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Don't hold your breath. Eagleton himself observes that postmodern nihilism supplies high-octane fuel for consumer culture. Indeed, "no way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation" than capitalism, whose ever-more untrammeled enlistment of fantasy and desire leaves pomo partisans the harmless task of shocking yesteryear's bourgeoisie. Safely imprisoned in the winter palaces of departments and administration, the radoisie rearranges the Feng Shui of academic life. They rail against the tyranny of hierarchy while forming tenure committees and write reams of footnoted, peer-reviewed articles on the indeterminacy of truth. (An academic himself—now at the University of Manchester after a long stint at Oxford—Eagleton wisely desists from too much egghead-bashing.)
Impatient with radicals marching on the tenure track, Eagleton returns to the traditions that galvanized the British Catholic Left: Aristotelianism, Thomism, and classical Marxism. Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva step aside for Alasdair MacIntyre and Philippa Foot, while "theory" gives way to philosophy and theology. With McCabe no doubt smiling down from heaven, Eagleton defends invaluable antiques like truth, goodness, and morality, while arguing against all mandarin pedantry that "objectivity and partisanship are allies, not rivals." Just as unfashionably, he rescues virtue from the sneers of Richard Rorty and the harrumphs of William Bennett. Neither bourgeois ideology nor bourgeois self-restraint, virtue, Eagleton reminds us, is "fulfilling your nature," cultivating and flourishing in one's talents and relationships.
Eagleton contends that when we universalize Aristotelian teleology, infuse it with Christian charity, and respect democratic-Enlightenment demands that "everyone be in on the action," we get socialism, the political economy of virtue. Far from being merely a more equitable system of production, socialism, Eagleton maintains, means "human solidarity as an end in itself," delight in the expression of powers and affections unsullied by the values of use or exchange. Thus the Marx who longed for the fulfillment of humanity's "species-being" becomes "the Aristotle of the modern age." Though Eagleton isn't the first to trace a line from Aristotle to Aquinas to Marx—the great historian and Christian socialist R. H. Tawney once dubbed Marx "the last of the Schoolmen" —he provides the clearest and most compelling reasons to authenticate the claim.
On the trip from Moscow to Athens, Eagleton detours more than once to Jerusalem and Rome. While Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, et al. are plundering Christianity for their own purposes—all of a sudden St. Paul has become enormously fashionable—Eagleton's background and erudition make him a much more credible interlocutor. True, when he appeals to "our dignity as moderately rational creatures," the Psychoanalyst from Vienna corrects the Angelic Doctor. Still, always a scourge of liberal twaddle, Eagleton reprises his Slant days as a keen but never reactionary critic of Vatican II, turning the Marxist suspicion of bourgeois reformism against theological pabulum. He dismisses Levinasian earnestness about "the Other" as neo-liberalism "bathed in an aura of religiosity" which "empties religious language of any meaning." Yet he readily summons the spirit of McCabe, reminding us that "there is no love without law" because moral codes define "what counts as love."
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