Alasdair MacIntyre’s Confrontation with the Left's Limits
still waiting on St. Benedict 2.0
It’s true! It was thanks to my professor of Fundamental Moral Theology that I was exposed to MacIntyre (and Taylor), and was inspired to start writing about the intersections of faith, philosophy, postmodern theory, and culture…which eventually gave birth to Cracks in PoMo. To honor MacIntyre’s legacy, we asked to write about him.
-Stephen
Alasdair MacIntyre died on May 21st, 2025, at the age of 96. He was one of the most famous living philosophers, and not just because of the quality of his work. MacIntyre had a peculiar intellectual journey. At different moments in his life, he took up both Marxism and Catholicism. Usually, when a thinker leaves the left and converts to Christianity, they become a pariah, an example of what you must never do. But that didn’t happen to MacIntyre. His reasons for leaving the left were unusually compelling, even to many avowed leftists. There seemed to be a need to take him seriously, to reckon with the path he represented. The left seemed to acknowledge—or to want to acknowledge—that MacIntyre’s problems with Marxism were real, that they needed to be worked through, that he had, in some sense, tasked them with overcoming the reasons for his exit.
What were those reasons? Many Marxists in the 50s and 60s had become apologists for barbarous authoritarian regimes. They were willing to countenance any conduct—even the construction and operation of repulsive totalitarian regimes—if it seemed to them to advance the cause of socialism. Bourgeois morality could only get in the way.
At the same time, new leftists who were critical of the Soviet Union and interested in bringing politics and morality together thought about morality in a very limited way. They would make universal rules and apply them indiscriminately, with no regard for context. They would estrange human reason from our psychological motivations and then demand we act from reason alone, depriving us of our ability to act from love. It was unsurprising that these moral theories came to seem alien to politics. Their rigidity, their indifference to specificity and to human feelings, made them seem alien in the context of real life.
If the choice is between an alien ethics and a pragmatic politics, pragmatism is fated to win. But once pragmatism prevails, there is no brake on it. It becomes possible to excuse Stalinism, if you think it will one day take you where you want to go. Other people become mere means, reduced to instruments or obstacles in a political quest. This includes the workers themselves, who are reduced to foot soldiers in the plots and schemes of the theorist.
So, MacIntyre tried to persuade his comrades that they needed an altogether different kind of morality, a morality appropriate to their political situation. In 1960, this took the form of a commitment to freedom. The concept of freedom, he argued, needed itself to be free—it needed to be possible for freedom to be free to come to mean new things in new situations. For these new kinds of freedom to develop, Marxists needed to be able to discuss freedom’s meaning freely in their organizations. This meant the organizations needed to be open to a plurality of perspectives on the concept. They could not be committed to rigid, prefabricated conceptual schemes imposed through pragmatism or disembodied reason. Such schemes would tie the concept of freedom down and subordinate it.
MacIntyre spent the 60s in socialist organizations, trying to change them from within. By the end of the decade, his frustration grew increasingly clear. In 1970 he claimed the student movement was “more like a children’s crusade than a revolutionary movement.” And when Marxists do begin to move toward power, they adopt a “bureaucratic” and “managerial” mode. Either they are immature—because they are trapped in an inadequate moral theory—or they grow vicious, as they pragmatically adopt whatever means is most readily available to them, regardless of its consequences for their purported ends.
Unable to move the Marxists out of this double-bind, he began to go his own way. In 1981 he published After Virtue. Not long after, he converted to Catholicism. After Virtue is inarguably one of the most influential works in philosophy of the past half-century. In it, MacIntyre argues that the good must be understood in relation to our social roles. We conceptualize it in relation to the specific roles we perform. To take up a role is to commit oneself to understanding how to perform it well, to the acquisition of the virtues, the human capacities, necessary to its performance. We attempt to be good friends, good partners, good parents, good citizens. Sometimes our job isn’t just a job, but a vocation—something that calls us to a role. The moral challenge in life is to figure out which roles to take up and from which to abstain, to decide which roles should be prioritized in cases in which the roles conflict. Different people take up different roles, yet all of these roles are, in their various ways, paths by which we come to know the good, to be the kinds of people able to live well. The result is not just one vision of the good life, but a plurality of visions anchored in different roles performed in different contexts. It’s a Thomistic position, in tradition with Thomas Aquinas’ Christianization of the thought of Aristotle.
This kind of position becomes difficult to articulate in modernity, because modern ethical theories attempt to abstract moral reasoning from discrete social roles. Modernity positions social roles as straightjackets, as fetters on human freedom. So, modern subjects instead become outfitted for the economy—they are prepared to do a variety of jobs, none of which requires or involves a vocation. Indeed, a vocation is an economic obstacle—it causes them to reject other forms of employment that might be more lucrative. How can we guide people who operate from the premise that they belong nowhere and to nothing? The modern moralists attempt to do this by fashioning abstract, universal moral theories that are said to apply to any and every situation whatever.
But in imposing one set of moral rules across all contexts, modern moralists actually circumscribe freedom. Instead of giving us meaningful choices about what roles to adopt, modern life strips us of all roles while at the same time subjecting us to a unitary system of rules. Inevitably, the modern subject turns against these rules from nowhere, insisting that the individual is entitled to make up their own rules as they go or to do without rules altogether. Once this happens, enlightenment reason is liquidated, and the question of how to live is left up to individual will.
Since enlightenment reason is fated from the start to go this way, it does no good to attempt to defend modernity from postmodernity. Instead, the possibility of developing the virtues through conscious commitments to social roles must be recovered. There must be a struggle for the freedom to pursue the good. Since freedom and the good appear estranged in modernity, there must be a struggle to overcome modernity itself.
But the Marxists were not willing to embark upon this struggle—they were not able or willing to dialogue with each other about freedom in communal organizations. So, there was, for MacIntyre, no obvious way of bringing this about. Since the Marxists were trapped in the very modes of thinking they hoped to overcome, they were unable to construct the necessary forms of organization. The search for the right kind of community brought MacIntyre not just to Catholicism, but ultimately to the monastic tradition. He closed After Virtue with a call for “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”
In late antiquity, the monks pushed up against the constraints of the old Roman rhetoric schools, which sought to fashion them into imperial functionaries. The monasteries were, at their inception, sites of rebellion against established structures. They aimed at creating new meaningful roles for those who recognized the spiritual limits of Roman civic life.
To recognize the limits of modernity and to go beyond them through new social organizations—that was the task MacIntyre laid at our feet. But After Virtue was published nearly 45 years ago. Neither the Marxists nor the Catholics have been able to supply a new St. Benedict, to generate a new form of community equal to MacIntyre’s task. That vocation—that calling—still remains unanswered. It would require virtues that today’s left does not possess. And deep down, the left knows it.
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