Alasdair Macintyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 (Historical Materialism) - Hardcover

"Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson have [...] done a great service to the left in putting together Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism." - Tyler Zimmer, in: International Socialist Review 80 (November-December 2011) "Blackledge and Davidson have provided a real service in pulling them [the essays] together. They shed welcome light on a particular period of political activity, and on the particular place of Left intellectuals within it. They should certainly be read by students of MacIntyre, and those seeking a handle on the distinctiveness of his work." - Gideon Calder, in: Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2 November 2010

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 Britain'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.