Alasdair MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025 at the age of 96, never got the memo informing him that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. He never thought that imagining the disembodied subject abstracted from its social context was a good starting point for anything, or that epistemology had philosophical priority, or that a principal task of philosophy was to defend the validity of our knowledge against sceptical doubt or to argue that some ‘ethical demands’ were ‘obligatory’. He certainly never received the notification issued at the start of the 20th century that henceforth philosophy would be essentially devoted to the analysis of language, the construction of formal arguments and the solution of logical puzzles. In contrast to all this his thought had a kind of archaic substantiality. He was one of the very few anglophone philosophers of the past two hundred years whom one could imagine emerging from the pages of Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius.   

There are a number of reasons for this. He was, of course, erudite, highly intelligent and argumentatively incisive, but more importantly he instantiated an unusual form of the unity of thought and life. He had a remarkable ability to learn and willingness to change his position. At various times in his life he was a Marxist, a practising analytic philosopher, an Aristotelian, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, and eventually a Roman Catholic and Thomist-Aristotelian. At times he seemed close to psychoanalysis; he wrote knowledgeably about Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Edith Stein, various figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and a number of theologians. In the case of almost any other philosopher, one might think it a sign of flightiness, but actually it was a mark of intellectual integrity.

He completely avoided one of the besetting sins of many philosophers, especially Catholic ones with whom he later came to be associated. Many of these, particularly the ‘birth Catholics’ among them, know antecedently exactly where they are going, and, straining all their intellectual muscles, they deploy the whole range of their argumentative capacities to get there. MacIntyre, in contrast, genuinely did not always know where he was going, and the openness of his search was not a deficiency, certainly not in a philosopher. It is one thing simply to change one’s mind, for whatever reason, and very much another to explain for what reasons one has shifted one’s view, and to argue in detail for the new position. MacIntyre was always extremely forthcoming in this regard. Whatever he thought, he thought for reasons he could and did specify at length. Because he was self-evidently not just a good philosopher but also a man of great moral seriousness, with him one could believe that the changes his views underwent were part of a coherent path, a cognitively motivated progressive development that retrospectively made sense.  

This remained true even when one might reject, as I do, the end-state at which MacIntyre arrived – a kind of virtue ethics based on rehabilitated natural teleology – and even if no one could properly specify the mechanisms which were operating at any given transition from one position to the next and which motivated the shift. It was perhaps not an accident that MacIntyre put such emphasis on the need for moral agents to tell coherent stories about their own life and development, as he could. In the end, we are essentially story-telling animals, and this fact about us is even more profound and important than that we are rational animals capable of argument. Story-telling, narrative, is sui generis, elemental and not reducible to anything else. This gives special prominence to the role of literature in human life, if ‘literature’ is taken to refer not just to any artfully arranged linguistic structure which is meaningful, but specifically to the stories about humans with vivid character traits involved in various actions; that is, verbal constructs centred around the two elements of plot and character. So the models for literature are Homer, Cervantes and Tolstoy, and especially the 19th-century novel, rather than, say, Pindar, Hölderlin and E.E. Cummings, literary figures in whose work plots and characters are not absent, but are certainly not central.

This view of the centrality of literature (that is, of the novel) was something MacInytre and Rorty shared, despite their differences on other issues. It was also part of the reason why many anglophone philosophers reacted so negatively to the work of both, because in the eyes of bien pensant analytic philosophers, recognizing that literature might have some significance and importance meant automatically devaluing reason, argumentation, objectivity and ‘science’. Literature was ‘subjective’ and a matter of emotions, and aesthetics was, as the name indicates, a study of appearances (not hard-edged reality), and was uninterested in truth, so it was incapable of becoming a proper science. Serious philosophy should therefore keep its distance.   

One should recall that part of the motivation for some early analytic philosophy, especially that which flourished in Central Europe between the wars, was moral and political. A philosophy centred on the stern disciplines of logic, science and mathematics was supposed to be a bulwark against the increasingly dangerous forms of political obscurantism that eventually lead to fascism. It is true that there seemed to be a natural antipathy between National Socialism and analytic philosophy. Contrary to what certain analytic philosophers seem sometimes to suggest, though, they were not the only targets of National Socialist ire. There was also a natural antipathy between National Socialism and Hegelian philosophy and between National Socialism and that form of Left Hegelianism which we call Marxism.Part of the reason was that Hegelians believed in rational political institutions and state-bureaucracies, whereas Nazis believed not in institutions but in ‘movements’, myth, and the irrational force of blood.

Furthermore, the Central European Hegelians who emigrated to the English-speaking countries remained relatively uninfluential there, and so their opposition to fascism was not noted. Members of the Frankfurt School, who were in some sense Left Hegelians, also pointed out that National Socialism, whatever its relation to analytic philosophers, was not exactly on bad terms with natural science per se – the Nazis loved the latest technology and supported scientific research with as much alacrity and enthusiasm as any analytic philosopher might want. However this general point did not receive much attention. So the upshot was that many of the late-analytic philosophers made it a point of honour and boasted even in the 1970s that they never read novels, and for them MacIntyre’s (and Rorty’s) recognition of literature’s value was a sign that they had not learned the lesson of history and had put philosophy on a slippery slope which was likely to lead to cultural and political disaster.    

The prominence of the category of ‘character’ in MacIntyre is striking. In a way MacIntyre’s ethics is about the action of people qua characters, related to one another and their environment by established practices and standing in a tradition. We tell our stories within these parameters. The triad ‘character/practice/tradition’ was to replace the liberal trio ‘(isolated individual) subject/rules/preferences (or interests)’. MacIntyre was himself a highly developed individual, but he rejected the liberal trio absolutely, and was particularly scathing about liberal individualism. From a religious point of view, perhaps, every individual was unique and precious, but epistemically, morally and politically the individual is not everything, the world as a whole (and human society) is much more important than me. Without active membership in political and social institutions, movements and organisations, I would be at best the empty, hollow shell of a human being. The idea that institutions were ‘good enough’ if they could be shown to be based on the mere (hypothetical) ‘consent’ of their members was shallow in the extreme. Marx was right that only through participation in inherently collective practices was it possible to develop a rich individuality. This gives MacIntyre’s thought an explicitly political and social dimension which most other 20th- and 21st-century anglophone philosophy lacks.    

It is an important part of understanding MacIntyre’s project that one sees it as itself being located in its own social and historical context. That context is a dual one. On the one hand, we have collectively faced up to the alternative formulated by Rosa Luxemburg, socialism or barbarism, and we have firmly chosen the latter. The other aspect of this choice becomes clear if one takes at all seriously the first few paragraphs of MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). Imagine, MacIntyre says, a world in which ‘science’ has been wiped out – all the scientists have been lynched, the labs, instruments, and books destroyed, no remaining humans have skill in higher mathematics, no one remembers how to do controlled observation. Even if someone were to try to collect and synthesize the surviving fragments of scientific concepts and theories and bits of cracked, broken, rusted and discarded instruments, these would be completely without the context which gives them meaning. Nothing could restore their original significance. Now imagine that instead of ‘science’ we were speaking of our moral, social, and political thought. For MacIntyre we are already living in the Dark Ages. Those who are capable of religious belief, and thus potentially members of the Roman Catholic Church, or who have the extreme good fortune to inhabit one or the other of the very few remaining marginal bubbles of healthy, significant human social interaction – mostly in small communities outside the economic mainstream – might be able to survive in isolation and impotence, but that is the best we can hope for. Remaining traces of traditional ways of life and belief were worth cultivating and defending, he thought, and occasionally he had a surprisingly sanguine attitude toward this, or even seemed to support not just the continuation, but revival of past habits.   

In one of my essays I raised some questions about the possibility of continuing traditions under changed conditions, and a fortiori about the possibility of reviving obsolete practices except under truly exceptional circumstances. MacIntyre took strong exception to this and described to me in a letter how his father, a non-Gaelic speaker in Glasgow, had decided that he was going to make his family Gaelic-speaking as part of a wider project of linguistically re-gaelicising Scotland, so he had them spend their holidays in the gaeltacht in the West of Ireland. In the letter I wrote in response I forebore to ask him how that project was going in 2015 because I could not think of a way of bringing it up without drawing attention to the quixotic nature of this plan, which seemed to me rather to be evidence of the point I had been trying to make. The concept of ‘tradition’ was as important as MacIntyre thought it was, but the contents and limits of individual traditions were much less easy to specify than he assumed and, as this particular case seemed to indicate, traditions were often much less manageable and much more fragile than he seemed willing to admit. It also seems undeniable that some traditions are inherently toxic and most traditions contain toxic elements. Walter Benjamin once wrote that there is no document of culture which is not also a document of barbarism. If one does not explicitly recognize this, making the concept of ‘tradition’ central to one’s thinking risks giving it, at best, a massively problematic bias. 

MacIntyre retained to the end of his life a healthy and deep Marxist suspicion of the institutions of parliamentary democracy and of the liberal, capitalist nation-state. One of the traditional virtues of the good citizen in the United States was participation in the political system, including voting in elections. In 2004 MacIntyre, by that time a citizen of the US, called upon his fellow-citizens not to vote in the coming presidential elections because both candidates, Bush and Kerry, were completely useless. MacIntyre claimed that ‘When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither’. Citizens, he said, had a duty to ‘withdraw from . . . arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have abrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.’   

The disesteem in which MacIntyre held analytic philosophy was fully reciprocated by most of the established practitioners of the discipline. When I was teaching in the Department of Philosophy at Princeton in the 1970s and early 1980s, we regularly went through the agonizing process of trying to hire someone in ‘ethics’. Why, some of my colleagues complained, was it so hard to find someone in that area who was intellectually rigorous and had anything interesting to say? MacIntyre had an answer: analytic approaches to ethics had the inherent deficiency of all analytic philosophy: they set themselves the project of putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle which was to result in a single beautiful picture, but the pieces from which the image was to emerge were two broken chess figures, four scraps of newspaper, half the label of a bottle of wine, a postage stamp, and an old NY subway token. Much ingenuity can be exhibited in arranging and rearranging these, but it is no surprise that the result disappoints. No clear, coherent picture emerges, or if one does, it has clearly been imposed on the material externally by force. It remains constricted, limiting and deeply unsatisfactory.  

One can, of course, agree with MacIntyre’s analysis of the state of contemporary ethics without also being committed to his slightly nostalgic view that in the past there was an overarching moral unity to human life. Perhaps not even Homeric society, fifth-century Athens, or primitive Christian communities had the coherence and displayed the moral harmony, even the potential moral harmony, which MacIntyre sought for all his life. Perhaps history is in that sense dialectical, and contradiction, indeterminacy, incompleteness and incoherence are just an integral part of all the forms of human life which we find in the historical record. To accept any part of this line of thought, however, would have been to transgress the self-imposed boundaries of analytic philosophy, which were surrounded by powerful taboos and rigorously policed. After a long discussion of various candidates, one of my colleagues said: ‘If we don’t hire X, whom do we hire? Alasdair MacIntyre?’ This was obviously thought to be a show-stopper, a proposal so absurd and outrageous that compared with it anything else seemed attractive. It was as if someone had said: ‘If we don’t hire X, what do you propose we do? Reintroduce human sacrifice of a graduate student at the end of every year?‘   

I dissented strongly from this judgment. MacIntyre was, in my estimation, one of the most important philosophers of the last half-century. He had produced a large body of highly original, insightful work that has already stood the test of time. His book on the history of ethics is still, in my view, unsurpassed. His strictly philosophical essays contain a wealth of sophisticated arguments, many of them as sharply formulated and as rigorous as anything one might find in the standard literature of analytic philosophy. He also had enlightening things to say about religion, history and literature, and this seemed to me no disqualification. Finally and most importantly, he offered an astute and extremely powerful account of the modern condition, of modern society, of modern ethics and of modern politics. By all accounts he was a successful and charismatic teacher. If these qualities were not what we wanted, then what did we want? 

I got to know MacIntyre only relatively late in his (and my) life. I first met him in Dublin in 2009 at a conference to celebrate his 80th birthday. There was a very significant clerical presence in the audience, many in full ecclesiastical fig: monks in brown, black and white, many with hoods, priests in black cassocks, nuns in various habits. It reminded me slightly of ceremonial occasions in my Catholic schooling. Almost all the talks and all the contributions to the discussion were heavily Thomist in their orientation, which was something that was to be expected, although my training in a Hungarian Catholic boarding-school had been robustly and relentlessly anti-Thomist. I gave a talk on Marxism at the end of which an elderly nun in the front row, who had dozed through the talk itself, suddenly jerked herself awake and asked in a puzzled voice where God and inviolability of Natural Law were in my talk – she must, she suggested, have missed something. At the dinner I was placed at what turned out to be the Infidels’ Table in the corner, and as the various Protestants and atheists seated there prepared to tuck into the first course, the table was swept by a breeze, seemingly from nowhere, which turned out to be generated by the masses of people in the rest of the room crossing themselves simultaneously, preparatory to saying Grace. We had to hold down the napkins.  

I have been told that the young MacIntyre was restless, and given his nomadic academic career and the many apparent shifts in his intellectual profile, this would make sense. However, the MacIntyre I encountered impressed me with his utter calm. He seemed to have attained ataraxia; he had no need to be defensive or aggressive. The last lecture I heard him give was at Fisher Hall, the Catholic Student Centre, in Cambridge. This must have been in about 2016. His topic was business ethics and the uselessness of including courses on this topic in the curriculum of business schools. It was impossible, he thought, to render an inherently corrupt and corrupting institution like Anglo-American ‘business’ salubrious by cosmetically adding on to the essential basic training a useless appendage that actually was not a functioning part of the enterprise, and could not be one because it contradicted everything the institution was devoted to. MacIntyre at this point was in his mid-80s, but he spoke and answered questions on his feet for over two hours with no visible signs of fatigue or diminution of the acuity of his comments, and with a mastery of his subject, the composure and equanimity which I had noticed before, and an implacable lack of cheap optimism. When someone in the audience asked what exactly his view was – wasn’t there some vague glimmer of hope that was perhaps hard to discern in this grim situation but nevertheless existed, or were things really hopeless? – MacIntyre immediately responded that he thought, of course, that the situation was hopeless.     

Especially when discussing MacIntyre it is important to distinguish two types of hope: terrestrial hope and the theological virtue of hope. When MacIntyre says that our situation is hopeless, he is referring (presumably) to terrestrial hope. The strand of Catholic theology with which I am most familiar understands hope as trust in the possibility of redemption by God, and takes it to be the opposite of ‘despair’. I despair if I believe my sins to be unforgivable. Some have thought that this is the ‘sin against the Holy Ghost’ for which there is no forgiveness. Suicide from religious despair is the worst sin imaginable. Judas’s most serious sin was not to betray Jesus, but to commit suicide because he despaired of divine forgiveness.     

If the political and social world seems grim, and ‘the new dark ages are upon us’, as MacIntyre claims, then looking for comfort and a sense of hope elsewhere – for a different hope from the terrestrial one – might be tempting. Yet to be able to enjoy the comfort given by any form of Christian religion, one must be capable of believing and embracing it. This is not just a question of an ability intellectually to accept certain doctrines that seem implausible, but also of the need completely to transform our moral sensibility. For the traditional Catholic, which is what MacIntyre, I take it, aspired to be, the mass murderer is not as evil as the poor devil who despairs of God’s forgiveness. This is deeply incompatible with the reaction most people now have, or could envisage having. To return from religion to politics, the ‘of course’ in MacIntyre’s remark at the Fisher Centre was significant. If one abstracts from the possibilities of religion, it seems that, for him, Luxemburg and Trotsky have the final word after all: we have chosen barbarism, and ‘there is no tolerable alternative set of political and economic institutions which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism’. 

Read on: Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Man Who Solved the Irish Question’, NLR I/8.