The life of Alasdair MacIntyre, begun growing up alongside Gaelic speakers in interwar Glasgow, and ending yesterday, in Notre Dame, seems to trace for us the trajectory of our entire era. There will be many deserved and heartfelt tributes to his extraordinary career over the coming days, laying out his transformative contributions to moral and political philosophy. But what strikes me, as I reflect upon his work, is just how much we are still living in the world he described, and in no small degree, predicted.
MacIntyre was a towering figure, especially for those of who shared his bone deep, intuitive revulsion of modern liberalism: “Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it — and that was when I was seventeen years old”. Starting his academic career as a Marxist, he converted to Catholicism in the 60s, yet this was not so much a departure from, as an intensification of, his politics — sometimes described as “revolutionary Aristotelianism”. His essential critique of liberalism in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? would shape an entire generation of post-liberal philosophers and theologians, such as Charles Taylor, and my father, John Milbank.
His works, decades on, still read like the sharpest of contemporary political analysis
MacIntyre grasped, perhaps better than any other thinker of his generation, the tragedy inherent in industrialised modernity. Vast material improvements have come at the apparently inescapable cost of degrading the moral fabric of our common life, alienating and displacing the individual citizen. A critic of both capitalism and communism, MacIntyre identified at once how the revolutionary zeal of socialist societies was in practice subordinated to a brutal model of industrial development and exploitation, whilst the social democratic project, though more apparently benign, ultimately did nothing to counter the spiritual degradation of capitalist modernity.
At a time when the West still seemed a vital and dynamic society, MacIntyre diagnosed the deep-rooted contradictions of an American project in which the “morality of particularist ties and solidarities has been conflated with a morality of universal, impersonal and impartial principles”. The latent tension that MacIntyre identified back in 1984 has since exploded into a divided America, with wild swings from the messianic liberal universalism of the neoliberal and progressive projects, to the America First politics of Trump and Vance. The danger of a liberal system that denies it is grounded in particular persons and circumstances, MacIntyre argued, was the creation of a hollow new kind of elite: “a correspondingly impartial actor, and one who in his impartiality is doomed to rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere”.
That his works, decades on, still read like the sharpest of contemporary political analysis is a testament to his deep insight, yet is also reflective of a degree of civilisational inertia that frustrated MacIntyre himself. The problem, as identified by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, is that capitalist modernity has become so all-encompassing and dominant, that it is impossible to conceive of an alternative, and the apparent alternatives themselves serve the system they appear to oppose. MacIntyre anticipated not only the by now well described problems of overt liberalism, but also the inadequacy of conservatism and its ultimate capture by liberalism. Crucially, for MacIntyre politics should be defined by membership of a moral community, something that the modern state can never fully be, whether it is dragooned into the service of rootless liberal cosmopolitanism, or captured by nationalistic conservatives.
MacIntyre’s revolution has yet to begin, but the signs of it are flickering upon the horizon. He looked to the development of “a new set of social forms” on the scale of those wrought by St Benedict. These are to be understood not as a shelter from progressivism, but as a coherent economic, political and ethical model, with its own unique institutional architecture, with its aim to entirely oppose the logic that we all live by. Such a revolution is as hard to imagine for us as the industrial revolution was for 18th century farmers, yet those looking back upon that time would find its seeds and early signs scattered everywhere, waiting to burst forth. There is a sombre providential symmetry in Alisdair MacIntyre dying as a new Pope takes on the name of Leo XIV, treading in the footsteps of the author of Rerum Novarum. His hopeful legacy, at once radical and conservative, patriotic and universalist, Catholic and socialist, will, I suspect, be borne forwards by the Church in whose embrace he died.
