Alasdair MacIntyre, philosopher who saw a ‘new dark ages,' dies at 96

Boston Globe

2 days ago

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MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe.
In his best-known book, 'After Virtue' (1981), he argued that thousands of years ago, the earliest Western philosophers and the Homeric myths generated 'the tradition of the virtues,' which was treated as objective truth. Value neutrality, to Mr. MacIntyre, was the goal of 'barbarians' and a sign of 'the new dark ages which are already upon us.'
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Such language might make Mr. MacIntyre seem like a wistful reactionary. In fact, his worldview was far less predictable.
He never entirely disavowed his youthful Marxism, applauding Karl Marx's critique of the individualistic and acquisitive spirit of capitalism. He maintained a certain sort of modesty from his days as a self-appointed champion of the working class — he never earned a doctorate and disliked being called 'professor' — and he continued showing the dialectical passion of a Trotskyist, occasionally launching into what one colleague called 'MacIntyrades.'
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His chief opponent was what he called 'modern liberal individualism,' a category in which he included not just supporters of the Democratic Party but also conventional conservatives, leftists, and even anarchists. All were guilty of 'emotivism': the belief that humanity was essentially a collection of autonomous individuals who selected their own principles based on inner thoughts or feelings.
This starting point, Mr. MacIntyre argued, could lead only to eternal, unresolvable disagreement. He went so far as to suggest that every tradition of modern politics had come to 'exhaustion,' and he rejected many essential tools of modern moral philosophy: Thomas Hobbes' social contract, John Locke's natural rights, Jeremy Bentham's moral consequences, and Isaiah Berlin's pluralism.
Instead, he valued storytelling, tradition, and rational debate, embedded within a shared moral community. He found these qualities in the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who promoted 'a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life,' he wrote in 'After Virtue.' Within such an order, moral truth was objective.
'After Virtue' gained extraordinary popularity for a work of late-20th-century moral theory, selling more than 100,000 copies, Compact magazine wrote in a piece published after Mr. MacIntyre's death, titled 'Postliberalism's Reluctant Godfather.'
That was an apt label for someone who managed, in recent years, to earn multiple tributes from Jacobin, a journal on the socialist left, and First Things, which is on the religious right. Mr. MacIntyre seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable with his influence as it came unavoidably into focus.
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In 'After Virtue,' he wrote that morality arose out of a belief in human telos — the ancient Greek notion of purpose being intrinsic to existence. People of the modern world, he said, had two choices: Follow Friedrich Nietzsche in trying to honestly face a world without the traditional notion of a human telos, rendering moral thought baseless, or follow Aristotle and recover moral purpose by fostering a society dedicated to the cultivation of virtue.
Mr. MacIntyre illustrated what that might look like with an analysis of what he called 'practices' — shared, skillful activities including chess, architecture, and musicianship — as examples of where virtue still had meaning. These pursuits, he said, intrinsically provide 'standards of excellence' and reward traits such as justice, courage, and honesty. In them, he saw a possible modern basis for virtue.
'After Virtue' was acclaimed by leading philosophers, including Bernard Williams, who in a 1981 review for The Sunday Times of London wrote that even Mr. MacIntyre's exaggerations were 'illuminating'; that his intellectual history of the moral self was a 'nostalgic fantasy' and yet also 'brilliant'; and that, whatever questions the book raised, 'the feeling is sustained that one's question would get an interesting answer.'
In a subsequent book, 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' (1988), Mr. MacIntyre provoked sharper criticism. His argument now promoted Roman Catholicism with Aquinas, not Aristotle, as its paragon of moral thought.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote a memorable takedown in The New York Review of Books accusing Mr. MacIntyre of dropping some of his own principles — such as his devotion to local traditions — when discussing Aristotle, Augustine, and the pope. What really interested Mr. MacIntyre, she argued, was not reason but authority: the ability of the Catholic Church to secure wide agreement, and, by extension, order.
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She was one of several distinguished thinkers to challenge Mr. MacIntyre's idealized view of the past, arguing that historical societies were not as unified as he claimed and that unanimity itself was not so great.
In a review of 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' published in The Times Literary Supplement, Thomas Nagel wrote, 'MacIntyre professes to be freeing us from blindness, but he is really asking for the return of a blindness to the difficulty of moral thought that it has been one of the great achievements of ethical theory to escape.'
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on Jan. 12, 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents, John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre, were both doctors. In the 1930s the family moved to London, where his parents treated patients in the working-class East End neighborhood.
In 1949, he earned a bachelor's degree in classics from Queen Mary College at the University of London. In the 1950s and '60s, he earned master's degrees in philosophy from Manchester University and Oxford while holding several lectureships.
As a student, he joined the Communist Party, but he also steered debates of Britain's Student Christian Movement as its chair.
In about 1970 he moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis University and gradually left Marx for Aristotle. In the 1980s, he converted to Catholicism and took to seeing Aquinas as the master thinker of the Aristotelian tradition. He had a series of academic appointments but mostly taught at Notre Dame, where his wife, Lynn Joy, is also a philosophy professor.
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His two previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Joy, his survivors include several children. He and Joy lived in Mishawaka, Ind., a city near Notre Dame.
For decades, no single tendency seemed to define readers who took inspiration from Mr. MacIntyre's work. There were heterodox Marxists, the skeptic of liberalism Christopher Lasch, and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum.
But more recently, one constituency claimed Mr. MacIntyre's work most completely and prominently: the Trump-supporting, religious, anti-consumerist, and illiberal right. Two leading commentators of this world, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, have written books that pay tribute to Mr. MacIntyre.
In 2017, the publication of one of these books, Dreher's 'The Benedict Option,' prompted an odd debate between Dreher and Mr. MacIntyre, with each man accusing the other of commenting on a book of his that he had not actually read.
During a lecture at Notre Dame, Mr. MacIntyre deplored becoming part of an ideological battle of his own time.
'The moment you think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative,' he said, 'you're done for.'
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