Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

38(8) 775792
Aristotelian Marxism/ The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453712453288
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MacIntyre, Marx and the
analysis of abstraction

Ruth Groff
St Louis University, USA

Abstract
I argue that Aristotelians who are sympathetic to the critique of liberal moral categories put
forward by Alasdair MacIntyre ought to avail themselves of Marxs analysis of capitalism in
Capital, Volume 1. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for such a recommendation. First,
Marxs account shows capitalism to be the sociological substrate for the evisceration of
particularity (coupled with the hold instrumental reason) that so concerns MacIntyre and other
Aristotelians. I offer an explanation for why MacIntyre seems not to appreciate this. Second,
Marxs own thinking is markedly Aristotelian, in ways that I specify.

Keywords
abstraction, Aristotelianism, Capital, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx

Were one to wish to appropriate After Virtue for the Marxian tradition, it would be enough
to point out that the first section of the book offers the most probing and devastating analysis
of the reification of moral categories under capital that we possess. (Frederic Jameson1)

Marx knew his Aristotle. He also knew his Hegel, of course, but Hegel himself bears the
stamp of Aristotle. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that there are fruitful points of phi-
losophical contact to be established between Aristotelianism and Marxist theory the
illustration of which is my present concern. To be sure, there are also points of political
contact. At the very least, a Marxist analysis is crucial to understanding the economic
logic of what Aristotle in the Politics called retail acquisition, a logic that now drives

Corresponding author:
Ruth Groff, Department of Political Science, St Louis University, 3750 Lindell Blvd, R. 139, Saint Louis, MO
63108, USA
Email: rgroff@slu.edu
776 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

production relations globally.1 Conversely, Aristotles account of citizenship as a form

of character friendship arguably has a role to play in the theorizing of fully democratic
social relations. But it is the epistemological and meta-theoretical interface that interests me
here. In the most general of terms, the case that I want to make is that Aristotelians need
Marx, and Marxist theory loosely construed, in order to properly diagnose the forms of
rationality with which they rightly take issue.2 At the same time, although I shall not pursue
the point in the present discussion, those working in the Marxist tradition might consider
looking to Aristotle for a viable set of non-foundational ethical concepts. The category that
links these ideas is that of reason: Aristotelians and I shall be treating Alasdair MacIntyre
here as an ideal type need Marxist theory in order to make full sense of what Horkheimer
called subjective reason.3 Marxist thinkers, meanwhile, might well benefit from looking to
Aristotles version of phronesis, or practical wisdom, in theorizing moral judgment.
MacIntyre is ideally positioned to exemplify contemporary Aristotelianism in this
instance because he himself takes Marx so seriously. Indeed, in his thoughts on his own
intellectual development, as well as on the continued relevance of Marx for contempo-
rary moral and political philosophy, he goes a good bit of the way toward making my
case for me. Yet, there is in MacIntyres brilliant and complex account of contemporary
moral discourse what can only be described as a striking lacuna: namely, a failure to
connect the false but real appearance of liberal forms of reason to the specific logic of
capitalism as a political economic form. The upshot is that while MacIntyre goes to
considerable lengths to underscore what it is that any philosopher stands to gain from
reading Marx, he does not seem to appreciate just how and what it is that Aristotelians
in particular stand to gain. Thus not even MacIntyre, I want to say, appreciates the full
significance of Marxist theory for Aristotelians.
Let me begin with MacIntyres own assessment of what is crucial in Marx. MacIntyre
reports having learned from Marx the fundamental lesson that ideas are always grounded
in specific social-historical conditions. They are, as he put it at a recent conference in
Dublin in his honor,4 always the ideas of actual people, involved in particular forms
of social practice. Extracted from such contexts, ideas are but meaningless abstractions.
This principle is axiomatic in MacIntyres work, and he is consistent in his crediting of it
to Marx. In an interview in 1991, for example, he said:

. . . it was Marxism which convinced me that every morality including that of modern
liberalism, however universal its claims, is the morality of some particular social group,
embodied and lived out in the life and history of that group. Indeed, a morality has no exis-
tence except in its possible social embodiments, and what it amounts to is what it does or
can amount to in its socially embodied forms. So that to study any morality by first abstract-
ing its principles and then studying these in isolation from the social practice informed by
them is necessarily to misunderstand them.5

Philosophy, it is easy to see, bumps up against sociology and history from this perspec-
tive, because the question that one must always ask is What are the circumstances, in
virtue of being embedded in which, a given concept has genuine substance, and is not
merely a chimerical appearance? Such an approach follows directly from the method
of The German Ideology, though another way to think of it might be to say that
Groff 777

MacIntyre, in keeping with Marx, has generalized the notion of utopian thinking, so
that it applies not just to unrealistic future-looking political proposals, but to ahistorical
philosophical analysis as such.
If beginning from real premises is what MacIntyre learned from Marx, it is worth
registering too what he says he learned from Hegel. From Hegel, he observes, we get the
idea that it is not just that ideas grow out of material conditions; the reverse is also the
case. As he put it in Practical Rationalities as Social Structures:

. . . theoretical standpoints may be presented, argued for . . . not only in the form of the
book, the article and the lecture, or dramatically in the dialogue or the play, but in the form
of those social dramas which are at one and the same time historical segments of the life of a
community and enacted theories. It was an Hegelian mistake to envisage history as the
self-realization of the Idea; it was an Hegelian insight to understand history as partly the
realization of a series of ideas.6

This point is also axiomatic in MacIntyres thinking, and I introduce it as background for this
reason. Although he notes that the stance that he adopts may set him at odds with sociologists
of knowledge, on the whole I think that MacIntyre does not clearly differentiate his Hegelian
interest in the embodiment of beliefs well enough from the socio-historical approach to ideas
that he adopts from Marx. In principle, certainly, the two points are compatible. A genuinely
dialectical theory should allow for causal determination to flow both ways, with respect to
the relationship between consciousness and social practices. It is the Hegelian line of think-
ing, however, that informs MacIntyres arresting claim that all intentional behavior is
enacted narrative and its the same Hegelian sensibility that may incline MacIntyre to
begin with forms of thought and then detail their instantiation, while neglecting to consider
other aspects of the relationship between ideas and social practice.
In any case, in After Virtue MacIntyre puts what he learned to magnificent use. His claim
in the book is that contemporary moral discourse lacks context, and is therefore devoid of
real content with respect to the stated meanings of its key terms. He adds, however, that
in another sense the terms are extremely well-entrenched, namely, in the context of how they
have come to be used, which is to advance statements of personal preference or desire in a
manner well-described, albeit incorrectly generalized, by emotivists and by Nietzsche/ans.
Meaning and use have come apart, as MacIntyre puts it. The contention in After Virtue is thus
that contemporary moral discourse is ideological in a very basic Marxist sense, in that mean-
ingless concepts are functioning to cloak real relations of power. But beyond this, MacIntyre
judges terms such as rights and utility to be not just empty, but false moral fictions, he
calls them, deployed in the service of an intellectual project that, for conceptual reasons, had
to fail. The fact that the ideological apparitions of contemporary moral philosophy are false
renders them ideological in an additional, more interesting sense: they are, technically,
speaking, false but real appearances. This is not the language that MacIntyre himself uses,
though he almost does. Needless to say, the important question will be what such false but
real appearances are appearances of.
For reasons internal to the alternative moral vocabulary that he proposes, MacIntyre
advances his position via historical narrative. The story begins with heroic societies,
especially Norse and Greek, in which, MacIntyre argues, the question of what one ought
778 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

to do in any given situation is entirely determined by ones role(s) within a pre-existing

social order (augmented by the perceived reality of fate), which order is reproduced
through just those activities that are required by said social positions. [M]orality and
social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society, MacIntyre writes.7
[F]reedom of choice of values would from [this standpoint] appear more like the freedom
of ghosts of those whose human substance approached vanishing point than of men.8
Next come the categories of Athens, ultimately as articulated by Aristotle. Here, says
MacIntyre, it is possible to question whether the social structure of ones own society is
as it should be though, perhaps paradoxically, such questioning is thought to itself be
possible only within the context of a properly formed polis, one whose function is pre-
cisely to be the venue for such reflection. The framework is now one in which human
being as such is taken to be the functional concept: to be a human being is to have a
certain defining form, an essence, as does a knife or an oak tree. And as with knives and
oak trees, so with human beings: it is good to be an excellent version of the kind of thing
that one is. The result, MacIntyre observes, is that while the question of what one ought
to do is more open on the Aristotelian model than it may have been in the heroic context,
nonetheless what one ought to do remains in the end a factual matter. Insofar as one is a
human being, one ought to do well, and take pleasure in doing well, the activities the
capacity for which is distinctive of human beings, namely contemplation and/or politics.
Aristotelian virtues are both the means to, and the substance of, this end.
It is the next step that is decisive. MacIntyres claim is that the rejection of the
Aristotelian philosophical framework (coupled with the relative loosening of social
roles) landed the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment in a conceptually untenable
situation. Before, moral precepts told one how to get from is to ought be the is
a fixed, determinate position within a network of relations in a pre-Aristotelian heroic
society, or be it the form, and therefore the telos, of a human being. As noted above,
in both cases normative claims amounted to answers to empirical questions: What is
required of a son? Which virtues go into flourishing as a human being? But is no longer
implies anything about ought, once (1) the social order allows for free-standing, osten-
sibly asocial individuals, whose social positions carry with them no special injunctions
for action, and (2) the concept of human being has lost its functional meaning. The
consequence, MacIntyre maintains, is that the Enlightenment moral project had to fail.
To quote a lengthy but key passage from the chapter bearing that phrase as its title:

. . . the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the sci-
entific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-
could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos. Since the whole point of ethics . . . is to enable man to pass
from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and
with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two
remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear. There is on the one hand a cer-
tain content for morality: a set of injunctions deprived of their teleological context. There is on
the other hand a certain view of untutored-human-nature-as-it-is. Since the injunctions were
originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate that
human nature [in keeping with its end], they are clearly not going to be such that they could be
deduced from true statements about [untutored] human nature.9
Groff 779

But, as noted above, the problem with notions such as utility and rights is not just that
they were originally formulated in the context of a necessarily futile undertaking. In
addition, MacIntyre contends, theyre unsound. At this point the point at which its
terms persist despite being both empty and false moral philosophy as MacIntyre diag-
noses it assumes the ideological cast described above. It is not essential that one share
MacIntyres outright rejection of the terms of liberal theory, in order to sympathize with
his concerns. Even if one does not agree with MacIntyre that rights, for example, are
moral fictions akin to unicorns, one might think that rights-talk is worrisome in that,
as Charles Taylor has argued, it is not clear that a lexicon of rights can itself sustain the
very social fabric required for such talk to have purchase.10 For my own argument,
meanwhile, it is enough simply to acknowledge that MacIntyre finds both utilitarianism
and Kantianism to be wanting, as Aristotelians generally do. What is of interest, from my
perspective, is the account that he gives of their hold.
If liberal moral philosophy trades in ill-conceived, indefensible, perhaps even inher-
ently incoherent concepts, what are we to make of such a fact? As Ive said, MacIntyre
believes, among other things, that the concepts in question obscure real relations of
power. Emotivists and Nietzschean perspectivists are correct, he thinks, to point this out
albeit incorrect to assume that in doing so they have grasped the nature of moral dis-
course per se. But merely identifying obfuscation is not sufficient, given what MacIntyre
says he learned from Marx. The final move, crucial because it anchors the ideas in ques-
tion materially, is to identify the possible social embodiments of the ideologically
inflected categories of contemporary moral philosophy.
MacIntyre says two things in this regard. The first is that contemporary discourse is
associated with precisely the ghostly and abstract self with which he contrasted the
heroic self.11 The contemporary self, he writes, is one that has no necessary social con-
tent and no necessary social identity [and] can then be anything, can assume any role or
take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.12 In saying this much,
MacIntyre is in company with Marx and with subsequent thinkers influenced by Marx:
the abstract individual of capitalism has no real identity, no genuine individuality. But it
is his second point that is perplexing, given his avowed intellectual debt to Marxism. The
claim in question is this: that what underwrites the abstract self sociologically is bureau-
cratic individualism13 and only that. MacIntyre doesnt offer much in the way of a
discussion about bureaucratic individualism, other than to say that the key institutions
of a bureaucratic society, which he identifies as being like ours, have manipulation
as their purpose, and rely upon yet another moral fiction (namely, that of social scientific
expertise, which MacIntyre dismisses on philosophical grounds) in the managerial pur-
suit thereof. But the lack of elaboration is not the issue. The issue is that there is not a
word to be said about capitalism.
The same striking absence is to be found, as it were, in Practical Rationalities as
Social Structures (1998c), a compact, otherwise-virtuoso piece first published in
1987, and in Whose Justice? Which Rationality, which the article prefigures. In these
works, MacIntyre argues that practical reason assumes different forms within different
traditions, and is exercised, in context, by very different kinds of selves. In Practical
Rationalities as Social Structures, the illustrative contrast is between the union of rea-
son, practice and identity in an Aristotelian context, a Humean context and, finally, a
780 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

contemporary context. The categories are more or less the same in Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?, but with added nuance. In both, MacIntyre characterizes the contemporary
self in much the same way as he did in After Virtue:

What then is the specific historical and social situation out of which this kind of relativist
and perspectivist speaks? It has to be one in which the individual has been able to or has
been compelled to free him or herself from any fixed identity which would impose a stand-
point. . . . It can only be an individual whose distinctive identity consists in key part in the
ability to escape social identification, by always being able to abstract him or herself from
any role whatsoever; it is the individual who is potentially many things, but actually in and
for him or herself nothing.14

And, in both, the accompanying sociological analysis draws the same blank:

. . . in so far as it is possible to be such an individual, he or she will exemplify what I will

borrow a phrase from the late A. A. Zhadanow to describe: rootless cosmopolitanism. Such
individuals . . . appeared in an earlier incarnation in Durkheims sociology as the margin-
alized victims of anomie, but in the century since then they have become philosophers.15

That a thinker as self-consciously indebted to Marx as MacIntyre is would be at a loss

to imagine a subject-position that corresponds to the-individual-as-such, i.e. to the indi-
vidual eviscerated of particularity that the only position that MacIntyre can imagine
that would correspond to such an identity is that of rootless cosmopolitan and/or
philosopher is, I must say, for there to be a very large, commodified elephant in the
room. To be fair, there is a reference in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to the fact
that in the contemporary context social and political relations have themselves come
to be understood as market-like:

. . . the parallels between this understanding of the relationship of human beings in the
social and political realm and the institution of the market, the dominant institution in a lib-
eral economy, are clear. In markets too it is only through the expression of individual pre-
ferences that a heterogeneous variety of needs, desires and goods conceived in one way or
another are given a voice.16

But the fact is presented just as MacIntyre says as a parallel; nothing more. Socio-
logically, the best that MacIntyre can do is to invoke Durkheim. Durkheim, he writes,
provided a clue to the ancestry of [contemporary perspectivism and relativism] when he
described in the late nineteenth century how the breakdown of traditional forms of social
relationship increased the incidence of anomie, of normlessness.17
For the purposes of my own argument (i.e. that Aristotelians are among the primary
philosophical beneficiaries of Marxs insight that capitalism involves, in its essence, the
wholesale abstraction of human subjectivity), it is enough, at this stage, to have shown
that MacIntyre, who may be regarded here as a paradigmatic Aristotelian, ignores capit-
alism when he gets to the diagnostic core of his account. But having observed that (even)
MacIntyre doesnt avail himself of Marx at the key moment when one would have
Groff 781

expected it, I want to say a word about why I think he doesnt before moving on to
demonstrate how he might have, and to say why I think he should have.
I noted at the outset that MacIntyre tends to think about the relationship between con-
sciousness and practice in terms of the former being instantiated in the latter, and rarely if
ever in terms of the former being generated by, or expressing in ideational form, the
structure or logic of the latter. MacIntyre attributes this feature of his thinking to Hegel,
though one could have learned it just as well from Plato or from Aristotle. But his avoid-
ance of Marx in explaining the social ground of the abstract self and its reliance on
abstract instrumental reason is not simply a matter of his having certain Hegelian predis-
positions. In fact, I think it can be shown that it is because MacIntyre believes that Marx
in the end failed to break significantly enough with Hegel that MacIntyre dismisses the
trenchant diagnosis of subjective reason put forward by Marx and subsequent Marxists.
Evidence for this interpretation of MacIntyre can be found in a short piece called The
Theses on Feuerbach: The Road Not Taken.
MacIntyres own thesis, in this gem of an article, is that Marx rejected philosophy
prematurely and unnecessarily, for what can best be described as political reasons, and
that in doing so he allowed his later work to be distorted by presuppositions which were
in key respects infected by philosophical error.18 The half-explicit further thesis is that
the road that Marx turned toward in the Theses on Feuerbach and then, in MacIntyres
view, backed away from, was an Aristotelian one. MacIntyre reads Marx as asserting that
the problem with Feuerbach is that his notion of philosophy presupposes the abstract
individual of civil society, and thus civil society itself, just as his critique of religion did.
Marxs view, as MacIntyre puts it, is therefore that if we suppose that in understanding
philosophical enquiry and argument as the activity of individuals, and that by giving an
account of the secular basis of that activity as the activity of individuals, we have
successfully moved from the abstract to the concrete, then we shall be deceiving
ourselves.19 Of course, as MacIntyre immediately notes, taking philosophy to be
grounded in the thought processes of atomistically conceived individuals is not simply
a philosophical mistake. Insofar as civil society is in reality alienated, it is a mistake
embodied in institutionalized social life. And it is therefore a mistake which cannot be
corrected merely by better theoretical analysis.20
What Marx established in the Theses on Feuerbach, says MacIntyre, is that there is a
contrast to be made between the alienated relations of civil society and the type of
philosophy that it sustains, on the one hand, and some other kind of social practice what
MacIntyre claims Marx meant by objective activity and the type of philosophy that it
would sustain, on the other. MacIntyre puts Hegel (along with the entire Enlightenment proj-
ect) on the side of civil society and its associated form(s) of reason, Aristotle (and Aquinas)
on the side of objective activity. The question, then, is where Marx himself falls.
As MacIntyre would have it, Marx recognized in the Theses on Feuerbach that civil
society generates an aporetic Kantian dichotomy between determinism and voluntarism,
at the level of thought. In keeping with this dichotomy MacIntyre reads Marx as saying
positivist social sciences represent human beings as objects, while human beings them-
selves cant help but think of themselves (ourselves) as subjects. Marx also saw that the
aporia cannot be solved from within and/or with the conceptual resources of civil
society. As MacIntyre puts it, a coherent account of the rational action of non-abstract
782 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

(i.e. social) individuals could only be developed within the context of, and with reference
to, non-alienated social practice one in which reasoning is attached to the pursuit of
internal goods, goods that are constitutive of, rather than mere means to, an end. Marx
himself puts it this way, in the 10th thesis: The standpoint of the old materialism is civil
society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.21 Although
much hangs on what one imagines Marx to have meant by human society or social
humanity, and although MacIntyre doesnt address the phrase directly, MacIntyres
Aristotelian reading is an extremely plausible one in my view.
MacIntyres further claim, however, is that after the Theses on Feuerbach Marx aban-
doned this line of thinking. It is not at all clear to me that MacIntyre is correct about this,
but the very fact that he believes it may explain his pointed lack of interest in the later
Marxs painstaking analysis of the logic of capital. In reflecting upon why Marx retreated
back to the theoretical forms of civil society, as MacIntyre believes him to have done,
MacIntyre introduces E. P. Thompsons portrait of hand-loom weavers in The Making
of the English Working Class. MacIntyre cites the weavers activity, and way of life more
generally, as an example of non-alienated social practice, informed by purposive prac-
tical reason. The hand-loom weavers activity was revolutionary, MacIntyre says, in that
it required the repudiation of industrial relations of production. Marx, meanwhile,
MacIntyre argues, although familiar with the insurrectionary role of the weavers in
1844,22 seems not to have understood the form of life from which that militancy
arose,23 and not to have realized that it was the virtues developed through, and rooted
in, that very form of life that made their resistance possible. MacIntyre hypothesizes that
Marx may have backed away from the analysis of the revolutionary potential of different
forms of reason because to have expressed those distinctions clearly and to have devel-
oped their implications would perhaps have left [him] unable to define his relationship to
the large-scale revolutionary changes which he had identified as imminent, tied instead
to what he took to be already defeated forms of past life.24
As MacIntyre sees it, the result of Marxs having stopped short of reconceptualizing the-
oretical inquiry, of his not having worked out a mode of reason that would be consistent with
the objective activity of human society or social humanity, is that later Marxist theory is
itself bifurcated along a determinist versus voluntarist line Engels and Plekhanov on the
one side, he says, Lukacs on the other. That the divide reproduces the very dichotomy that
Marx identified in the Theses on Feuerbach as being distinctive of civil society is an indi-
cation that something has miscarried.25 This failure to get past the philosophical forms of
civil society has two important consequences for Marxist moral philosophy, MacIntyre
thinks. I mention this because it connects to my own view that Marxists might benefit from
attending to Aristotles account of phronesis as developed in the Ethics. First, Marxists tend
to revert either to the language of Kant or of utilitarianism, when pressed to engage in nor-
mative discussion. I agree with this assessment. Second, Marxists, like other moderns, are
hard-pressed to see how norms grounded in specific kinds of historical practices might none-
theless attain objectivity; instead, the assumption is that one is either a universalist or a rela-
tivist. Here too the insight seems correct to me, though in this case I am taking MacIntyres
lead in affirming it, and my endorsement is tentative.
MacIntyre, then, while not having taken from Marx what he should have, has not sim-
ply overlooked Marx in a nave manner. Marx himself, MacIntyre thinks, and subsequent
Groff 783

Marxists by intellectual inheritance, remain within the framework of the old material-
ism. My aim in this portion of the argument was simply to explain the omission of key
elements of Marxs thought in MacIntyres account, before moving on. Having done so,
however, I am left with a new consideration to be folded into the next step, namely,
whether MacIntyres assessment of Marx is correct. Did Marx abandon a nascent
Aristotelianism in favor of a mix of Hegel and British empiricism in his mature analysis
of capitalism? In my view, the answer is no though even if he had, in principle
Aristotelians ought to be as free to make use of Marx as we are the empiricist Durkheim
or the interpretivist, value-neutral Weber. But in fact, part of why Marxs social science
ought to be of interest to Aristotelians is because it is itself so Aristotelian.
Let me proceed by addressing three closely related questions. First, exactly what is it
that is so noticeably absent, in MacIntyres account of the sociological underpinnings of
reason-from-nowhere, and the empty self to which it attaches? I will say in advance
that in responding to this question I understand myself to be simply reiterating
well-worn insights from the western Marxist tradition. Second, what is the underlying
significance, for Aristotelians, of the Marxist contribution? Finally, what of MacIntyres
critique? Is Marx as non-Aristotelian in his mature work as MacIntyre takes him to be?
To begin: the missing sociological referent in MacIntyres account of the ghostly
contemporary self is the commodification of labor power in societies such as ours,
as MacIntyre likes to put it.26 MacIntyre rightly observes in his reference to weaving that
production in capitalism is governed by instrumental rationality, rather than by the struc-
tures of reason associated with the shared pursuit of goods that are internal to a given
end. But there is more to the commodification of labor power than this, and here one
really must turn to Marx. What is distinctive about capitalism, Marx shows, is that in
capitalism commodities circulate as values, expressed in terms of exchange-value, rather
than as use-values. In developing these categories Marx draws not just on book 5 of the
Nicomachean Ethics, which he discusses in chapter 1 of Capital, but on book 1, chapters
810 of the Politics. Indeed, the distinction in purpose between what Aristotle charac-
terizes as the natural and the unnatural forms of acquisition respectively is at the very
heart of the matter.
The use-value of a thing is a matter of what need it can satisfy, in virtue of being the
kind of thing that it is and having, therefore, the properties that it does. A mug, for
example, such as the one presently at my side, has various use-values, one of which is
to hold hot liquids such as tea. If the mug were flat, or made of tissue-paper, it would
lose the value in question. Use-value is qualitative. It attaches to things given what they
are. In all economies but capitalism, goods are produced and exchanged qua use-values,
as specific things or kinds of things.
Exchange-value is different. An exchange value is simply the expression of a ratio of
equivalence, e.g. this is good for 5 of those.27 It has nothing to do with what a thing is
intrinsically. Rather, it is simply a measure of what a thing may be replaced with, a sub-
stitution index. Exchange-value, Marx suggests, is thus an indicator of a very specific set
of social relations of production, namely, ones in which goods are routinely produced for
the sole purpose of being replaced with (exchanged for) something other than themselves.
As it happens, wide-scale exchange of this type requires that the labor power embodied in
goods be itself considered as so much interchangeable, generic human capacity.
784 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

But lets stick with mugs for the moment. My same mug, considered in terms of its
exchange-value rather than its use-value, no longer differs qualitatively from a piece
of tissue-paper. Now the equation is quantitative. The mug is equal to this many sheets
of tissue, is equal to that much tea, is equal to this portion of a table, etc.28 The index will
in principle include the total number of kinds of commodities in existence. Money,
which Marx calls the universal equivalent, can be used to take the place of what would
otherwise be an impossibly long list. Expressing substitution ratios between commodi-
ties in terms of money highlights the purely quantitative character of the comparison: the
cup is equal to some amount of dollars while the tissue is equal to less than a penny.
Commodities circulate as exchange-values in the context of a form of production the
purpose of which is to realize profit. If one asks what the function or aim of economic
activity is in capitalism, as Aristotle would have us do, the answer is just as Henry Ford
said: were not in business to make cars; were in business to make money. Of course, the
full account of this historically unprecedented form of social organization Marx develops
over thousands of pages of analysis. This said, the unique logic of capitalism as a system
is crystallized in simple formulaic terms in the opening chapters of Capital, in the con-
trast between the non-capitalist circuit CMC (commoditymoneycommodity) and
MCM1 (moneycommoditymore money) the capital-form, or General Formula of
Capital. An important feature of the dynamic of producing for the purpose of realizing
profit (MCM1), in contrast to that of producing for the purpose of satisfying needs
(CMC), is that, as Aristotle notes at 1257b23 of the Politics, acquisition for its own
sake is in principle infinite. The same is true of the retail form of the art of acquisition,
Aristotle says. There is no limit to the end it seeks; and the end it seeks is wealth of the
sort we have mentioned and the mere acquisition of money.29
Marx argues that the value-generating commodity that makes profit possible in capit-
alism is labor power. Labor power too may be considered in terms of use-value and
exchange-value. The use-value of labor power is the doing of this sort of thing or that
sort of thing. I may be a skilled tailor, capable of making coats, to use Marxs example.
Or I may be able to make tables, or spin cotton. Labor in this sense is concrete: sewing,
carpentry and spinning are different kinds of activities, each from the others. When labor
circulates as a commodity within a capitalism system, however, it loses its qualitative
character, just as other commodities do (though labor power is unlike other commodities
in being that which, in Marxs view, the ratios of exchange-value actually express,
namely value). Marx discusses the contrast between concrete, particular kinds of
productive labor, on the one hand, and the odd phenomenon of undifferentiated homo-
geneous human labor, on the other, in some detail.30 The name that he gives to the latter
to the existence, in capitalism, of what we might think of as generic labor-power is
abstract labor.
Abstract labor is what the human capacity to consciously and creatively transform
ourselves and our environment turns into, in societies such as ours. Abstract labor is
the sociological substrate of the ghostly self, and nothing about saying so, as Marx and
subsequent Marxists have done, commits one to the standpoint of civil society. On the
contrary, through all of Marxs work, from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 to Capital, the moral of the story is that for labor to assume this form is an affront
to our dignity as human beings, an alienation of our species being, as the young Marx
Groff 785

put it, even if it took the mature Marx to explain it. Likewise, it is hard to see how Hor-
kheimer or Adorno, for example, could be charged with either voluntarism or determin-
ism in their own efforts to stake out an acceptable materialist epistemology, one that
would not simply function to replicate civil society. On the contrary. Indeed, its worth
considering again what such thinkers and Lukacs too have had to say on the topic of
what Horkheimer called subjective reason.
With respect to its formalism, the contention from a Marxist perspective is that the
principled disregard for the particular, at the level of thought, expresses, at the level
of thought, the principled disregard for the particular that is the mark of exchange-
value. A society characterized by the ubiquity of exchange-value is likely, so the Marxist
analysis goes, to be one in which we will find some version of Kantian universalism at
the level of philosophy. Similarly, political ideas such as formal equality and constitu-
tionalism, for example, can be seen to be animated by the fact that the transfer of surplus,
in capitalism, occurs through the non-personal mechanism of the wage-relation, rather
than through political or juridical means.
Qua specifically instrumental reason, meanwhile formal in its own way, in that inso-
far as instrumental reason is a matter of means-calculation as such, it doesnt matter what
the ends may be in its instrumentality, subjective reason is understood by thinkers
informed by Marx to encapsulate the logic of capitalism also. As Ive noted, MacIntyre
does make reference to what he calls the bargaining mentality of the market, in this
regard. But here too the relevant sociology cuts deeper. If Kantian pure practical reason
expresses the abstraction of exchange-value, the instrumental reason of utilitarianism
can be seen to express the fact that commodified goods are produced not for their own
sake, but instead as means means to an end unrelated to their use-values. Such a reality
is more shocking than it might initially sound. For it is not simply that one or another
particularly impractical commodity is produced solely as a means of attaining something
else, but that they all are. X is always only a means to y, within the context of capitalist
relations of production. And the further step of welding instrumental reason to the spe-
cific goal of quantitative increase what Rawls called economic rationality this step
can be seen to be grounded in the capital-form as well, the telos of which is the increase
of M to M1, ad infinitum. I dont mean to suggest that people were not appetitive prior to
the emergence of capitalism. Already in the Republic, Plato felt the need to make the
point that the state should not take the pursuit of profit to be its end. My point is only
that if one is interested, as MacIntyre is, in identifying the forms of practice that are asso-
ciated with the dominant forms of thought in liberal, capitalist societies in the West, then
surely one must point to the Law of Value, and not simply to the market defined as a
site of bargaining.
As a meta-theoretical matter, it is worth adding that for Marx, and certainly for thin-
kers such as Horkheimer and Adorno, the point with respect to the ontological status of
consciousness is neither that capitalism is nothing other than a Hegelian objectification
of ideas, nor, conversely, that ideas are merely epiphenomenal with respect to a base
construed along physicalist lines. Rather, the claim is that people engage, consciously,
in certain kinds of social relationships, which relationships they then come to understand
in identifiable, if oft-times distorted or inadequate, ways. These conceptual forms in turn
become the available ones for making sense of other aspects of reality. The step that the
786 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

Marxists take is to pose the straightforwardly historical question What is the practice
that could or does sustain this set of beliefs? in a more philosophical register: What
is the sociological truth-content, to use Adornos term, that is ideologically encoded
in these ideas, or this bit of meaning?
I have been arguing that MacIntyre needs Marxist theory not (just) for the reasons that
he says he does, but also in order to successfully analyse Kantian and utilitarian moral
philosophy especially, to properly diagnose the conceptions of reason operative
therein, and the picture of the abstract individual to which such conceptions attach. But,
one might say, MacIntyre is an Aristotelian who has self-consciously undertaken to forge
ahead along the very road that he thinks ought to have been Marxs; his is in this respect a
Marxist project. It is therefore no wonder that he turns out to need Marx in order to see it
through. But that doesnt mean that other Aristotelians should be interested in Marx.
This brings me to my second question. Why should any Aristotelian, not just one who
is already influenced by Marx, care about Marxist theory? There are three good reasons,
at a minimum. The first comes, almost fully developed, from MacIntyre himself. In
Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995, MacIntyre observes that in capit-
alism, pleonexia, the drive to have more and more, becomes treated as a central virtue.31
Aristotle refers negatively to pleonexia in book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which has
to do with the virtue of justice, i.e. knowing how to apportion things appropriately. As I
read him, MacIntyres point in Three Perspectives is that capitalism encourages people
to be insatiable consumers, and that insatiable consumerism, because intemperate, is
inconsistent with eudaimonia, with flourishing. It seems to me that MacIntyre is clearly
correct in the sense that, if one shares Aristotles views about what makes for a good
character, one ought to have to have reservations about capitalism and ought, I would
add, to take an interest in analyses of it as deeply probing as Marxs. This, as I said, is
almost the point that I want to make. What I will add, however, is that what Aristotelians
can learn from Marx is not only that capitalism fosters pleonexia, though it does do this,
but that capitalism just is institutionalized pleonexia.
A second reason for Aristotelians to pay attention to Marx can be seen if we contrast an
Aristotelian who engages with Marxist theory with a Kantian who does. The Kantian might
come to see that insofar as capitalism presupposes commodified labor power, it precludes
treating humanitys creative capacity as an end, and therefore precludes treating persons
themselves as ends. As Horkheimer argues in Materialism and Morality, Kantian thought
may for this reason be seen to impel us beyond an acceptance of the present.32 However,
while we may well expect the instrumental character of capitalism to be a problem for the
Kantian, it need not necessarily be a problem for the Kantian that capitalism turns concrete
labor into abstract labor. But for all of the reasons that MacIntyre has spent the last 25 years
clarifying for us, it is or should be a problem for the Aristotelian. For as Marx shows,
capitalism is not just institutionalized pleonexia; it is institutionalized abstraction. Those
who object to abstract universalism in moral and political philosophy, and who agree with
Aristotles assumption in the Politics that different sorts of ideas hold sway in differently
organized societies, will therefore find an analysis specific to their concerns in Capital and
in subsequent Marxist philosophy, something that arguably cannot be found elsewhere.
Finally, Marx should be of interest to Aristotelians because Aristotelians are commit-
ted philosophically to essentialism, to the concept of form. Marxs account of capitalism
Groff 787

affords insight not only into the anti-essentialism of the self-that-is-nothing, but into anti-
essentialism more globally. Why? Because the lesson from Marxs analysis of exchange-
value is that the commodity form is antithetical to the idea of essentialism. While the
value that is expressed in exchange-value is itself an emergent property of a particular
social form,33 the exchange-values of commodified objects are not derived from their
own forms. To say this, however, is to say that in virtue of its own essence, capitalism
is likely (as commodification takes hold generally) to generate the false but real appear-
ance of anti-essentialism as a (comparably) general metaphysical principle precisely
the anti-essentialism that has been dominant philosophically for the last several hundred
years.34 This is a line of argument that should be of interest to Aristotelians.
That Marxs own investigation into capital presupposes the concept of form
brings me to the last of my three questions. In what sense is Marxs social science
Aristotelian? I cannot here develop the systematic response that the question
deserves, but I can at least block out how I think it should go. I see Marxs work
as recognizably Aristotelian in its ontology, its epistemology and its normative
structure. If this is so, then it will turn out that MacIntyre did not actually go far
enough in his Aristotelian reading of the Theses on Feuerbach. It will be not far-
fetched at all to think that what Marx meant can only be expressed, or at least can
best be expressed, in Aristotelian terms. The mistake will have been to think that
this is not equally so of Marxs later work.
MacIntyre references Carol Gould in setting out his own view of Marxs ontology, at
least in what MacIntyre sees as the exemplary Theses on Feuerbach. Gould holds a ver-
sion of the position sometimes called political Marxism, according to which the spatial
metaphor of base and superstructure reifies and partitions that which in reality is social
relations between conscious persons, all the way down. This line of interpretation is cor-
rect, in my view, and MacIntyre is right to be dismissive of those who imagine that Marx
thought that human society, even one as distorted as capitalism, is made up of a purely
ideational sphere that is somehow under-girded by a purely physical sphere. But what
MacIntyre overlooks is the metaphysics. Marx regards the social relations that constitute
capitalism as assuming a form of a determinate kind form construed in Aristotelian
terms as the essential, organizing principle of a thing, in virtue of which it has charac-
teristic dispositional properties, which may or may not be actualized. For this reason
alone i.e. insofar as form is arguably the foundational ontological category of his
mature work 35 Marx shows up as an Aristotelian, rather than as the reductive materi-
alist that he is often taken to be, even by Marxists.
Epistemologically, meanwhile, much has been made of Marxs dialectical stance. But
there are other things to be said of Marxs approach to the study of society than that it is
dynamic in this way. Of particular importance is the end to which Marxs dialectical
method is put namely, that of giving an account of an object, here capitalism, precisely
in terms of its essence, its form. The name for such an account is a real definition. Real
definitions may be contrasted with nominal definitions, which point not to intrinsic prop-
erties, but rather to the observable features and/or other subjective effects of an object
that constitute what Locke calls a things nominal rather than real essence. Harre and
Madden, Roy Bhaskar and others working in the area of critical realism have reclaimed
the language of real definitions and real essences, and critical realists especially have
788 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

noted that the categories can be seen to hold in Marxs work. But Marxs interest in pro-
viding a real definition of capitalism and its constitutive relationships is itself
Aristotelian the epistemic complement to the commitment to form as a metaphysical
principle. Howard Engelskirchen has illustrated this point beautifully, in recent work on
the topic, cited above. In this same vein, David Depew has argued that Marxs very
concept of species-being rests on the idea that human consciousness is the capacity,
associated with Aristotles epistemology, to apprehend objects as instances of kinds or
species, where a species mark is one or more distinctive dispositional capacities.36
Knowing, we might want to say be the object of knowledge human nature (in the case
of species-being) or the alienated objectification thereof (in the case of capital)
knowing, on this Aristotelian model, is to be able to give an account of the form of the
thing that is known.
And Marxs notion of a social scientific law is Aristotelian too, as James Farr and oth-
ers have argued in careful detail.37 For the positivist, a law is a universal statement of
event regularity: for all x, if x, y. On this model, a particular occurrence of y is
explained by the fact that its following upon x is an instance of the law that in all cases
x, y follows. In keeping with Hume, however, no necessary connection between the vari-
ables is thereby asserted. Especially, what x and y are, let alone what each is essen-
tially, bears no causal weight. Marx, by contrast, can be seen to have anticipated
contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers of science, who conceive of laws and their
underlying metaphysics very differently. From the neo-Aristotelian perspective, some-
times called scientific essentialism, laws are thought to be statements about what things
do, or have the potential to do, given what they are, perhaps even what they are essen-
tially.38 Causal connections are thought to be metaphysically necessary, precisely
because they are thought to be grounded in the natures of things. When a scientific essen-
tialist engages in social science, he or she seeks, as Marx did, to determine the essence, or
form, of the object of inquiry, so as to be able to say, as Marx did, what it is therefore
likely to do. The Law of Value is not a report of a regularity, but a claim about the intrin-
sic properties of the capital-form. Its tempting to say that scientific essentialism, includ-
ing scientific essentialism as practised by Marx, is a response to Aristotles insistence
that objects be studied in ways that are appropriate to the kind of thing that they are:
a reality characterized by the existence of form is such that study of it ought to consist
of the identification thereof.
Finally, at the risk of provoking Marxists and Aristotelians alike, I want to maintain
that there is a normative structure to Marxs thinking, and that while it has Kantian and
Hegelian aspects, it is above all Aristotelian. There is, admittedly, a strain of Marxism
whose proponents will object that Marxs mature work in fact has no normative struc-
ture, that it was only in his youthful, humanist writings that Marx was interested in
what is good for people, and whether or not capitalism is. Notwithstanding the amount
of ink that has been spilt on the topic, it seems to me to be as difficult as ever to take this
interpretation seriously. Unless and in the face of countless passages that scream out
against such a reading one has persuaded oneself that Marx regards the transfer of
human subjectivity onto commodities as a normatively neutral state of affairs, unless one
has persuaded oneself of this, one need not read any further than Volume 1, Part 1,
Chapter 1 of Capital to see that in the course of investigating capitalism, Marx was also
Groff 789

laying bare the mechanisms of what he had earlier condemned as alienation albeit
doing so with far greater sociological specificity than he had been able to do in 1844.
And that the study of capital and the analysis of alienation should turn out to coincide
should come as no surprise, as the point driven home by the later, scientific Marx is
precisely that capitalism both rests upon and reproduces alienated species-being.
The question, then, is not whether or not there is a normative structure to Marxs
thinking, but rather how to characterize it. As I said, I believe it to be Aristotelian to
a significant degree. If one reads the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics together, as
Aristotle intended, and pays attention to books 8 and 9 of the Ethics as well as to books
7 and 8 of the Politics, one can see that, for Aristotle, the key task is to identify the kinds
of social relationship that involve people in the types of activity that constitute the full
actualization of the human form, or soul. Aristotle doesnt think that all humans have
such a form; women dont, and non-Greeks dont. For those who do, however, there are
two kinds of activity that are fitting: contemplation (i.e. the study of form through sci-
ence, mathematics, or metaphysics) and politics (the exercise of phronesis, or practical
wisdom, in the course of deliberation with ethically capable equals, i.e. with fellow cit-
izens within a proper polis). Aristotle devotes almost all of his discussion to the second
alternative, asking after the excellences of character that it both presupposes and hones.
The activities of production and of art (or of child-care within the household) do not
show up as full expressions of human rationality, as Aristotle tells the story. Also, as
MacIntyre reminds us, Aristotles account is ahistorical.
Thus it is easy to see the ways in which Aristotles view of things is not shared by
Marx. But there are also important ways in which it is. At the deepest level, the question
that Marx has undertaken to answer is Aristotles: namely, what are the conditions of
possibility, in terms of the kinds of social relationships that must be in place, for the
human energeia to be successfully expressed? And what kinds of relationships, with
what purposes as their ends, preclude it? One might object that at this level of abstraction
anyone can be made to seem as though she or he is addressing Aristotles question. I
dont think that this is so, but even if it were, what we see in Marx is not only that the
question is Aristotelian, but that in key respects the answer is as well. It is not just capital
that has a form, in Marxs thought; human beings do too. Our form, our species-being,
as Marx called it in the 1844 Manuscripts, consists of a unique capacity to self-
consciously and creatively shape our environment physical and social in accordance
with the laws of beauty, as Marx puts it.39 Indeed, species-being a capacity for free,
conscious, collective self-determination is arguably just the sort of inherently open-
ended, neo-Aristotelian category that MacIntyre was casting about for in After Virtue,
when he replaced the concept of soul with that of practice within a healthy tradition.
Also crucial, however, is that the normative objective for Marx is not the maximization
of pleasure, or the redistribution of wealth, or the achievement of equality. Rather, as
with Aristotle, the good amounts to nothing more nor less than the actualization
of our uniquely human capacities namely, for Marx, precisely the as-yet unrealized
capacity for creative life activity that under capitalism has been given over to commod-
ities, rendered subject to the Law of Value. The idea that it is the human telos to be free
may seem to some Aristotelians to be a bad category mistake. But, Kantian resonances in
Marx notwithstanding, freedom so construed can only mean for Marx something very
790 Philosophy and Social Criticism 38(8)

much like what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia: not the doing of duty (or, for the empiri-
cists, whatever happens to please us), but, rather, the doing of that which is distinctively
ours as human beings to do. There is argument to be had over what this activity might be
thought to involve, substantively, but the form of the problem no pun intended is
Aristotelian.
Let me reiterate that there is far more to be said about the potential for a marriage of
Marxism and Aristotelianism than space permits. And there are benefits to be reaped by
both parties. As noted at the outset, while Aristotelians may need Marxist theory in order
to adequately critique liberal forms of reason, there is also a case to be made that the
concept of phronesis, as Aristotle understood it, is an untapped philosophical resource
for Marxists. Happily, I am hardly alone in taking an interest both in what Kelvin Knight
has called revolutionary Aristotelianism40 and in its Aristotelian Marxist inverse. With
any luck, there will ample opportunity to pursue these and other points in future
discussions.

Notes
1. Frederic Jameson (19834: 151).
2. Aristotle, Politics, book 1.9 (1995: 248).
3. Cf. Peter Lindsay (2002).
4. Max Horkheimer (1992).
5. Alasdair MacIntyre, On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophies of the 20th
Century (2009).
6. MacIntyre, interview with Giovanna Borradori (1998: 258).
7. MacIntyre, Practical Rationalities as Social Structures (1998c: 1334).
8. MacIntyre (1981: 116).
9. (ibid.: 119.)
10. (ibid.: 52.)
11. Charles Taylor, Atomism, (1985: 187210) and Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian
Debate, (1995: 181203).
12. MacIntyre (1981: 31).
13. (ibid.: 30).
14. (ibid.: 33).
15. MacIntyre (1998c: 135).
16. (ibid.)
17. MacIntyre (1988: 336).
18. (ibid.: 368).
19. MacIntyre (1998b: 224).
20. (ibid.: 228).
21. (ibid.: 229).
22. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1978).
23. MacIntyre, Practical Rationalities as Social Structures (1998c: 232).
24. (ibid.).
25. (ibid.).
26. It is worth comparing this thought with the opening sentence of Adornos Negative Dialectics:
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed
Groff 791

(1992: 3). MacIntyre has different hopes for reason than does Adorno, but there is interesting
agreement that Marxism is ill-served by its Hegelian and its empiricist elements. It is also worth
noting that Lukacs himself problematizes the dichotomy between determinism and voluntarism,
charging Engels with erring in his belief that the behavior of industry and scientific experiment
constitutes praxis in the dialectical, philosophical sense (Lukacs, 1971: 132).
27. Note that in Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1971: 83222), Lukacs, as
translated by Livingstone, also uses the metaphor of the ghostly individual. Specters abound.
28. Many thanks to Howard Engelskirchen for this phrase, and for helping me to clarify my under-
standing of the relevant sections of Capital. Any inaccuracies or peculiarities of language are
mine, not his.
29. For the purpose of the present argument, I have bracketed the otherwise crucial point that what
is actually being equalized in these ratios is value, not quantities of the commodity in its
concrete form.
30. Aristotle, Politics, 1257b23 (1995: 27). For an excellent discussion of Marxs appropriation of
Aristotle, see Scott Meikle, Aristotle and Exchange Value (2002[1991]).
31. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (1990: 128).
32. MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, vol. 2 (2006: 49).
33. Max Horkheimer, in Beyond Philosophy and Social Science (1993).
34. Howard Engelskirchen, On the Clear Comprehension of Political Economy (2008).
35. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, The Concept of Essence (1968).
36. See David Depew, Aristotles De Anima and Marxs Theory of Man, (2002[19812]);
Depew refers to these as the epistemic schema in Marxs thought.
37. (ibid.: 227).
38. James Farr, Marxs Laws (2002[1986]). See also Engelskirchen (2008).
39. See authors such as Brian Ellis, Scientific Essentialism (2001); Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory
of Science (1978); a less Aristotelian version is Alexander Bird, Natures Metaphysics: Laws
and Properties (2007).
40. Karl Marx, Estranged Labor, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1964:
114).
41. See, for example, Kelvin Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy (2007).

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