James MacAllister

Institute for Education, Community and Society, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore some of MacIntyre’s ideas concerning utopia, education, and hope. I firstly analyse MacIntyre’s suggestion that teachers are the forlorn hope of Western culture. I argue that the rather pessimistic tone of this conclusion is only seemingly (and not actually) at odds with what MacIntyre says elsewhere about the potential of education to challenge the worst excesses of advanced capitalism. To help build this argument, I secondly examine what MacIntyre says about the social virtue of hope in Marxism and Christianity. There he documents some significant concerns with Marxist ideology but nonetheless concludes that Marxism is the only project that can re-establish hope as a social virtue. I thirdly document how MacIntyre continues to champion the virtue of hope in his more recent work. However, the hue of this virtue has become both Marxist and Aristotelian. He now holds that a “utopianism of the present” is needed to combat advanced capitalism. While utopians of the future sacrifice away the possibility of learning how to transform the present, utopians of the present refuse to make this sacrifice. MacIntyre’s later work suggests he has renewed hope that a practice-based education can contribute to a utopianism of the present: a utopianism that can challenge the iniquities and distortions generated by market based economies.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 13 June 2018

Revised 6 May 2019

Accepted 11 June 2019

KEYWORDS

MacIntyre; utopia; education; virtue; hope

From: International Critical Thought 2019 9 (3)

Editor: Wang Yi