Bookbag: Alasdair MacIntyre makes fun of Herbert Marcuse

A very young Alasdair MacIntyre was commissioned to do a "Modern Masters"-type book on Marcuse for reasons passing understanding. Isn't that like asking Mary McCarthy to introduce Scoundrel Time?

The central oddity of One Dimensional Man is perhaps that it should have been written at all. For if its thesis were true then we should have to ask how the book came to have been written and we would certainly have to enquire whether it would find any readers. Or rather, to the extent that the book does find readers, to that extent Marcuse's thesis does not hold.

And then there's

Some later Marxists have certainly been utilitarians—Kautsky was. But most have been clear that freedom is a goal which may be incompatible with the goal of happiness. Trotsky's view that the gap between aspiration and achievement will be a permanent feature of human life, so that tragedy will be permanently relevant to the contemporary human experience, seems far more faithful to Marx's view than Kautsky's was. Moreover on this point Marx and Trotsky are surely right and Marcuse surely mistaken.

Don't ask me where I got a copy of this book. Or why.