Aristotelian Marxism/Marxist Aristotelianism

Marx knew his Aristotle. He also knew his Hegel, of course, but Hegel himself bears the stamp of Aristotle. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that there are fruitful points of philosophical contact to be established between Aristotelianism and Marxist theory – the illustration of which is my present concern. To be sure, there are also points of political contact. At the very least, a Marxist analysis is crucial to understanding the economic logic of what Aristotle in the Politics called ‘retail acquisition’, a logic that now drives production relations globally. ¹ Conversely, Aristotle’s account of citizenship as a form of character friendship arguably has a role to play in the theorizing of fully democratic social relations. But it is the epistemological and meta-theoretical interface that interests me here. In the most general of terms, the case that I want to make is that Aristotelians need Marx, and Marxist theory loosely construed, in order to properly diagnose the forms of rationality with which they rightly take issue. ² At the same time, although I shall not pursue the point in the present discussion, those working in the Marxist tradition might consider looking to Aristotle for a viable set of non-foundational ethical concepts. The category that links these ideas is that of reason: Aristotelians –– and I shall be treating Alasdair MacIntyre here as an ideal type – need Marxist theory in order to make full sense of what Horkheimer called subjective reason. ³ Marxist thinkers, meanwhile, might well benefit from looking to Aristotle’s version of phronesis, or ‘practical wisdom’, in theorizing moral judgment.

MacIntyre is ideally positioned to exemplify contemporary Aristotelianism in this instance because he himself takes Marx so seriously. Indeed, in his thoughts on his own intellectual development, as well as on the continued relevance of Marx for contemporary moral and political philosophy, he goes a good bit of the way toward making my case for me. Yet, there is in MacIntyre’s brilliant and complex account of contemporary moral discourse what can only be described as a striking lacuna: namely, a failure to connect the false but real appearance of liberal forms of reason to the specific logic of capitalism as a political economic form. The upshot is that while MacIntyre goes to considerable lengths to underscore what it is that any philosopher stands to gain from reading Marx, he does not seem to appreciate just how and what it is that Aristotelians in particular stand to gain. Thus not even MacIntyre, I want to say, appreciates the full significance of Marxist theory for Aristotelians.

Let me begin with MacIntyre’s own assessment of what is crucial in Marx. MacIntyre reports having learned from Marx the fundamental lesson that ideas are always grounded in specific social-historical conditions. They are, as he put it at a recent conference in Dublin in his honor, ⁴ always the ideas of actual people, involved in particular forms of social practice. Extracted from such contexts, ideas are but meaningless abstractions. This principle is axiomatic in MacIntyre’s work, and he is consistent in his crediting of it to Marx. In an interview in 1991, for example, he said:

Philosophy, it is easy to see, bumps up against sociology and history from this perspective, because the question that one must always ask is ‘What are the circumstances, in virtue of being embedded in which, a given concept has genuine substance, and is not merely a chimerical appearance?’ Such an approach follows directly from the method of The German Ideology, though another way to think of it might be to say that MacIntyre, in keeping with Marx, has generalized the notion of ‘utopian’ thinking, so that it applies not just to unrealistic future-looking political proposals, but to ahistorical philosophical analysis as such.

If beginning from ‘real premises’ is what MacIntyre learned from Marx, it is worth registering too what he says he learned from Hegel. From Hegel, he observes, we get the idea that it is not just that ideas grow out of material conditions; the reverse is also the case. As he put it in ‘Practical Rationalities as Social Structures’:

This point is also axiomatic in MacIntyre’s thinking, and I introduce it as background for this reason. Although he notes that the stance that he adopts may set him at odds with sociologists of knowledge, on the whole I think that MacIntyre does not clearly differentiate his Hegelian interest in the embodiment of beliefs well enough from the socio-historical approach to ideas that he adopts from Marx. In principle, certainly, the two points are compatible. A genuinely dialectical theory should allow for causal determination to flow both ways, with respect to the relationship between consciousness and social practices. It is the Hegelian line of thinking, however, that informs MacIntyre’s arresting claim that all intentional behavior is enacted narrative – and it’s the same Hegelian sensibility that may incline MacIntyre to begin with forms of thought and then detail their instantiation, while neglecting to consider other aspects of the relationship between ideas and social practice.

In any case, in After Virtue MacIntyre puts what he learned to magnificent use. His claim in the book is that contemporary moral discourse lacks context, and is therefore devoid of real content with respect to the stated meanings of its key terms. He adds, however, that in another sense the terms are extremely well-entrenched, namely, in the context of how they have come to be used, which is to advance statements of personal preference or desire in a manner well-described, albeit incorrectly generalized, by emotivists and by Nietzsche/ans. Meaning and use have come apart, as MacIntyre puts it. The contention in After Virtue is thus that contemporary moral discourse is ideological in a very basic Marxist sense, in that meaningless concepts are functioning to cloak real relations of power. But beyond this, MacIntyre judges terms such as ‘rights’ and ‘utility’ to be not just empty, but false – ‘moral fictions’, he calls them, deployed in the service of an intellectual project that, for conceptual reasons, had to fail. The fact that the ideological apparitions of contemporary moral philosophy are false renders them ideological in an additional, more interesting sense: they are, technically, speaking, false but real appearances. This is not the language that MacIntyre himself uses, though he almost does. Needless to say, the important question will be what such false but real appearances are appearances of.

For reasons internal to the alternative moral vocabulary that he proposes, MacIntyre advances his position via historical narrative. The story begins with heroic societies, especially Norse and Greek, in which, MacIntyre argues, the question of what one ought to do in any given situation is entirely determined by one’s role(s) within a pre-existing social order (augmented by the perceived reality of fate), which order is reproduced through just those activities that are required by said social positions. ‘[M]orality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society’, MacIntyre writes. ⁷ ‘[F]reedom of choice of values would from [this standpoint] appear more like the freedom of ghosts – of those whose human substance approached vanishing point – than of men.’ ⁸

Next come the categories of Athens, ultimately as articulated by Aristotle. Here, says MacIntyre, it is possible to question whether the social structure of one’s own society is as it should be – though, perhaps paradoxically, such questioning is thought to itself be possible only within the context of a properly formed polis, one whose function is precisely to be the venue for such reflection. The framework is now one in which ‘human being as such’ is taken to be the functional concept: to be a human being is to have a certain defining form, an essence, as does a knife or an oak tree. And as with knives and oak trees, so with human beings: it is good to be an excellent version of the kind of thing that one is. The result, MacIntyre observes, is that while the question of what one ought to do is more open on the Aristotelian model than it may have been in the heroic context, nonetheless what one ought to do remains in the end a factual matter. Insofar as one is a human being, one ought to do well, and take pleasure in doing well, the activities the capacity for which is distinctive of human beings, namely contemplation and/or politics. Aristotelian virtues are both the means to, and the substance of, this end.

It is the next step that is decisive. MacIntyre’s claim is that the rejection of the Aristotelian philosophical framework (coupled with the relative loosening of social roles) landed the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment in a conceptually untenable situation. Before, moral precepts told one how to get from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ – be the ‘is’ a fixed, determinate position within a network of relations in a pre-Aristotelian heroic society, or be it the form, and therefore the telos, of a human being. As noted above, in both cases normative claims amounted to answers to empirical questions: What is required of a son? Which virtues go into flourishing as a human being? But ‘is’ no longer implies anything about ‘ought’, once (1) the social order allows for free-standing, ostensibly asocial individuals, whose social positions carry with them no special injunctions for action, and (2) the concept of ‘human being’ has lost its functional meaning. The consequence, MacIntyre maintains, is that the Enlightenment moral project had to fail. To quote a lengthy but key passage from the chapter bearing that phrase as its title:

But, as noted above, the problem with notions such as ‘utility’ and ‘rights’ is not just that they were originally formulated in the context of a necessarily futile undertaking. In addition, MacIntyre contends, they’re unsound. At this point – the point at which its terms persist despite being both empty and false – moral philosophy as MacIntyre diagnoses it assumes the ideological cast described above. It is not essential that one share MacIntyre’s outright rejection of the terms of liberal theory, in order to sympathize with his concerns. Even if one does not agree with MacIntyre that rights, for example, are moral fictions akin to unicorns, one might think that rights-talk is worrisome in that, as Charles Taylor has argued, it is not clear that a lexicon of rights can itself sustain the very social fabric required for such talk to have purchase. ¹⁰ For my own argument, meanwhile, it is enough simply to acknowledge that MacIntyre finds both utilitarianism and Kantianism to be wanting, as Aristotelians generally do. What is of interest, from my perspective, is the account that he gives of their hold.

If liberal moral philosophy trades in ill-conceived, indefensible, perhaps even inherently incoherent concepts, what are we to make of such a fact? As I’ve said, MacIntyre believes, among other things, that the concepts in question obscure real relations of power. Emotivists and Nietzschean perspectivists are correct, he thinks, to point this out – albeit incorrect to assume that in doing so they have grasped the nature of moral discourse per se. But merely identifying obfuscation is not sufficient, given what MacIntyre says he learned from Marx. The final move, crucial because it anchors the ideas in question materially, is to identify the ‘possible social embodiments’ of the ideologically inflected categories of contemporary moral philosophy.

MacIntyre says two things in this regard. The first is that contemporary discourse is associated with precisely the ‘ghostly’ and ‘abstract’ self with which he contrasted the heroic self. ¹¹ The contemporary self, he writes, is one that ‘has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity [and] can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing’. ¹² In saying this much, MacIntyre is in company with Marx and with subsequent thinkers influenced by Marx: the abstract individual of capitalism has no real identity, no genuine individuality. But it is his second point that is perplexing, given his avowed intellectual debt to Marxism. The claim in question is this: that what underwrites the abstract self sociologically is ‘bureaucratic individualism’ ¹³ – and only that. MacIntyre doesn’t offer much in the way of a discussion about bureaucratic individualism, other than to say that the key institutions of a bureaucratic society, which he identifies as being ‘like ours’, have manipulation as their purpose, and rely upon yet another moral fiction (namely, that of social scientific ‘expertise’, which MacIntyre dismisses on philosophical grounds) in the managerial pursuit thereof. But the lack of elaboration is not the issue. The issue is that there is not a word to be said about capitalism.

The same striking absence is to be found, as it were, in ‘Practical Rationalities as Social Structures’ (1998c), a compact, otherwise-virtuoso piece first published in 1987, and in Whose Justice? Which Rationality, which the article prefigures. In these works, MacIntyre argues that practical reason assumes different forms within different traditions, and is exercised, in context, by very different kinds of selves. In ‘Practical Rationalities as Social Structures’, the illustrative contrast is between the union of reason, practice and identity in an Aristotelian context, a Humean context and, finally, a contemporary context. The categories are more or less the same in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, but with added nuance. In both, MacIntyre characterizes the contemporary self in much the same way as he did in After Virtue:

And, in both, the accompanying sociological analysis draws the same blank:

That a thinker as self-consciously indebted to Marx as MacIntyre is would be at a loss to imagine a subject-position that corresponds to ‘the-individual-as-such’, i.e. to the individual eviscerated of particularity – that the only position that MacIntyre can imagine that would correspond to such an identity is that of ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and/or ‘philosopher’ is, I must say, for there to be a very large, commodified elephant in the room. To be fair, there is a reference in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to the fact that in the contemporary context social and political relations have themselves come to be understood as market-like:

But the fact is presented –– just as MacIntyre says – as a parallel; nothing more. Sociologically, the best that MacIntyre can do is to invoke Durkheim. ‘Durkheim’, he writes, ‘provided a clue to the ancestry of [contemporary perspectivism and relativism] when he described in the late nineteenth century how the breakdown of traditional forms of social relationship increased the incidence of anomie, of normlessness.’ ¹⁷

For the purposes of my own argument (i.e. that Aristotelians are among the primary philosophical beneficiaries of Marx’s insight that capitalism involves, in its essence, the wholesale abstraction of human subjectivity), it is enough, at this stage, to have shown that MacIntyre, who may be regarded here as a paradigmatic Aristotelian, ignores capitalism when he gets to the diagnostic core of his account. But having observed that (even) MacIntyre doesn’t avail himself of Marx at the key moment when one would have expected it, I want to say a word about why I think he doesn’t – before moving on to demonstrate how he might have, and to say why I think he should have.

I noted at the outset that MacIntyre tends to think about the relationship between consciousness and practice in terms of the former being instantiated in the latter, and rarely if ever in terms of the former being generated by, or expressing in ideational form, the structure or logic of the latter. MacIntyre attributes this feature of his thinking to Hegel, though one could have learned it just as well from Plato or from Aristotle. But his avoidance of Marx in explaining the social ground of the abstract self and its reliance on abstract instrumental reason is not simply a matter of his having certain Hegelian predispositions. In fact, I think it can be shown that it is because MacIntyre believes that Marx in the end failed to break significantly enough with Hegel that MacIntyre dismisses the trenchant diagnosis of subjective reason put forward by Marx and subsequent Marxists. Evidence for this interpretation of MacIntyre can be found in a short piece called ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: The Road Not Taken’.

MacIntyre’s own thesis, in this gem of an article, is that Marx ‘rejected philosophy’ prematurely and unnecessarily, for what can best be described as political reasons, and that in doing so he ‘allowed his later work to be distorted by presuppositions which were in key respects infected by philosophical error’. ¹⁸ The half-explicit further thesis is that the road that Marx turned toward in the Theses on Feuerbach and then, in MacIntyre’s view, backed away from, was an Aristotelian one. MacIntyre reads Marx as asserting that the problem with Feuerbach is that his notion of philosophy presupposes the abstract individual of civil society, and thus civil society itself, just as his critique of religion did. Marx’s view, as MacIntyre puts it, is therefore that ‘if we suppose that in understanding philosophical enquiry and argument as the activity of individuals, and that by giving an account of the secular basis of that activity as the activity of individuals, we have successfully moved from the abstract to the concrete, then we shall be deceiving ourselves’. ¹⁹ Of course, as MacIntyre immediately notes, taking philosophy to be grounded in the thought processes of atomistically conceived individuals is not simply a philosophical mistake. Insofar as civil society is in reality alienated, ‘it is a mistake embodied in institutionalized social life. And it is therefore a mistake which cannot be corrected merely by better theoretical analysis.’ ²⁰

What Marx established in the Theses on Feuerbach, says MacIntyre, is that there is a contrast to be made between the alienated relations of civil society and the type of philosophy that it sustains, on the one hand, and some other kind of social practice – what MacIntyre claims Marx meant by ‘objective activity’ – and the type of philosophy that it would sustain, on the other. MacIntyre puts Hegel (along with the entire Enlightenment project) on the side of civil society and its associated form(s) of reason, Aristotle (and Aquinas) on the side of ‘objective activity’. The question, then, is where Marx himself falls.

As MacIntyre would have it, Marx recognized in the Theses on Feuerbach that civil society generates an aporetic Kantian dichotomy between determinism and voluntarism, at the level of thought. In keeping with this dichotomy – MacIntyre reads Marx as saying – positivist social sciences represent human beings as objects, while human beings themselves can’t help but think of themselves (ourselves) as subjects. Marx also saw that the aporia cannot be solved from within – and/or with the conceptual resources of – civil society. As MacIntyre puts it, a coherent account of the rational action of non-abstract (i.e. social) individuals could only be developed within the context of, and with reference to, non-alienated social practice – one in which reasoning is attached to the pursuit of ‘internal goods’, goods that are constitutive of, rather than mere means to, an end. Marx himself puts it this way, in the 10th thesis: ‘The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.’ ²¹ Although much hangs on what one imagines Marx to have meant by ‘human society or social humanity’, and although MacIntyre doesn’t address the phrase directly, MacIntyre’s Aristotelian reading is an extremely plausible one in my view.

MacIntyre’s further claim, however, is that after the Theses on Feuerbach Marx abandoned this line of thinking. It is not at all clear to me that MacIntyre is correct about this, but the very fact that he believes it may explain his pointed lack of interest in the later Marx’s painstaking analysis of the logic of capital. In reflecting upon why Marx retreated back to the theoretical forms of civil society, as MacIntyre believes him to have done, MacIntyre introduces E. P. Thompson’s portrait of hand-loom weavers in The Making of the English Working Class. MacIntyre cites the weavers’ activity, and way of life more generally, as an example of non-alienated social practice, informed by purposive practical reason. The hand-loom weavers’ activity was revolutionary, MacIntyre says, in that it required the repudiation of industrial relations of production. Marx, meanwhile, MacIntyre argues, although familiar with the insurrectionary role of the weavers in 1844, ²² ‘seems not to have understood the form of life from which that militancy arose’, ²³ and not to have realized that it was the virtues developed through, and rooted in, that very form of life that made their resistance possible. MacIntyre hypothesizes that Marx may have backed away from the analysis of the revolutionary potential of different forms of reason because ‘to have expressed those distinctions clearly and to have developed their implications would perhaps have left [him] unable to define his relationship to the large-scale revolutionary changes which he had identified as imminent, tied instead to what he took to be already defeated forms of past life’. ²⁴

As MacIntyre sees it, the result of Marx’s having stopped short of reconceptualizing theoretical inquiry, of his not having worked out a mode of reason that would be consistent with the ‘objective activity’ of ‘human society or social humanity’, is that later Marxist theory is itself bifurcated along a determinist versus voluntarist line – Engels and Plekhanov on the one side, he says, Lukacs on the other. That the divide reproduces the very dichotomy that Marx identified in the Theses on Feuerbach as being distinctive of civil society is an indication that something has miscarried. ²⁵ This failure to get past the philosophical forms of civil society has two important consequences for Marxist moral philosophy, MacIntyre thinks. I mention this because it connects to my own view that Marxists might benefit from attending to Aristotle’s account of phronesis as developed in the Ethics. First, Marxists tend to revert either to the language of Kant or of utilitarianism, when pressed to engage in normative discussion. I agree with this assessment. Second, Marxists, like other moderns, are hard-pressed to see how norms grounded in specific kinds of historical practices might nonetheless attain objectivity; instead, the assumption is that one is either a universalist or a relativist. Here too the insight seems correct to me, though in this case I am taking MacIntyre’s lead in affirming it, and my endorsement is tentative.

MacIntyre, then, while not having taken from Marx what he should have, has not simply overlooked Marx in a naïve manner. Marx himself, MacIntyre thinks, and subsequent Marxists by intellectual inheritance, remain within the framework of ‘the old materialism’. My aim in this portion of the argument was simply to explain the omission of key elements of Marx’s thought in MacIntyre’s account, before moving on. Having done so, however, I am left with a new consideration to be folded into the next step, namely, whether MacIntyre’s assessment of Marx is correct. Did Marx abandon a nascent Aristotelianism in favor of a mix of Hegel and British empiricism in his mature analysis of capitalism? In my view, the answer is no – though even if he had, in principle Aristotelians ought to be as free to make use of Marx as we are the empiricist Durkheim or the interpretivist, ‘value-neutral’ Weber. But in fact, part of why Marx’s social science ought to be of interest to Aristotelians is because it is itself so Aristotelian.

Let me proceed by addressing three closely related questions. First, exactly what is it that is so noticeably absent, in MacIntyre’s account of the sociological underpinnings of ‘reason-from-nowhere’, and the empty self to which it attaches? I will say in advance that in responding to this question I understand myself to be simply reiterating well-worn insights from the western Marxist tradition. Second, what is the underlying significance, for Aristotelians, of the Marxist contribution? Finally, what of MacIntyre’s critique? Is Marx as non-Aristotelian in his mature work as MacIntyre takes him to be?

To begin: the missing sociological referent in MacIntyre’s account of the ghostly contemporary self is the commodification of labor power in ‘societies such as ours’, as MacIntyre likes to put it. ²⁶ MacIntyre rightly observes in his reference to weaving that production in capitalism is governed by instrumental rationality, rather than by the structures of reason associated with the shared pursuit of goods that are internal to a given end. But there is more to the commodification of labor power than this, and here one really must turn to Marx. What is distinctive about capitalism, Marx shows, is that in capitalism commodities circulate as values, expressed in terms of exchange-value, rather than as use-values. In developing these categories Marx draws not just on book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which he discusses in chapter 1 of Capital, but on book 1, chapters 8–10 of the Politics. Indeed, the distinction in purpose between what Aristotle characterizes as the natural and the unnatural forms of acquisition respectively is at the very heart of the matter.

The use-value of a thing is a matter of what need it can satisfy, in virtue of being the kind of thing that it is – and having, therefore, the properties that it does. A mug, for example, such as the one presently at my side, has various use-values, one of which is to hold hot liquids such as tea. If the mug were flat, or made of tissue-paper, it would lose the value in question. Use-value is qualitative. It attaches to things given what they are. In all economies but capitalism, goods are produced and exchanged qua use-values, as specific things or kinds of things.

Exchange-value is different. An exchange value is simply the expression of a ratio of equivalence, e.g. ‘this is good for 5 of those’. ²⁷ It has nothing to do with what a thing is intrinsically. Rather, it is simply a measure of what a thing may be replaced with, a substitution index. Exchange-value, Marx suggests, is thus an indicator of a very specific set of social relations of production, namely, ones in which goods are routinely produced for the sole purpose of being replaced with (exchanged for) something other than themselves. As it happens, wide-scale exchange of this type requires that the labor power embodied in goods be itself considered as so much interchangeable, generic human capacity.

But let’s stick with mugs for the moment. My same mug, considered in terms of its exchange-value rather than its use-value, no longer differs qualitatively from a piece of tissue-paper. Now the equation is quantitative. The mug is equal to this many sheets of tissue, is equal to that much tea, is equal to this portion of a table, etc. ²⁸ The index will in principle include the total number of kinds of commodities in existence. Money, which Marx calls the universal equivalent, can be used to take the place of what would otherwise be an impossibly long list. Expressing substitution ratios between commodities in terms of money highlights the purely quantitative character of the comparison: the cup is equal to some amount of dollars while the tissue is equal to less than a penny.

Commodities circulate as exchange-values in the context of a form of production the purpose of which is to realize profit. If one asks what the function or aim of economic activity is in capitalism, as Aristotle would have us do, the answer is just as Henry Ford said: we’re not in business to make cars; we’re in business to make money. Of course, the full account of this historically unprecedented form of social organization Marx develops over thousands of pages of analysis. This said, the unique logic of capitalism as a system is crystallized in simple formulaic terms in the opening chapters of Capital, in the contrast between the non-capitalist circuit C–M–C (commodity–money–commodity) and M–C–M ¹ (money–commodity–more money) the capital-form, or General Formula of Capital. An important feature of the dynamic of producing for the purpose of realizing profit (M–C–M¹), in contrast to that of producing for the purpose of satisfying needs (C–M–C), is that, as Aristotle notes at 1257b23 of the Politics, acquisition for its own sake is in principle infinite. ‘The same is true of the retail form of the art of acquisition’, Aristotle says. ‘There is no limit to the end it seeks; and the end it seeks is wealth of the sort we have mentioned and the mere acquisition of money.’ ²⁹

Marx argues that the value-generating commodity that makes profit possible in capitalism is labor power. Labor power too may be considered in terms of use-value and exchange-value. The use-value of labor power is the doing of this sort of thing or that sort of thing. I may be a skilled tailor, capable of making coats, to use Marx’s example. Or I may be able to make tables, or spin cotton. Labor in this sense is concrete: sewing, carpentry and spinning are different kinds of activities, each from the others. When labor circulates as a commodity within a capitalism system, however, it loses its qualitative character, just as other commodities do (though labor power is unlike other commodities in being that which, in Marx’s view, the ratios of exchange-value actually express, namely ‘value’). Marx discusses the contrast between concrete, particular kinds of productive labor, on the one hand, and the odd phenomenon of undifferentiated ‘homogeneous human labor’, on the other, in some detail. ³⁰ The name that he gives to the latter – to the existence, in capitalism, of what we might think of as generic labor-power – is abstract labor.

Abstract labor is what the human capacity to consciously and creatively transform ourselves and our environment turns into, in ‘societies such as ours’. Abstract labor is the sociological substrate of the ghostly self, and nothing about saying so, as Marx and subsequent Marxists have done, commits one to the standpoint of civil society. On the contrary, through all of Marx’s work, from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital, the moral of the story is that for labor to assume this form is an affront to our dignity as human beings, an alienation of our ‘species being’, as the young Marx put it, even if it took the mature Marx to explain it. Likewise, it is hard to see how Horkheimer or Adorno, for example, could be charged with either voluntarism or determinism in their own efforts to stake out an acceptable materialist epistemology, one that would not simply function to replicate civil society. On the contrary. Indeed, it’s worth considering again what such thinkers – and Lukacs too – have had to say on the topic of what Horkheimer called subjective reason.

With respect to its formalism, the contention from a Marxist perspective is that the principled disregard for the particular, at the level of thought, expresses, at the level of thought, the principled disregard for the particular that is the mark of exchange-value. A society characterized by the ubiquity of exchange-value is likely, so the Marxist analysis goes, to be one in which we will find some version of Kantian universalism at the level of philosophy. Similarly, political ideas such as formal equality and constitutionalism, for example, can be seen to be animated by the fact that the transfer of surplus, in capitalism, occurs through the non-personal mechanism of the wage-relation, rather than through political or juridical means.

Qua specifically instrumental reason, meanwhile – formal in its own way, in that insofar as instrumental reason is a matter of means-calculation as such, it doesn’t matter what the ends may be – in its instrumentality, subjective reason is understood by thinkers informed by Marx to encapsulate the logic of capitalism also. As I’ve noted, MacIntyre does make reference to what he calls the bargaining mentality of the market, in this regard. But here too the relevant sociology cuts deeper. If Kantian pure practical reason expresses the abstraction of exchange-value, the instrumental reason of utilitarianism can be seen to express the fact that commodified goods are produced not for their own sake, but instead as means – means to an end unrelated to their use-values. Such a reality is more shocking than it might initially sound. For it is not simply that one or another particularly impractical commodity is produced solely as a means of attaining something else, but that they all are. X is always only a means to y, within the context of capitalist relations of production. And the further step of welding instrumental reason to the specific goal of quantitative increase – what Rawls called ‘economic rationality’ – this step can be seen to be grounded in the capital-form as well, the telos of which is the increase of M to M¹, ad infinitum. I don’t mean to suggest that people were not appetitive prior to the emergence of capitalism. Already in the Republic, Plato felt the need to make the point that the state should not take the pursuit of profit to be its end. My point is only that if one is interested, as MacIntyre is, in identifying the forms of practice that are associated with the dominant forms of thought in liberal, capitalist societies in the West, then surely one must point to the Law of Value, and not simply to ‘the market’ defined as a site of bargaining.

As a meta-theoretical matter, it is worth adding that for Marx, and certainly for thinkers such as Horkheimer and Adorno, the point with respect to the ontological status of consciousness is neither that capitalism is nothing other than a Hegelian objectification of ideas, nor, conversely, that ideas are merely epiphenomenal with respect to a ‘base’ construed along physicalist lines. Rather, the claim is that people engage, consciously, in certain kinds of social relationships, which relationships they then come to understand in identifiable, if oft-times distorted or inadequate, ways. These conceptual forms in turn become the available ones for making sense of other aspects of reality. The step that the Marxists take is to pose the straightforwardly historical question ‘What is the practice that could or does sustain this set of beliefs?’ in a more philosophical register: ‘What is the sociological truth-content’, to use Adorno’s term, ‘that is ideologically encoded in these ideas, or this bit of meaning?’

I have been arguing that MacIntyre needs Marxist theory not (just) for the reasons that he says he does, but also in order to successfully analyse Kantian and utilitarian moral philosophy – especially, to properly diagnose the conceptions of reason operative therein, and the picture of the abstract individual to which such conceptions attach. But, one might say, MacIntyre is an Aristotelian who has self-consciously undertaken to forge ahead along the very road that he thinks ought to have been Marx’s; his is in this respect a Marxist project. It is therefore no wonder that he turns out to need Marx in order to see it through. But that doesn’t mean that other Aristotelians should be interested in Marx.

This brings me to my second question. Why should any Aristotelian, not just one who is already influenced by Marx, care about Marxist theory? There are three good reasons, at a minimum. The first comes, almost fully developed, from MacIntyre himself. In ‘Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995’, MacIntyre observes that in capitalism, pleonexia, the drive to have more and more, becomes treated as a central virtue’. ³¹ Aristotle refers negatively to pleonexia in book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which has to do with the virtue of justice, i.e. knowing how to apportion things appropriately. As I read him, MacIntyre’s point in ‘Three Perspectives’ is that capitalism encourages people to be insatiable consumers, and that insatiable consumerism, because intemperate, is inconsistent with eudaimonia, with flourishing. It seems to me that MacIntyre is clearly correct in the sense that, if one shares Aristotle’s views about what makes for a good character, one ought to have to have reservations about capitalism – and ought, I would add, to take an interest in analyses of it as deeply probing as Marx’s. This, as I said, is almost the point that I want to make. What I will add, however, is that what Aristotelians can learn from Marx is not only that capitalism fosters pleonexia, though it does do this, but that capitalism just is institutionalized pleonexia.

A second reason for Aristotelians to pay attention to Marx can be seen if we contrast an Aristotelian who engages with Marxist theory with a Kantian who does. The Kantian might come to see that insofar as capitalism presupposes commodified labor power, it precludes treating humanity’s creative capacity as an end, and therefore precludes treating persons themselves as ends. As Horkheimer argues in ‘Materialism and Morality’, Kantian thought may for this reason be seen to impel us beyond an acceptance of the present. ³² However, while we may well expect the instrumental character of capitalism to be a problem for the Kantian, it need not necessarily be a problem for the Kantian that capitalism turns concrete labor into abstract labor. But for all of the reasons that MacIntyre has spent the last 25 years clarifying for us, it is – or should be – a problem for the Aristotelian. For as Marx shows, capitalism is not just institutionalized pleonexia; it is institutionalized abstraction. Those who object to abstract universalism in moral and political philosophy, and who agree with Aristotle’s assumption in the Politics that different sorts of ideas hold sway in differently organized societies, will therefore find an analysis specific to their concerns in Capital and in subsequent Marxist philosophy, something that arguably cannot be found elsewhere.

Finally, Marx should be of interest to Aristotelians because Aristotelians are committed philosophically to essentialism, to the concept of form. Marx’s account of capitalism affords insight not only into the anti-essentialism of the self-that-is-nothing, but into anti-essentialism more globally. Why? Because the lesson from Marx’s analysis of exchange-value is that the commodity form is antithetical to the idea of essentialism. While the value that is expressed in exchange-value is itself an emergent property of a particular social form, ³³ the exchange-values of commodified objects are not derived from their own forms. To say this, however, is to say that in virtue of its own essence, capitalism is likely (as commodification takes hold generally) to generate the false but real appearance of anti-essentialism as a (comparably) general metaphysical principle – precisely the anti-essentialism that has been dominant philosophically for the last several hundred years. ³⁴ This is a line of argument that should be of interest to Aristotelians.

That Marx’s own investigation into capital presupposes the concept of form brings me to the last of my three questions. In what sense is Marx’s social science Aristotelian? I cannot here develop the systematic response that the question deserves, but I can at least block out how I think it should go. I see Marx’s work as recognizably Aristotelian in its ontology, its epistemology and its normative structure. If this is so, then it will turn out that MacIntyre did not actually go far enough in his Aristotelian reading of the Theses on Feuerbach. It will be not far-fetched at all to think that what Marx meant can only be expressed, or at least can best be expressed, in Aristotelian terms. The mistake will have been to think that this is not equally so of Marx’s later work.

MacIntyre references Carol Gould in setting out his own view of Marx’s ontology, at least in what MacIntyre sees as the exemplary Theses on Feuerbach. Gould holds a version of the position sometimes called political Marxism, according to which the spatial metaphor of base and superstructure reifies and partitions that which in reality is social relations between conscious persons, all the way down. This line of interpretation is correct, in my view, and MacIntyre is right to be dismissive of those who imagine that Marx thought that human society, even one as distorted as capitalism, is made up of a purely ideational sphere that is somehow under-girded by a purely physical sphere. But what MacIntyre overlooks is the metaphysics. Marx regards the social relations that constitute capitalism as assuming a form of a determinate kind – form construed in Aristotelian terms as the essential, organizing principle of a thing, in virtue of which it has characteristic dispositional properties, which may or may not be actualized. For this reason alone – i.e. insofar as form is arguably the foundational ontological category of his mature work ³⁵ – Marx shows up as an Aristotelian, rather than as the reductive materialist that he is often taken to be, even by Marxists.

Epistemologically, meanwhile, much has been made of Marx’s dialectical stance. But there are other things to be said of Marx’s approach to the study of society than that it is dynamic in this way. Of particular importance is the end to which Marx’s dialectical method is put – namely, that of giving an account of an object, here capitalism, precisely in terms of its essence, its form. The name for such an account is a ‘real definition’. Real definitions may be contrasted with nominal definitions, which point not to intrinsic properties, but rather to the observable features and/or other subjective effects of an object that constitute what Locke calls a thing’s ‘nominal’ rather than real essence. Harre and Madden, Roy Bhaskar and others working in the area of critical realism have reclaimed the language of real definitions and real essences, and critical realists especially have noted that the categories can be seen to hold in Marx’s work. But Marx’s interest in providing a real definition of capitalism and its constitutive relationships is itself Aristotelian – the epistemic complement to the commitment to form as a metaphysical principle. Howard Engelskirchen has illustrated this point beautifully, in recent work on the topic, cited above. In this same vein, David Depew has argued that Marx’s very concept of species-being rests on the idea that human consciousness is ‘the capacity, associated with Aristotle’s epistemology, to apprehend objects as instances of kinds or species, where a species mark is one or more distinctive dispositional capacities’. ³⁶ Knowing, we might want to say – be the object of knowledge human nature (in the case of species-being) or the alienated objectification thereof (in the case of capital) – knowing, on this Aristotelian model, is to be able to give an account of the form of the thing that is known.

And Marx’s notion of a social scientific law is Aristotelian too, as James Farr and others have argued in careful detail. ³⁷ For the positivist, a law is a universal statement of event regularity: for all x, if x, y. On this model, a particular occurrence of y is ‘explained’ by the fact that its following upon x is an instance of the law that in all cases x, y follows. In keeping with Hume, however, no necessary connection between the variables is thereby asserted. Especially, what x and y are, let alone what each is ‘essentially’, bears no causal weight. Marx, by contrast, can be seen to have anticipated contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers of science, who conceive of laws and their underlying metaphysics very differently. From the neo-Aristotelian perspective, sometimes called scientific essentialism, laws are thought to be statements about what things do, or have the potential to do, given what they are, perhaps even what they are essentially. ³⁸ Causal connections are thought to be metaphysically necessary, precisely because they are thought to be grounded in the natures of things. When a scientific essentialist engages in social science, he or she seeks, as Marx did, to determine the essence, or form, of the object of inquiry, so as to be able to say, as Marx did, what it is therefore likely to do. The Law of Value is not a report of a regularity, but a claim about the intrinsic properties of the capital-form. It’s tempting to say that scientific essentialism, including scientific essentialism as practised by Marx, is a response to Aristotle’s insistence that objects be studied in ways that are appropriate to the kind of thing that they are: a reality characterized by the existence of form is such that study of it ought to consist of the identification thereof.

Finally, at the risk of provoking Marxists and Aristotelians alike, I want to maintain that there is a normative structure to Marx’s thinking, and that while it has Kantian and Hegelian aspects, it is above all Aristotelian. There is, admittedly, a strain of Marxism whose proponents will object that Marx’s mature work in fact has no normative structure, that it was only in his youthful, ‘humanist’ writings that Marx was interested in what is good for people, and whether or not capitalism is. Notwithstanding the amount of ink that has been spilt on the topic, it seems to me to be as difficult as ever to take this interpretation seriously. Unless – and in the face of countless passages that scream out against such a reading – one has persuaded oneself that Marx regards the transfer of human subjectivity onto commodities as a normatively neutral state of affairs, unless one has persuaded oneself of this, one need not read any further than Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 1 of Capital to see that in the course of investigating capitalism, Marx was also laying bare the mechanisms of what he had earlier condemned as ‘alienation’ – albeit doing so with far greater sociological specificity than he had been able to do in 1844. And that the study of capital and the analysis of alienation should turn out to coincide should come as no surprise, as the point driven home by the later, ‘scientific’ Marx is precisely that capitalism both rests upon and reproduces alienated species-being.

The question, then, is not whether or not there is a normative structure to Marx’s thinking, but rather how to characterize it. As I said, I believe it to be Aristotelian to a significant degree. If one reads the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics together, as Aristotle intended, and pays attention to books 8 and 9 of the Ethics as well as to books 7 and 8 of the Politics, one can see that, for Aristotle, the key task is to identify the kinds of social relationship that involve people in the types of activity that constitute the full actualization of the human form, or soul. Aristotle doesn’t think that all humans have such a form; women don’t, and non-Greeks don’t. For those who do, however, there are two kinds of activity that are fitting: contemplation (i.e. the study of form through science, mathematics, or metaphysics) and politics (the exercise of phronesis, or practical wisdom, in the course of deliberation with ethically capable equals, i.e. with fellow citizens within a proper polis). Aristotle devotes almost all of his discussion to the second alternative, asking after the excellences of character that it both presupposes and hones. The activities of production and of art (or of child-care within the household) do not show up as full expressions of human rationality, as Aristotle tells the story. Also, as MacIntyre reminds us, Aristotle’s account is ahistorical.

Thus it is easy to see the ways in which Aristotle’s view of things is not shared by Marx. But there are also important ways in which it is. At the deepest level, the question that Marx has undertaken to answer is Aristotle’s: namely, what are the conditions of possibility, in terms of the kinds of social relationships that must be in place, for the human energeia to be successfully expressed? And what kinds of relationships, with what purposes as their ends, preclude it? One might object that at this level of abstraction anyone can be made to seem as though she or he is addressing Aristotle’s question. I don’t think that this is so, but even if it were, what we see in Marx is not only that the question is Aristotelian, but that in key respects the answer is as well. It is not just capital that has a form, in Marx’s thought; human beings do too. Our form, our ‘species-being’, as Marx called it in the 1844 Manuscripts, consists of a unique capacity to self-consciously and creatively shape our environment – physical and social – in accordance with the laws of beauty, as Marx puts it. ³⁹ Indeed, species-being – a capacity for free, conscious, collective self-determination – is arguably just the sort of inherently open-ended, neo-Aristotelian category that MacIntyre was casting about for in After Virtue, when he replaced the concept of ‘soul’ with that of ‘practice within a healthy tradition’. Also crucial, however, is that the normative objective for Marx is not the maximization of pleasure, or the redistribution of wealth, or the achievement of equality. Rather, as with Aristotle, ‘the good’ amounts to nothing more – nor less – than the actualization of our uniquely human capacities – namely, for Marx, precisely the as-yet unrealized capacity for creative life activity that under capitalism has been given over to commodities, rendered subject to the Law of Value. The idea that it is the human telos to be free may seem to some Aristotelians to be a bad category mistake. But, Kantian resonances in Marx notwithstanding, freedom so construed can only mean for Marx something very much like what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia: not the doing of duty (or, for the empiricists, whatever happens to please us), but, rather, the doing of that which is distinctively ours as human beings to do. There is argument to be had over what this activity might be thought to involve, substantively, but the form of the problem – no pun intended – is Aristotelian.

Let me reiterate that there is far more to be said about the potential for a marriage of Marxism and Aristotelianism than space permits. And there are benefits to be reaped by both parties. As noted at the outset, while Aristotelians may need Marxist theory in order to adequately critique liberal forms of reason, there is also a case to be made that the concept of phronesis, as Aristotle understood it, is an untapped philosophical resource for Marxists. Happily, I am hardly alone in taking an interest both in what Kelvin Knight has called ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ ⁴⁰ and in its Aristotelian Marxist inverse. With any luck, there will ample opportunity to pursue these and other points in future discussions.