12/5/21

MacIntyre's book is a good old fashioned philosophical takedown, aiming simply to prove that "almost all of Marcuse's key positions are false." For the most part this consists not so much in pointing to Marcuse's logical fallacies or syllogistic slipups, but rather to his prevarications and his tendency to assert rather than argue. To take merely one instance from many, MacIntyre draws attention to Marcuse's claim that with Marx we transition from the (Hegelian) emphasis on reason, to an emphasis on happiness as the key to freedom---a claim that is put forth without any textual or argumentative substantiation.

One of the most interesting claims of the book is that Marcuse's brand of Marx-inflected social criticism is not a development of Hegel/Marx, but a regression to a young Hegelian position, and would thus be susceptible to (e.g.) the criticisms leveled by Marx against such thinkers in The German Ideology. The greatest indication of this, for MacIntyre, is Marcuse's use of Freudian ideas that allow him to characterize members of modern society as repressed and imprisoned within unsatisfying regimes of desire. That this is clearly reminiscent of the young Marx's concept of alienation is beyond dispute; but MacIntyre's (somewhat merely implicit) claim that the "mature" Marx abandoned this stance is questionable, at least in the stark terms MacIntyre employs. Marx's charge vis-a-vis the young Hegelians was largely that their social criticisms were utopian: there was no (dialectical) account of how the current unsatisfying situation held within it the seed of its own self-overcoming. If MacIntyre thinks Marcuse is guilty of the same flaw, he doesn't clearly make that case (as far as I remember). Overall, this criticism of Marcuse is interesting but under-developed.

MacIntyre's criticisms of Marcuse's clumsy attempts to attack modern philosophy, especially "linguistic" philosophy (Wittgenstien, Ryle, Austin) are, by contrast, totally on-point.

The only real faults of the book, in my opinion, are to be found in MacIntyre's occasionally simplistic treatment of Marx: MacIntyre's Marx is cast as more Engels-ian and less Hegelian than I think he should be. ( )