The Ethical Dance-A Review of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Abstract

The appearance of this book during 1981 marked the resumption of a public position by a figure who, after making a particularly striking impression in the British New Left in the ten years up to 1968, withdrew both his energies and his person from the nexus of causes and comradeships to which he had contributed a mercurial and generous vitality. Emerging from a Christian (and then Christian-Marxist) background into the turbulent debates of the post-1956 far left, an analytic philosopher with a gift for passionate, resonant expression in both the written and spoken word, a militant owing successive loyalties to Trotskyist, syndicalist or semi-Leninist groups and parties but at the same time respected by and responsive to a wider and less affiliated left: MacIntyre was one of the outstanding socialist intellectuals of that fertile period in British intellectual and political life which saw the rise of CND and its civil-disobedience wing, the expansion of working-class direct action through the shop stewards' movement, the thriving of early vanguard forms of theatre and rock protest, and the beginnings of those long, large waves of popular dissensus (or, in Ralph Miliband's useful term 'de-subordination') which have proven, in the seventies and early eighties, signally resistant to any organised channel of political activity.