In 1971 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published Against the Self-Images of the Age. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton reviewed the book, in what appears to be one of his earliest pieces for the NS.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book divides roughly down the middle: Part One covers the “end-of-ideology” theorists, liberal theology, psychoanalysis, Tawney, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Lukacs and Goldmann; Part Two spans a range of topics in the fields of morality, action, rationality, motivation and belief. This attractively unfamiliar structure is part of the book’s points: MacIntyre wants to challenge the conventional dichotomy between philosophical enquiry and ideological commitment, and there are few thinkers as well equipped as he is to do so. The form of this book, ironically, actually reflects the dichotomy he hopes to surmount; and the reason for this is implicit in its general thesis.
The thesis, briefly, is that the dominant contemporary ideologies of Christianity, psychoanalysis and (above all) Marxism have failed, and that a surer basis for a true understanding of the world is to be sought for in the explorations of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the social sciences. So the relations between “ideology” and “philosophy” are, after all, of a fairly tentative, cautionary kind; the academic philosophy of Part Two, far from probing, subverting or underpinning the ideological discussions of Part One, is in effect a new kind of departure, laying the humble groundwork for an alternative world-view to those just examined and dismissed. MacIntyre’s introductory claim to “link” ideology and philosophy, then, is true only in a fairly broad sense: apart from an occasional chapter in which both approaches briefly fuse (his penetrating commentary on Goldmann’s The Hidden God, for example), ideology and philosophy remain locked incommunicado in their separate halves of the volume. Creative communication between them is postponed to the future, when the old ideological rubble will have been cleared, the findings of sociology and moral philosophy grown more politically indicative, and a “genuinely post-Marxist ideology of liberation” will therefore be able to flourish. The awkwardness of the book’s structure – its paradoxical air of claiming a synthesis while in fact presenting an opposition – can then be seen to spring from the transitional character of MacIntyre’s current thinking. The ideological orthodoxies are bold but discreditable; the philosophical alternatives are sound but modest, still far removed from bringing to birth a new, satisfactory world-view.
This transitional character reveals itself in one major, serious obscurity: MacIntyre’s attitude to Marxism. We are told in the introduction that he will show why the selected ideologies have failed; yet although part of that promise is fulfilled after a fashion, in two astringent, rather cursory assaults on Christianity and psychoanalysis, the reader anxious to learn where exactly Marxism went wrong can riffle through these pages till the workers’ state arrives without uncovering a single serious analysis of Marxism’s political and theoretical deficiencies. What we find instead, bafflingly, is a series of critical but fundamentally sympathetic pieces on revolutionary theory, written on the whole from within a Marxian perspective.
The formal connection between the book’s two parts is made explicitly enough. MacIntyre argues, rightly, that Marxism has paid dangerously little attention to such questions as the philosophical status of its key evaluative terms, or to the explanation of action. Are these, then, constructive dimensions into which Marxism could develop, or has Marxism’s previous inattention to them disabled it so radically that it no longer merits serious intellectual consideration? Because the book seems to turn around an absent centre (the critique of Marxism which should be there but isn’t), these questions are hard to answer. MacIntyre certainly seems to assume that Marxism can now be abandoned for moral philosophy and sociology; but if that is so, then there’s surely more than a faint irony in the fact that in the strictly philosophical essays here, as in MacIntyre’s earlier Short History of Ethics, some of the most astute insights emerge, once again, from within a Marxian frame of reference. MacIntyre’s valuable insistence on returning concepts to their social contexts results in a deft knack of throwing fresh light on philosophical puzzles – the “is/ought” problem, for instance, and the related conflict between naturalism and prescriptivism. By drawing attention to the kinds of society in which those issues arise, he promises to shift the terrain of the entire argument and raise new kinds of question.
That technique is put to occasionally brilliant use in these pages, not least in the persuasive chapter on Hume; and the incisiveness shown there is sustained. The piece on the “end-of-ideologies” myth, familiar though its case now is, is a model of political acuteness; “God and the Theologians” leaves the most radical de-mythologisers with some tough questions to answer; and the essays on Lukacs and Goldmann display an imaginative engagement which vitalises, for a brief moment, MacIntyre’s emotionally frugal, severely linear prose. It’s the strains and dislocations in the total structure, not in the pieces which compose it, which give most cause for anxiety.
[Further reading: A Budget ten billion off course]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand