Alasdair MacIntyre's engagement with Marxism : selected writings 1953-1974 / / edited and with an introduction by Paul Blackledge & Neil Davidson.

• Superior document: Historical materialism book series, v. 19
• Author: MacIntyre, Alasdair C.
• TeilnehmendeR: Blackledge, Paul, 1967-; Davidson, Neil, 1957-2020.
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: Historical materialism book series ; 19.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (507 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950's and 1960's, one of the most erudite members of Britain’s Marxist Left: being a militant within, first, the Communist Party, then the New Left, and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics, and that, in the wake of the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, the powerful and optimistic revolutionary Marxist ethics of liberation he articulated in that period is arguably as salient to anti-capitalist activists today as it was half a century ago.

Table of Contents

Extracts from Marxism : an interpretation -- Marxist tracts -- On not misrepresenting philosophy -- The algebra of the revolution -- Notes from the moral wilderness -- Dr. Marx and Dr. Zhivago -- Marcuse, Marxism, and the Monolith -- The straw man of the age -- The 'New Left' -- What is Marxist theory for? -- From Macdonald to Gaitskell -- Communism and British intellectuals -- Freedom and revolution -- Breaking the chains of reason -- Is a neutralist foreign policy possible? -- The man who answered the Irish question -- Culture and revolution -- Marxists and Christians -- Rejoinder to left reformism -- Congo, Katanga, and the UNO -- Sartre as a social theorist -- The sleepwalking society : Britain in the sixties -- Open letter to a right-wing young socialist -- The new capitalism and the British working class -- C. Wright Mills -- Going into Europe -- Prediction and politics -- True voice -- Trotsky in exile -- Labour policy and capitalist planning -- Marx -- The socialism of R.H. Tawney -- Marxist mask and romantic face : Lukacs on Thomas Mann -- Pascal and Marx : on Lucien Goldmann's hidden god -- Recent political thought -- Herbert Marcuse -- How not to write about Stalin -- How to write about Lenin and how not to -- The strange death of social democratic England -- In place of Harold Wilson? -- Marxism of the will -- Mr. Wilson's pragmatism -- Tell me where you stand on Kronstadt -- Irish mythologies -- Sunningdale : a 'colonial' solution -- Irish conficts and British illusions -- Epilogue. 1953, 1968, 1995 : three perspectives.