THE ETHIC OF THE PRODUCERS: SOREL, ANDERSON AND MACINTYRE

The unifying moral theme represented by the ethic of the producer has not always been prominent in studies of Georges Sorel's work. But this theme was critically important to the political and moral education of the generation of socialists that came to maturity in the era of cultural modernism 1910-30. The most interesting of these was John Anderson who left Scotland in 1926. He was the most important philosopher to have worked in Australia, and for more than thirty years he presented to his students a sophisticated understanding and appreciation of Georges Sorel's ethic of the producers. Anderson's social and political thought reveals a neglected aspect of the Scottish intellectual and cultural synthesis of Calvinist theology and Aristotelian virtue ethics identified by Alasdair Macintyre. It also suggests an unexpected connection between Macintyre's virtue ethics and the distinctively Augustinian response to the modernist crisis in authority represented by Georges Sorel.