Nicholas uniquely interprets Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism as a response to alienation defined as the divorce of fact from value. However, this account cannot address alienation in the form of the oppression of women or people of color. Importantly, it fails to acknowledge the domination of nature that blackens the heart of alienated life. Alienation must be seen as a separation of the human from nature. Nicholas turns to Aristotle, first, to uncover the way his philosophy embodies a divorce of human from nature, then to reconstruct the essential elements of Aristotle’s metaphysics to defend a philosophical anthropology based on Eros.
Love and Politics: Persistent Human Desires as a Foundation for Liberation presents a critical theory that synthesizes MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and Social Reproduction Theory. It will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers.
Jeffery L Nicholas is an associate professor at Providence College and director of the Center for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at Providence College. He is author of Reason, Tradition, and the Good: MacIntyre’s Tradition Constituted Reason and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. He holds an appointment as a foreign research associate with the Center for Aristotelian Studies and Critical Theory at Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania.