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This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries.

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moore's critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradley's identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essay's second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyre's account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophy's dilemma about the human good.

Chris Wickham’s work appears to be motivated by an implicit ethic of ‘protagonism’ or praxis. This essay attempts to explicate that ethic. It argues that his work indicates why and how historical materialism, having abandoned historical teleology, should be combined with a teleological ethics.*

Alasdair MacIntyre has recently had published two books of selected essays, a study of the phenomenologist Edith Stein, a third edition of After Virtue, and an extensive collection of his early Marxist writings. These are reviewed, along with two recently published commentaries upon his work. The recent reinterpretation and revival of interest in that work receives much support from most of these publications. Central to this reinterpretation is the concept of practices, which MacIntyre first elaborated in After Virtue. His recent work indicates how that concept may be further developed in the direction of a politically radical moral realism.

Philosophical tradition has been challenged by those who would have us look to our own practice, and to nothing beyond. In this, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is followed by the politics of Hannah Arendt, for whom the tradition of political philosophy terminated with Karl Marx’s theorization of labour. This challenge has been met by Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom the young Marx’s reconceptualization of production as a social activity can inform an Aristotelianism that addresses our shared practices in traditional, teleological terms. Looking to the social nature of our practices orientates us to common goods, to the place of those goods in our own lives, and to their place within political communities. MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelian tradition has Heideggerian and other philosophical rivals, but he argues that it represents our best way of theorizing practice.

Social practices are widely regarded as the bedrock that turns one’s spade, beneath which no further justifications for action can be found. Followers of the later Wittgenstein might therefore be right to agree with Heideggerians and neo-pragmatists that philosophy’s traditional search for first principles should be abandoned. However, the concept of practices has played a very different role in the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. Having once helped lead the assault on foundationalism in both moral and social philosophy, his elaboration of an Aristotelian’ concept of practices in After Virtue has since led him to embrace a metaphysical teleology. This paper attempts to outline MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept, and to identify its ethical, political and philosophical significance.

Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian critic of communitarianism, which he understands to be committed to the politics of the capitalist and bureaucratic nation-state. The politics he proposes instead is based in the resistance to managerial institutions of what he calls ‘practices’, because these are schools of virtue. This shares little with the communitarianism of a Taylor or the Aristotelianism of a Gadamer. Although practices require formal institutions. MacIntyre opposes such conservative politics. Conventional accounts of a ‘liberal-communitarian debate’ in political philosophy face the dilemma that Alasdair MacIntyre, often identified as a paradigmatic communitarian, has consistently and emphatically repudiated this characterization. Although neo-Aristotelianism is sometimes seen as a philosophical warrant for communitarian politics, MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism is opposed to communitarianism. This paper explores the rationale of that opposition.

Although Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is famous for its critique of the Enlightenment project in moral theory, and although Immanuel Kant is usually considered the greatest protagonist of that project, Kant’s role within the argument of After Virtue is far less clear than one might presume. After exploring Kant’s role within MacIntyre’s work — before, within and since After Virtue — this paper will argue that the greatest alternative to Aristotle in contemporary philosophy, ethics and politics is no longer Nietzsche, as After Virtue proposed, but Kant. Kant’s representation by such contemporary Kantians as Paul Guyer is of a figure who presciently anticipated developments in philosophy and politics and has withstood deconstruction by Nietzscheans. Therefore, contemporary Aristotelians still need to find some way to come to terms with Kant’s version of the Enlightenment project and of liberalism — and, indeed, with liberal institutions as justified in Kantian terms.

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The end of the twentieth century, and of a millennium, may be an appropriate time at which to ask where Marxism went wrong. The century was that in which Marxism came and went as a world-shaping political and cultural force. Its tragic history is one of zealous hopes and desperate failures, of revolutions and mass suffering, of ideas institutionalized and institutions collapsing. The millennium reminds us that Marxism was the millennial creed of modernity. If a few still cling to its revolutionary hopes, their rivals and friends alike now find it virtually impossible to take such ideas seriously. Where once were Marxists, postmodernists now indict Marxism as an archetypically modern essentializ-ing metanarrative and totalizing discourse. Whatever Marxism might be at the end of the millennium, it is not what was once preached by Engels and Kautsky Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky and Mao. What remains of Eastern Marxism is merely conservative; what remains of Western Marxism is merely academic.