Eschatology, Practices, and Utopia: Bretherton and MacIntyre Against Capitalism

This paper explores the possibility of resisting capitalism given capitalism’s seemingly totalizing effects on our formation as subjects. I address this problem by exploring the work of two scholars whose work in ethics take it quite seriously: Luke Bretherton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Exploring the tensions in Luke Bretherton’s use of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thought for his ethics and political theology, I argue that they differ in their assessments of the possibilities of and limits to systematic ethical critiques of capitalism – and structural analysis in general. This is in part due to their respective frameworks for social analysis: Augustinian cosmology for Bretherton and Aristotelian ethics for MacIntyre. After investigating these frameworks and MacIntyre’s post-Marxist trajectory, I use Fredric Jameson’s concept of utopia to re-read Bretherton’s Augustinian eschatology and MacIntyre’s practices within institutions in a way that opens both to the possibility of emancipatory politics and social transformation.