Alastair Macintyre and Bernard Williams - top notch writers when it comes to ethics
#MoralPhilosophy#Ethics#Liberalism#Morality#Marx#Marxism#Localism: "MacIntyre once believed that Marxism offered a solution, but by the time he wrote After Virtue he thought that it was ‘exhausted as a political tradition’, even if it remained ‘one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’. The familiar liberal explanations of its failure missed the point, however: the problem with political Marxism isn’t that it is dogmatic, scientistic, authoritarian or economistic, but that it is ‘deeply optimistic’. This is a typical MacIntyre moment: simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true. If there is a single thread running through the works of Marx, it is that the evils of capitalism, terrible as they are, will soon be outweighed by its double legacy: on the one hand the enormous wealth generated by modern industry, and on the other an international proletariat with the strength and wisdom to put it to good use. But Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting ... political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ‘tolerable alternative’. The resulting ‘exhaustion’ had spread from Marxism to ‘every other political tradition’, plunging the world into a ‘new dark ages’, darker than ever before. (‘This time ... the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,’ MacIntyre wrote, ‘they have already been governing us for quite some time.’) The only chance of building a better world, he concluded, was to abandon politics and concentrate on ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’."
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