Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement With Marxism

Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most erudite members of Britainrs"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. Paul Blackledge, D/Phil (1999) York, is the author of Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004) and Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006). Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000) and the Deutscher Prize winning Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003).

Paul Blackledge is the author of Perry Anderson, Marxism, and the New Left, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History, and the co-editor of Revolutionary Aristotelianism. Neil Davidson is a senior research fellow in the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692-1746 and The Origins of Scotish Nationhood.