ABSTRACT
Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one visionary, socialist, political essay in the 1950s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) that echoes throughout the book. In the 1958 ‘House of Theory’, she sees the Welfare State as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for the values she saw as central to the socialist tradition—equality, lack of exploitation, meaningful work, and a sense of community. Murdoch connected this failure with a distinctly intellectual source of socialism’s diminishment in British popular consciousness—the absence (connected with British empiricism) of a systematic exploration of those very ideas, and others such as liberty, democracy, and dignity. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch abandons the idea that moral ideals provide a guide to constructing a good society. She retains from her earlier work that the individual-moral domain is governed by perfectionism; but society cannot be. ‘Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of’ (MGM 368), for example, through the liberal idea of rights.
