Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrate that MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism is a response to alienation that emerges from his previous engagement with Marx. MacIntyre’s understanding of alienation and, therefore, his conceptualization of practices stems from his reading of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. It traces out MacIntyre’s understanding of alienation as a religious concept and his argument that human beings can overcome alienation when they come to realize their desire for community in which they co-discover what they want. The book completes the arc of this argument by showing that the concepts of Revolutionary Aristotelianism reunite historical fact and value. It opens up the first lacuna which is the absence of a theory of historical human nature by engaging with the work of Christopher Lutz and Paul Blackledge and looking more closely at MacIntyre’s various discussions of love.