Tough day for philosophy.”
“What do you mean?”
“MacIntyre died.”
This matter-of-fact text exchange with a colleague at the McGrath Institute for Church Life brought me the news that Alasdair MacIntyre, the Notre Dame professor emeritus and world-renowned moral philosopher, died on May 21, 2025.
It was hardly a surprise. MacIntyre was 96 years old, and in recent years his activity had been limited. Still, it was sobering to think there would be no more of his lectures to attend, no more of his latest essays to pore over and discuss, no more new books of his to read, study, mark up and read again. No more conversations with him on campus.
Like many, I first encountered Alasdair MacIntyre through his groundbreaking book After Virtue. In a Notre Dame seminar on theological ethics in 1982, the year after the book was published, Professor Stanley Hauerwas plopped a hardcover copy on the table and explained why it did not have a place on his syllabus alongside Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Barth. Of MacIntyre’s masterwork, Hauerwas said, “In this course, it’s presupposed.”
I began reading it that week and have been rereading it ever since. The book validated my allegiance to Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement. After helping start André House in Phoenix, the kind of local community that MacIntyre writes about at the end of After Virtue, I returned to graduate studies in theology and ethics with Hauerwas, who had relocated to Duke University. During my first seminar there
in 1989, Hauerwas assigned us the unpublished manuscript of what would soon become a celebrated After Virtue sequel: Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition.
Finishing it, I knew that MacIntyre’s combination of tradition-dependent Thomism, Marxist critique of the modern state and market, and localist vision of political and economic life would shape my teaching and writing.
I am far from alone. MacIntyre’s influence has resonated across the decades, inspiring study and critique that persists in the many obituaries, tributes and commemorative essays written by colleagues, former students, former comrades, journalists and public intellectuals of various persuasions.
Colleagues expressed admiration — even those who disagreed with him. Students were grateful for the intellectual path he opened up. One former co-worker at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture reminded us how she named her baby after him.
Somewhat-more-distant observers displayed a remarkable diversity of viewpoints about MacIntyre’s ideas and made many competing claims on his intellectual paternity of contemporary movements.
The neoconservative publication The Catholic Thing described MacIntyre as “one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries.” Writers from the right-leaning “postliberal” political movement claimed him as “the original postliberal philosopher” or as “Postliberalism’s Reluctant Godfather.”
The New York Times obituary swiped at MacIntyre’s critique of “modern liberal individualism” for including “not just supporters of the Democratic Party but also conventional conservatives, leftists and even anarchists” — in other words, for including just about everyone except the “one constituency” that has “claimed Mr. MacIntyre’s work most completely and prominently: the Trump-supporting, religious, anti-consumerist and illiberal right.”
This was not The Gray Lady’s recommendation for summer reading. But neither was it accurate.
Decidedly leftist periodicals in the United Kingdom commended MacIntyre — though he had long-ago defected from their ranks and converted to Catholicism — for retaining “his Marxist disgust at capitalism and at the alienation of modernity” and for never losing his “gut commitment to the working class.”
These are only a few of the memorials for MacIntyre. He would have appreciated the gratitude from students and colleagues, scowled at the neoconservatives, scowled again at the self-styled postliberals, expressed annoyance at The Times, and nodded in agreement with the Marxists. But the spectacle of a cacophony of conflicting commentaries would not have surprised him.
MacIntyre spent half his life arguing that our culture is fragmented and fraught by deep moral disagreements that cannot be resolved — not unless we disavow our modern conceptions of the moral life and retrieve an ancient alternative derived from the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. This is the basic thesis of After Virtue, published in 1981 and widely regarded as his most important book. Even the obituaries agreed on this much.
The book changed many people’s lives, MacIntyre’s as well. It completed his pivot away from the Marxism of his youth and toward the Aristotelian, Thomist, distinctly Catholic philosophy of his middle and later years — a trajectory that twice brought him onto the faculty at Notre Dame. This is where he finished his long, nomadic intellectual journey as friend and colleague to some and a perplexity to others, and as a bit of an outsider at a University that remained reluctant to embrace the far reaching intellectual vision he put before us.
MacIntyre was born in 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland, to Scots-Irish parents who were both physicians. The family moved to London, where MacIntyre grew up. He periodically visited family in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland as a youth, learning Scottish Gaelic from an aunt and becoming intimately familiar with what he later described as “a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers.”
In 1949, he graduated from Queen Mary College of the University of London, where he read Plato and Aristotle in Greek, studied the ethics of Kant and Mill, read Wittgenstein, Sartre and Karl Marx. His intellectual journey as student and lecturer took him to the universities of Manchester and Leeds, then on to Oxford, where he earned an Oxonian master’s degree in 1961. Fellowships followed at Oxford, Princeton, Oxford again, then a sociology professorship at the University of Essex. Along the way, he published books on Marxism and Christianity, the philosophy of religion, Freud and secularization.
MacIntyre’s study of Marxism during these years was more than a theoretical exercise. At Queen Mary College, he imbibed Marx’s critique of capitalism and made it his own while also forging a solidarity with people from the working classes of East London.
At Manchester, he participated in a leftist Christian movement and joined various political parties of the Marxist left, organizing workers and writing in party journals on Marxist theory and on political issues ranging from the workers’ revolts in Hungary to the “Irish Question” to nuclear disarmament. The central challenge for the New Left was to have no truck with the brutalities of Stalin and the Soviet Union while also refusing to align with political liberalism of the West.
MacIntyre’s self-appointed task was to find a consistent, rational approach to morality in modern life that was more compelling than either a dutiful adherence to rules or a utilitarian calculation of consequences. Both approaches struck him as bloodless and sterile, oblivious to real people’s desires. How can abstract moral principles or cost-benefit analyses generate revolutionary solidarity in workers enticed by wages that enable them to replace their ice boxes with electric refrigerators? Something more was needed, something grounded in human nature that could furnish reasons for undertaking collective sacrifice.
At length, MacIntyre found that Marxism lacked the capacity to resist the corrosive effects of Western free-market individualism. His unsuccessful attempt to forge a rational grounding for moral beliefs and action informed two books published in that era: A Short History of Ethics (1966) and Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971). Both reveal that he could not sustain the Christian beliefs of his youth and had abandoned his 20-year commitment to the Marxism of the New Left.
Immigrating to the United States in 1970, he spent the decade teaching at Brandeis and Boston universities. There MacIntyre took stock of the moral defects of Marxism and came to see that they arose out of the same individualism that it originally opposed. Its vision of communist society never overcame expressivist conceptions of the emancipated self. The larger problem lay in the atomistic ethos of the modern and modernizing world, and he began working out an argument against that ethos and toward a solution. The result was After Virtue.
After Virtue presents a dense, multilayered, complicated argument that can nevertheless, for purposes of a thumbnail sketch, be divided into two basic parts: (1) the problem with morality in modernity and (2) the Aristotelian solution.
The problem with morality in modernity is twofold. On the one hand, we think of our moral beliefs as matters of individual attitudes, feelings, preferences, mere opinion — what analytic philosophers called “emotivism.” On the other hand, we live in a world of facts ascertained by the scientific method and pertaining to the natural universe, society and human behavior.
We thus live in a bifurcated world of facts and values. Gone is the world in which soul, household, city and cosmos are knit together into a single, albeit complex, organically united whole. The Greeks had one version of this unitary vision, ancient Christians had another version, the medieval Christians yet another, but with the advent of modernity a rupture opens and in time gives way to a mechanized universe within which humanity has lost its central place and final purpose or telos.
The thinker who best captures the modern fact-value bifurcation is Max Weber, whose sociological analyses show that modern bureaucracies, whether public or private, are managed according to an ethics of means: getting things done in the most efficient, effective way possible. Bureaucracy requires that one’s moral and religious values be set aside, confined to individually chosen ultimate ends. The last thing you want is a religious fanatic running the government or a moral idealist serving as CEO of a large corporation.
But this circumstance, MacIntyre argues, gives rise to our endless moral disagreements. A morality confined to the sphere of the individual offers no commonly accepted rational way to resolve moral disagreements between people or communities. Our discussions of issues such as war, abortion and economic justice bring forth a mishmash of moral terms, concepts taken out of their social context, fragments from sacred texts and secular sayings detached from the web of beliefs and practices in which they were — and can only be — fully intelligible.
The governing ethic of modern bureaucratic states and corporations, what Weber called “instrumental rationality,” instills in our minds and hearts a cold pragmatism that overrides any individually cherished moral “values” or “ultimate ends.” This is the mentality that brought us the Vietnam War, racial segregation, gross inequality of income and wealth, abortion on demand and the nuclear arms race among other modern crises.
Today, outside our closed circles of agreement, we have no rational way to discuss and debate such matters, no common conception of human nature and flourishing, no shared conception of the good. What is to be done?
The answer comes in part two of After Virtue, where MacIntyre unfolds the tradition of the virtues, starting with Homer, focusing on Aristotle, discussing medieval figures, and then presenting a philosophical account of practices, institutions, human action and intention — and the crucial concept of narrative.
His fundamental point is that modern moral discourse is shaped by concepts and rules, whereas the tradition of the virtues is shaped by stories — heroic stories like the Iliad or Beowulf, the Icelandic and Irish sagas, the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, Dante’s Divine Comedy and the novels of Jane Austen. Embedded in such stories are accounts of how the characters possess or lack the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude or temperance, as well as secondary virtues such as patience or affability. Their possession of such virtues enables them to attain the good. Their succumbing to vices such as anger, greed or lust thwarts their attainment of the good.
A key point for MacIntyre is that the powers or capacities or excellences — all synonyms for virtue — enable us to move toward the good life. Certain practices bring about moral transformation. Good examples are skilled work, such as farming or furniture making, playing a musical instrument, and games like chess or any number of sports. He also stresses that virtues emerge through cooperative activity with others, as with a string quartet or a fishing crew, where each person has a role to perform for the success of a common endeavor.
All this shows that the life of the virtues can only be enacted within communal settings, especially those that are small and share ethnic and religious ties in which people are defined not as autonomous individuals but by their social roles. In such settings, moral beliefs are not cast in terms of abstract principles but are embedded in communal narratives of how the virtues enable their members to attain the good.
Yet in this analysis, a new, intractable problem arises when it comes to modern politics. The modern liberal state is designed for groups that do not share a conception of the good. Its purpose is to translate substantial moral beliefs into interests that must be adjudicated in the so-called public sphere so as to forge policies that are more or less acceptable to all. The state has the advantage of making peace among diverse groups, but no subsidiary group feels at home in the public sphere or at home with each other. In the face of substantial differences, moral and political views run into unresolved — and unresolvable — disagreements.
In addition, the individualistic conceptions of rights instilled by political liberalism dissolve the social bonds of traditional communities. This dynamic explains why After Virtue concludes on such a somber note. MacIntyre writes that “Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition” — adding that “this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.”
So, is there any reasonable ground for hope? MacIntyre says yes, there is — a deeply chastened hope best understood if we draw a parallel “between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.” In that earlier history, he notes, “a turning point” came when people of good will ceased identifying civility and moral community with the continuance of the Roman imperium. Instead, they took up the task of constructing “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.”
We have reached a similar turning point, MacIntyre concludes; to us now falls the task of constructing
local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.
The publication of After Virtue came at roughly the midpoint of MacIntyre’s career. It was widely reviewed and sparked conversations and debates in philosophy, sociology, political theory, economics, literature, law, education, history and theology. Criticism aimed especially at his attack on modern liberalism and the seeming nostalgia of his appeal to premodern society.
The more serious of these criticisms MacIntyre answered in the second edition, published in 1984, confirming that After Virtue “ought to be read as a work still in progress.” That work continued for the next few years, while MacIntyre moved with his wife, Lynn Joy, a philosopher of science, to Wellesley College, then Vanderbilt University, then Notre Dame.
The move to Notre Dame in 1988 was propitious. He had enjoyed longstanding intellectual synergy with several philosophers here. He had visited three times in the 1970s as a lecturer. David Solomon had spent two years working with him at Boston University. Rev. David Burrell, CSC, ’54, a member of the theology and philosophy departments, was an avid MacIntyre reader, as were world-class Thomists like Ralph McInerny and Alfred Freddoso. Hauerwas had published on the virtues and jointly edited with MacIntyre a book of essays on moral philosophy called Revisions.
The most propitious development paving the way for MacIntyre to come to Notre Dame was religious: He had become Catholic.
He was not the type to share his personal reasons for his conversion, but his philosophical reasons are displayed throughout his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), in which he identifies himself as an Augustinian Christian.
Take one example: Aristotle’s philosophy lacks an account of moral failure, of why, when we know the good, we nevertheless fail to do the good. But St. Augustine’s theology offers such an account: In a word, it is sin. Drawing on Scripture, especially the letters of St. Paul, Augustine located the source of sin in the will, which needs the healing love of Christ and the guidance of the Church. In this reckoning, humility is the crucial virtue; pride, the deadly vice.
Eight centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas put Aristotle and Augustine together to arrive at a better account of the virtues, one in which humble obedience to ecclesiastical authority is crucial in moral and intellectual inquiry. In this way, as MacIntyre would put it, Aquinas was a better Aristotelian than Aristotle.
MacIntyre extended this argument in his next book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Invoking Pope Leo XIII, who had called more than a century earlier for reviving Thomistic studies to confront modernism, MacIntyre took up the task, engaging the modern encyclopedists and postmodern genealogists with the truths set forth by Aquinas and by the heirs of the tradition that bears his name.
This is the kind of creative reading and wrestling with texts that brought MacIntyre into the Church. One pictures him poring over Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, and Aquinas’ Summa, paging back and forth at his desk in the early morning — studying his way into Catholicism. Precedent for taking this path can be found in St. John Henry Newman.
MacIntyre’s argument in both these sequels to After Virtue was grounded in a strong appeal to tradition. His appeal was received with skepticism, to put it mildly. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago slammed Whose Justice? Which Rationality? as an apologia for political and ecclesiastical authoritarianism. She was joined by a chorus of critics over the next few years.
MacIntyre was undaunted. His lecture circuit took a sharp Catholic turn. In 1991, he helped mark the 50th anniversary of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., by stressing the importance of the theological virtues in philosophy and the relevance of theological study in a world torn by war. In 1993, he delivered a paper on Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, exhibiting how to do philosophy in full submission to papal authority. MacIntyre was making obedience intellectually interesting.
The same year, he gave a rare, published interview to a graduate student journal called Kinesis. The interviewer cautiously asked him about his religious beliefs.
MacIntyre: “I am a Roman Catholic. Period.”
Interviewer: “In a traditional and orthodox sense?”
MacIntyre: “There is no other sense.”
I came to know MacIntyre personally during his second stint at Notre Dame, where he returned in 2000 after a detour to Duke. He was focused on teaching undergraduates. Stories circulated about his classes. He told his students that the University’s job was not to give them want they want, but what they need. He also said students were under too much pressure from their parents to do well, which discouraged their risk-taking in class and in life. He maintained that what students lacked most was a sense that their lives could have world-historical significance.
He told one class that everyone should eat a hot breakfast every morning. I imagine the students buckling their brows. But he may have been harking back to cold summer mornings in Donegal.
He had a way of keeping people off balance. A Notre Dame graduate from the 1990s tells the story of how he and a friend went to the professor’s office to ask for reading recommendations. MacIntyre’s response was that we must strive to be the kind of people who don’t go around asking for reading recommendations. But then he listed some: Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Flannery O’Connor.
One time, a close follower approached him: Can I ask you a question? MacIntyre’s reply: “You just did.”
The late Michael Garvey ’74, who worked in media relations at Notre Dame, once got a call from Peter Steinfels, then a religion columnist for The New York Times, seking comment from a faculty member. Garvey recommended MacIntyre. Steinfels brushed him off: “Oh no, Garvey, he’ll just tell me I’m asking the wrong questions.”
MacIntyre had returned to Notre Dame just as the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture was getting off the ground. David Solomon, his longtime colleague in philosophy and the founding director of the center, had written into its mission statement the aim of promoting MacIntyre’s work.
I introduced MacIntyre for his first talk at a de Nicola conference on the culture of death, after which he walked to the podium, and then, with a voice and cadence like Alfred Hitchcock’s, spoke from notes for 45 minutes, made the point that our rhetoric is distorted by our compartmentalized lives, and said we should be careful with phrases like “culture of death.” The talk deflated the culture-warrior polemicists in the crowd.
In later years, he gave papers to de Nicola’s fall conferences on beauty, poetry, being European, heeding the plight of the poor and other topics, maybe two dozen keynote lectures in all.
In 2010, MacIntyre retired from teaching, but kept an office in the center which he used in the afternoons. Students, faculty and staff would appear with questions or share ideas about their work. I would visit once every month or two, usually to probe his early Marxist days or discuss his chastened view of politics. He would offer examples of fishing cooperatives in Denmark or a political movement in India or a car manufacturer in southern Indiana. One time he talked about a hopeful development in local politics. I said, “So, we’ve come from the vanguard of the revolution to the mayor of Mishawaka?” “Yes,” he nodded unblinkingly.
As the years went by, MacIntyre came to be regarded as an intellectual superstar by his younger followers and his co-workers. When Artur Rosman, editor-in-chief of Church Life Journal at the McGrath Institute, happened upon him in the elevator in Geddes Hall, he reported the encounter on Facebook. “Met Big Mac today.”
In one of his last de Nicola conference appearances, delivered via computer during the COVID-19 pandemic, MacIntyre offered a particularly moving paper called “What We Owe to the Dead, Alas!” He looked frail in his wire-rim glasses and roll-neck sweater, the kind made in Donegal or the Aran Islands. We owe the dead our truthfulness, he said, in telling the story of their lives.
Here is something truthful about MacIntyre. He rejected conventional politics, which made him something of an outsider, even among his strongest supporters. He wrote voluminously on the natural law and the common good, but consistently argued that these Thomistic concepts are subversive to the state-and-market system. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, he rejected both George W. Bush and John Kerry as intolerable options, stoutly declaring: “In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote cast for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.”
In his view, partisan politics, shaped as it is by political operatives and cultural elites, renders us heedless of people’s everyday lives and blind to whole ways of life that are disappearing. He held that only from a perspective outside the given alternatives and dominant modes of thought and ideology can we be sufficiently reflective about our situation and what is to be done. As he put it in a lecture at the Law School, political liberalism and conservatism are mirror images of each other; the moment you think of yourself as one or the other, you’re done for. In short, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism” is the label MacIntyre scholars use to capture his position. Too many Catholics embraced the Aristotelian part but never got the revolutionary part.
All this is a matter of dispute, of course, and the best way to honor MacIntyre’s memory is to engage in disputations about his work. We could start with the memorials that “dropped” after he died. One MacIntyre student dashed off a rebuttal to the obituary in The New York Times. The neocons could be chided for omitting MacIntyre’s condemnation of the nuclear arms race. The old school Marxists should be urged — as MacIntyre did — to explain why no one has yet to spark a revolution. As for the postliberals claiming him as their “reluctant Godfather,” they could be called MacIntyre’s mistaken and misbegotten godchildren.
In God, Philosophy, Universities (2009), MacIntyre left a last will and testament for places like Notre Dame, and holding disputations lies at the heart of his hopes and vision. Without them, it is not clear how or why a Catholic university could or should survive. It would lose its purpose, its commitment to developing the Catholic tradition. It would lose its way of life and fade away, like a mid-20th century fishing village in Donegal. It remains for us to continue arguing for a rational ground for the good so that we may move toward our final end and thus maintain our way of life for the generations that come after us.
At the memorial service for MacIntyre in June, his wife, Lynn, read from an autobiographical account he gave in a 2010 lecture. One never really knows where one is going in life, he had said. Many contingencies render our lives unpredictable. Who could have predicted that organizing workers in East London or Manchester and thinking through the revolutionary theory that would account for it would, at length, bring him to the University of Notre Dame?
His ashes lie in Cedar Grove Cemetery. An outsider, but our outsider, “until the day breaks.” These are the words MacIntyre used to dedicate After Virtue to the memory of his father and his father’s sisters and brothers, but the dedication is written in the Gaelic used in their part of the world for inscriptions on headstones, reminding us of what we are waiting for: Gus am bris an la.
Michael Baxter is an associate professor of the practice at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life.