeed, it is very interesting that he eventually came to reject Marxism not so much for its revolutionary substance but rather for its failure fully to disarticulate itself from inherited aspects of liberal theory, particularly liberal moral theory. MacIntyre’s criticisms of liberal moral theory are well known and need only be briefly restated. In After Virtue he famously argued that in the modern world moral