ABSTRACT
To understand how potentially radical and, perhaps, seemingly anachronistic an Aristotelian dimension to Marxism can seem, it is first necessary to understand the cultural and intellectual context of modern Marxism. In so doing we will be able to see more clearly how distinctive both the Marxist MacIntyre, and the post-Marxist
Aristotelian MacIntyre, really are. Even if we grant the priority of sociological factors in deciding the fate of Marxism, we cannot neglect the role of intellectuals and ideas. For we know that intellectuals, at least in the west, have been crucial to the development of the Marxist tradition.1 We should note, therefore, that long before political developments seemed to question Marxism, there was, by the end of the nineteenth century, a powerful weight of pessimism in European culture concerning the emancipatory potential of the application of human thought to the world. As H.Stuart Hughes has shown, this pessimism took the form of a critique of the Enlightenment in general, and of Marxism in particular, focusing positively on concepts like the Freudian unconscious and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. As Stuart Hughes puts it:
psychological process had replaced external reality as the most pressing topic of investigation. It was no longer what actually existed that seemed most important: it was what men thought existed. And what they felt on the unconscious level had become rather more interesting than what they had consciously rationalised.2
