Sadly, yesterday (22nd May 2025), Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most influential moral philosophers of our times, and undoubtedly one of the most important intellectual beacons of my own life, passed away at the ripe old age of 96. Though he was not a household name for most people, he was known to anyone seriously involved in the world of moral, social, or political philosophy as a philosopher who thought against the grain of modernity, and he offered a provocative diagnosis of the collapse of rational discourse in modern democracies.

MacIntyre has always preserved a Marxian sensibility about the depersonalising and exploitative repercussions of large-scale impersonal economies. But early in his intellectual journey, he abandoned the strict tenets of Marxism to derive insights from ancient Greek philosophy, in particular Aristotle. Finally, he converted to Catholicism and embraced the natural law thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas. 

MacIntyre was a relenteless critic of the “Enlightenment project” of developing a form of knowledge unshackled from tradition and history, and is probably best known for his seminal work, After Virtue (1981), a provocative critique of modern philosophy and indeed of the modern way of life, and a defence of an Aristotelian ideal of the well-lived human life, an ideal in which nature, virtue, and sociality featured prominently. 

He marked a generation of thinkers because he exposed the hollowness of attempts to build a theory of morality and knowledge without attending properly to the historical and social embeddedness of language and thought, whether in philosophy or science. He also contributed greatly to the revival of classical philosophy, especially in an Aristotelian and Thomistic vein. 

When I started my Ph.D. at Notre Dame in the early 2000s, I hatched a plan to persuade MacIntyre to serve on my thesis committee. I set up a meeting to discuss one of the chapters with him, and with some trepidation, went up to his office. Almost right away, he set aside the niceties of introductions and just blurted out, “What is this visit about? What do you want from me?” or something to that effect. 

Those who knew MacIntyre will probably agree that he did not tend to mince his words and would get to the point rather quickly. I was thrown off balance by his abrupt question, and just had to confess out of the blue that I was hoping he would consider being on my Ph.D. committee. He politely explained that he would happily read anything I sent him but had a “policy” of not serving on Ph.D. committees except under very exceptional conditions. Ph.D. students tended to be already “corrupted” in their thinking by the “system,” as he elsewhere explained to me, so his time was more fruitfully spent teaching undergraduate students. 

MacIntyre was someone who had a deep and, I suspect, often unconscious influence on my thinking, even though I cannot say that I carefully read every line he wrote, and I probably have a somewhat less pessimistic view of modern society than he did. I think I was influenced by him via some sort of intellectual “osmosis,” just having him on the same campus, and knowing he was pushing forward a certain way of thinking that could be described as countercultural yet also deeply thoughtful and informed. 

I sympathised with his critique of modern economies and States, yet wondered if his opposition to modernity was over the top. I have since come to converge more closely with MacIntyre’s thoughts on the need for coherent social practices to underpin a flourishing human life, and the limits inherent in large-scale social structures such as those of modern states and economies. In particular, I have come to appreciate even more than before the ways modern social structures can make meaningful and flourishing human relationships and communities very difficult to create. 

It is partly thanks to MacIntyre’s vision of healthy communities and the pathologies of the bureaucratic-administrative state that I have sought to work out in greater detail (for example, in my book, The Polycentric Republic) the institutional structures that might better support flourishing communities in the context of large and interconnected societies. 

It feels strange and a little eerie to think that this intellectual giant has passed on and can no longer make his voice heard in this world, except through his books and those he influenced. To this day, I am surprised that someone I did not know well personally, nor take regular classes with, nor read voraciously, could mark my own intellectual journey as decisively as he did. But there are some people who come along and you just know they are a force to be reckoned with. Alasdair was one of those people. May he rest in peace.

Republished from the author’s Substack