Source: Law & Liberty
by Rachel Lu
“Alasdair MacIntyre was a political animal, or so one naturally assumes. He was at any rate an Aristotelian, and since Aristotle declared man to be the zoon politikon (‘political animal’), it seems safe to say that MacIntyre thought of himself as one such. Nevertheless, for much of his life he was deeply reluctant to enter into political discourse. In youth, he was (in)famously a Marxist. Eventually he broke with the socialists and made his way to Aristotelian Thomism. He spent decades writing on the incoherence of modern moral theory, giving considerable attention along the way to action theory, the virtues, and the history of philosophy. But he largely eschewed political discourse, to the frustration of political theorists who hoped to enlist him as an ally.” (09/02/26)