Two Ships Passing at High Noon: Alasdair MacIntyre & Raymond Geuss

Benjamin M. Studebaker

Alasdair MacIntyre was born in Glasgow and educated in the British university system. He began his career as a Marxist in the 1950s, before converting to Catholicism in the early 80s. He has spent most of his career teaching in the United States. Raymond Geuss, the son of a Catholic steelworker, attended a Catholic school in Pennsylvania before undergoing university education at Columbia. He then moved to West Germany and finally to the UK, taking up a post at Cambridge. By the 80s, he was established as a scholar of critical theory. These two prominent philosophers—MacIntyre and Geuss—have a shared understanding of the relationship between Catholicism and Marxism. Both take Catholicism and Marxism to be alternatives to liberalism, particularly to the liberalism of Kant, whom both reject. They both understood liberalism to be in crisis, and for both of them liberalism lacks the necessary tools to respond effectively to that crisis. Their reverse journeys were made for largely the same reasons, but they yielded quite different results.

Ultimately, MacIntyre and Geuss differed on Aristotle and Aquinas. MacIntyre embraced them both, drawing on them to return to virtue ethics. But for Geuss, Aristotle cannot be rehabilitated, and Aquinas appears inevitably to him as a dogmatist. Yet even though the two have arrived at very different positions, they have remained on good terms throughout their careers. Indeed, each praises the work of the other. In, “Review: Outside Ethics,” MacIntyre calls Geuss the best essayist of his generation, while Geuss, in A World Without Why, praises MacIntyre’s intellectual courage. It is as if their ships passed by one another, in broad daylight. They took a good, long look at each other’s boats, found much to admire, yet went their separate ways.

MacIntyre and Geuss disagree, but their disagreement has been so very civil. On some level, they recognize in one another a common cause, albeit one they pursue through different terminology. Each has, in his own way, attempted to answer a crisis of values in liberalism, a crisis that is visible to each in large part because of the role Catholicism has played in their lives.

Alasdair MacIntyre

1929-2025

MacIntyre became a lecturer at Manchester University in 1951, when he was just 22 years old. During the 50s, he became involved with the left on a political level. He even joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Yet, at the same time, he considered becoming a minister in the Church of Scotland. In the middle of the 20th century, the British communists remained interested in having dialogue with Christian perspectives. There were social relations between Christians and communists and not just at a purely intellectual level. MacIntyre published a book in 1953—Marxism: An Interpretation—in which he urged Christians to read Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. He contributed to some of the major journals of the emerging New Left, like the Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner.

For MacIntyre and his fellow interlocutors, the Soviet Union had become lost in Stalinist barbarity. There was a need to re-ground Marxism in an ethical tradition. But while many new leftists looked to Kant to perform this role, MacIntyre would not go this way. In a 1958 piece titled “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” MacIntyre argues that for Kant, “the ‘ought’ of morality is utterly divorced from the ‘is’ of desire.” Since for Kant, moral actions cannot be performed “from inclination,” Kantian morality estranges us from our human motivations. It turns our reason into an alien power. Instead, we need a morality that helps us make sense of our motivations, that helps choose among them. Reason works with our psychological drives rather than against them. A decade later, in 1969, MacIntyre takes the point still further—to be a Kantian is to submit to an alien dogma even when this dogma conflicts with evident political and military facts. The point is reiterated in 1995. For MacIntyre, the interest in “Kantian universalism, contractarianism” and “utilitarianism” is to be understood as “the outcome of a history in which different aspects of the life of practice had first been abstracted from the practical and theoretical contexts in which they were at home and then transformed into a set of rival theories, available for ideological deployment.”

For a long time, MacIntyre sought to persuade the new left of the need for a different sort of moral theory rooted in the demands of real life. In 1959, he joined Britain’s main Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Labour League. But he worried the league wasn’t revolutionary enough—it remained too committed to entryism within the Labour Party. Democratic socialism was too technocratic. MacIntyre warned his comrades not to behave as if they were “sent from heaven” to “guide the labour movement from above with their theorizing.”

This activity culminated in an essay on “Freedom and the Revolution,” in which MacIntyre framed the classless society as inextricably linked to human freedom. Freedom could not have just one, prescribed meaning, handed down as a dogma. Instead, the concept of freedom itself requires the freedom to evolve and change. Yet this emphasis on freedom must not be confused with an emphasis on liberal individualism. As MacIntyre put it, “freedom is not a problem of individual against society but the problem of what sort of society we want and what sort of individual we want to be.” For MacIntyre, “only within some organizational form can human freedom be embodied.” This led him to the idea that workers and intellectuals should join party organizations.

But how should they conduct themselves as party members? Despite MacIntyre’s repeated attempts to get his fellow leftists to adopt an ethics rooted in real life, he found his comrades repeatedly abstracting away from the concrete situations they faced in the post-war world. As the 60s wore on, his frustrations grew. He left International Socialism’s editorial board in 1968, and in 1970 he condemned the student movement as “more like a new version of the children’s crusade than a revolutionary movement.” But this was not just a problem with the privileged students, but with the workers, too. In the 90s, he reflected that proletarianization, “tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.”

What was needed, for MacIntyre, was Aristotelian virtue ethics Christianized by Thomas Aquinas. For Aristotle, the good must be understood in relation to a techne, to an art, a craft, a social role, a practice. It is in and through the techne that we come to know what the good involves in the particular situations in which we find ourselves. This gives rise to many kinds of good lives, all emanating from a universal, but realizable via a plurality of routes.

The Marxists could not take up Aristotle and Aquinas because, as MacIntyre put it in After Virtue “as Marxists organize and move toward power they always do and have become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric; for in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form.” Because the Marxists never found an adequate moral theory on which to ground their commitment to freedom, their politics always took the form of concealing their will to power through bureaucratic machinations. To be really committed to freedom, it was necessary to recognize that freedom serves the good—the two are not opposed. And to put freedom in the service of the good, there needs to be a tradition of conceptualizing the two in tandem, a tradition that is realized at a thick, organizational level. This culminates in a call for a new monasticism. We are, as MacIntyre says, being “governed by barbarians” and therefore we are waiting “not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Raymond Geuss

1946-present

Geuss’ life followed the reverse track. Geuss’ father tried and failed to become a Catholic priest. This failure only made Geuss’ father more committed to the Catholic faith, so he sent the young Raymond to a Catholic school staffed principally by Hungarian exiles. His teachers came from the Habsburg Empire, from Franco’s Spain, and from the communist bloc. Their Catholicism was of a very old type.

For Geuss, liberal freedom operated from the principle, De gustibus non est disputandum. In matters of taste, there can be no disputes. Liberals subscribe to a notion of individual sovereignty. Each individual is free to determine what counts as his good, and each is not to be interfered with. The only break on individual sovereignty is the sovereignty of others.

Geuss’ Catholic boarding school opposed this doctrine head-on. For his teachers, people don’t know themselves, they don’t know what they want, and what they want often has nothing to do with what’s good. Indeed, “there could be forms of the good” which we “could only come to see even vaguely” if we “were living as part of an appropriately constituted group of people held together, for instance, by faith and sacraments.” It was not merely a matter of having a discussion or deliberation—there was a need for collective action and experience, for an organization with a history. And what is that organization? The church! Extra ecclesiam nulla est salus, which Geuss prefers to translate, in Not Thinking like a Liberal, as “outside a church there is no salvation.”

This critique extended to Kantian notions of reason and to discussions grounded on such notions. Because we use reason in particular historical situations, its use is constrained by the character of those situations. Even if we subject the conditions of discussion themselves to reason, those conditions will nonetheless constrain our reflections and limit the purchase of any conclusions we draw. Sometimes, we will even find ourselves in deeply confusing situations in which reason is no help at all. In these situations, we await unknown contingent events—or an act of God—to free us from stultification. Our freedom to think and act in a conscious way therefore depends upon God’s grace.

Yet Geuss describes his school as having had no truck with Thomas Aquinas. Because the teachers there came from Europe, they were not trained in American Catholic seminaries, where Thomism was dominant. Consequently, there was no emphasis on the concept of “nature”—on “human nature” or on “natural law.” Nature, for Geuss’ teachers, could not be a source of normative or proto-normative concepts. Natural human impulses “could be things one should (in some circumstances) satisfy,” but they would need to be satisfied in ways sensitive to historical context. And in some cases, natural impulses had to be “resisted or needed to be transformed.” Along these lines, Geuss offers a paradoxical quote from his religion teacher, Father Béla Krigler. It reads:

            “The most natural thing for a man is to turn against his own nature and do something marvelous that is not in any way ‘natural.’”

Geuss followed Krigler in rejecting Thomism and in rejecting Aristotle. For Geuss, Aristotle lacks a concept of history. In A World Without Why, Geuss ascribes to Aristotle the view that human beings have a “historically uniform human nature.” And he doesn’t think Aquinas offers any help. For Geuss, Aquinas made Aristotle worse by inserting into the Aristotelian schema the concept of the “will.” The will is for Geuss a Stoic concept, alien to Aristotelian thinking and fundamentally hostile to it. For Aristotle, a good person is not free to choose whether to be good. A good person has a habit of acting on the basis of their understanding of the good. They cannot help but do this. So, for Aristotle, a good man is free primarily in the sense that he is not a slave—his freedom is not to do with the freedom of the will.

In Geuss’ view, the bringing of free will into the equation undercuts the importance of historical conditions in shaping what is possible for us. He even frames the coming of Christ as one of these historical conditions. As Geuss puts it, the coming of Christ changed what was possible for human beings. People who existed before Christ had more limited possibilities, through no fault of their own. No matter how reasonable the pagans were or how long they discussed metaphysics with one another, they could not have arrived at Christianity before the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ alters what it means to be human so much so that it gives rise to a new historical era. This historical quality is, for Geuss, missing in pre-Christian Aristotelianism. The Thomistic invocation of the will only further obscures it.

Geuss concludes that “if there is a future for theological ethics in the Roman Catholic tradition it will certainly not be Thomist.” And on this basis he expresses pessimism about theology in general—for Geuss, it is too mired in overly rigid, dogmatic categories, to appropriately connect with the vicissitudes of real life. Over the course of his career, Geuss adopted an aversion to what he called “the quest for certainty.” Those who would establish a single permanent, transhistorical account, of whatever kind, would draw his ire. For Geuss, those who pursue such quests are stricken with “the authoritarian personality.” It’s a critique he directed not just at the Thomists, but at Kantians, Lutherans, Cartesians, Rawlsians, and more.

Instead, he became a Western Marxist and lifelong admirer of Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, “There is no right life in a false life.” Geuss takes this to mean that living well would require a change in social conditions, one that he lacked the power to initiate on his own, much less bring to completion. The best he could do, then, is what he thought he ought to—even, though, on some level, he thought such action to be totally pointless. If that strikes you as unclear, know that Geuss agrees with Marcuse that “unclarity is a virtue.” To avoid thinking like a liberal, you have to push against the limits of what can be conveyed in conventional language.

So, both MacIntyre and Geuss think there is a need for more than mere dialogue. We need organizations that create the conditions for the right kind of dialectic. In both cases, the model for these organizations is Christian in character. And, for both men, we lack the relevant kind of organization. MacIntyre awaits a new St. Benedict—he is waiting for a new kind of intellectual environment in which his non-dogmatic variant of Thomism can be further developed together with others. Geuss also recognizes a need for something like the church, for something like the school he attended as a boy. But he can find no such organizations in this world. So, he has been forced to make his way in and through the liberal universities. These universities are, according to Geuss, overwhelmingly Kantian, often in only a half-conscious way. MacIntyre, too, has, despite everything, spent a life in the universities. In this sense, the two men have lived liberal lives, even as they have struggled not to think like liberals.

MacIntyre died on May 21, 2025 at 96 years old. Geuss is 78. It is too late for MacIntyre to succeed in finding a new form of life in and through this thought. At this point in his life, it seems unlikely Geuss will do so, either. But I’d like to think that when the ships slipped by each other, there might have been an opportunity to do more than just say “nice boat.” Maybe it falls to us to make the organizations that MacIntyre and Geuss knew they needed but could never find. I’ll leave it there.

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Benjamin Studebaker has a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He's the author of two books: The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut and Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies.