Copyright photo Photo: Matt Cashore, courtesy of University of Notre Dame
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, known for his profound influence on moral and political philosophy. Born in Glasgow in 1929, he studied classics in London and then philosophy at Manchester, taught philosophy and sociology at various universities in Britain, and moved to the United States in the early 1970s. He died there on May 21, 2025. His work – particularly After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016) – revitalized the Aristotelian tradition of ethics and offered a powerful critique of moral individualism and emotivism in capitalist modernity. MacIntyre’s thought bridges different philosophical traditions, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with deep historical insight. His emphasis on the importance of practices, the narrative unity of life, and traditions, as well as his refusal to compartmentalize theory and practice, have reshaped contemporary ethical theory and continue to inspire debate across philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. This is my personal account of him as my philosophical inspiration.
I encountered Alasdair MacIntyre’s name during my master’s studies at the University of York, where, upon receiving an Oxford-Chevening scholarship, I came to study for an MA in political philosophy. The MA programme I enrolled in during the autumn of 1997 was ‘The Idea of Toleration’, curated by Prof. Susan Mendus. It was in her political philosophy class, co-taught with the then-young Dr. Matt Matravers, that I heard Alasdair MacIntyre’s name for the first time.
The course was a curious one. It was structured around the liberal-communitarian debate, with the two figures studied being John Rawls and Alasdair MacIntyre. Matt Matravers taught Rawls, while Susan Mendus taught MacIntyre. After completing the course, I wasn’t convinced by either of them. Matravers’ rendering of Rawls sounded boring and unnecessarily complicated, while Mendus’s MacIntyre appeared too authoritarian, too anti- postmodern, and too anti-liberal.
Coming from the then-impoverished post Soviet Lithuania, where a professor’s salary (like my father’s) was six to seven times smaller than that of a shop manager in the UK, the ghost of the authoritarian, absurdist Soviet system was still present in the mind of a young scholar like me. Mendus’s MacIntyre, in response to moral incoherence and subjective arbitrariness, seemed to suggest that it was up to tradition to remedy the ills of modernity by imposing its external moral standards. In the mind of a 24-year-old who still vividly remembered the grotesque Soviet propaganda and the images of the holy trinity – Marx, Lenin, and Brezhnev – at school, MacIntyre’s emphasis on moral tradition sounded too authoritarian.
And yet, there was something appealing about MacIntyre. It was a fortunate coincidence that he came to deliver his lecture on toleration at the University of York in the spring of 1998. We – the graduate students and faculty – all went to a huge lecture hall to hear MacIntyre speak. The hall was packed. The argument he read from his paper was complex, yet what impressed me was its force, his ability to tackle questions with wit, and his uncompromising courage to defy the orthodoxy of the day.
The audience was predominantly (left) liberal, with the occasional Marxist or post-Marxist, such as Alex Callinicos – who was also present at the lecture but, unlike other faculty members, did not socialize with MacIntyre. When a question about J.S. Mill was raised by a member of the faculty – drawing on the contrast between Mill’s time and our own, when people no longer believed in the Second Coming of Christ – MacIntyre’s response was brief: I have no doubts about the Second Coming of Christ.
The encounter ended the next day, when MacIntyre delivered a seminar to postgraduate students, where, among other things, he insisted on the importance of reading Emmanuel Levinas. I rejoiced in his advice as I was already interested in Levinas’s philosophy. It was then that I decided to write my MA dissertation on his philosophy. Yet as a young scholar from post-Soviet Eastern Europe, I could not write only on the After Virtue project of practice, narrative unity of life, and tradition. A postmodern twist was needed. So instead, my imagined construction of a philosophical dialogue on transcendence and tradition between MacIntyre and Emmanuel Levinas was born.
In a similar vein, the project on alternative forms of the political continued with my PhD at Warwick, where MacIntyre’s philosophy featured prominently and was structured both against Rawlsian liberalism — as the dominant theoretical tradition of the political — and against Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s postmodernism. It was at a conference I organized, and then in my viva at Warwick, that I met Kelvin Knight, who later introduced me to Alasdair.
And so, my cooperation and lasting friendship with comrade Knight began. Alasdair’s work and personality were at the core of our discussions and collaboration. I soon learned the famous story of how Kelvin got to know Alasdair.
Kelvin Knight published his now famous 1996 paper “Revolutionary Aristotelianism” in an edited volume of Political Studies Association of the UK, where he, among other things, argued that rendering MacIntyre as a communitarian thinker is a gross misunderstanding of MacIntyre’s moral and political philosophy.
Instead, he argued, it should be understood as Revolutionary Aristotelianism which puts Marx, and MacIntyre’s early Marxism, and Aristotle together. To read MacIntyre as a conservative-communitarian thinker who provides yet another theoretical critique of Rawls and liberal individualism in general is to misunderstand what’s at stake in his thought. Instead, MacIntyre’s position should be understood along these lines: his Marxist critique of capitalism and the political-practical attempt at its revolutionary change were transformed into an Aristotelian endeavor to construct our communal lives through the pursuit of aretai (virtues). To do so we – collectively and individually – need to engage in practices as cooperative meaningful activities against the odds of the acquisitiveness and pleonexia of capitalist-bureaucratic institutions. We also need to engage in ruthless honesty without which we will not be able to understand ourselves and the stories of who we are, narratives which are always embedded in and extended through traditions as points of arguments, rational contestations, and conflicts. Hence, the pursuit of the lives of aretai today is and can be only socially disruptive. It is revolutionary.
MacIntyre’s endorsement of Knight’s paper is well documented. Yet what is less known is that Kelvin received a phone call out of the blue – on the other end of the line was Alasdair himself, saluting Kelvin’s accurate interpretation of his work. And so, the project of MacIntyrean enquiry was born. Through his own work (e.g. Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre, 2007) and intellectual engagement with numerous people, Kelvin Knight gathered scholars from around the world and, in 2007, organized the now famous conference “Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism” at London Metropolitan University. Alasdair himself gave a short keynote address, which ended with his, now often cited, reply to Alex Callinicos that he did not know how to organize a revolution – implying that neither did Callinicos.
As a highly successful conference, it brought together a range of scholars, though the two dominant constituencies were (British) Marxists, who read or knew MacIntyre from his time in Britain, and Catholics/Thomists from the US. While chairing the final session, I posed the question of how a constructive conversation between Marxists and Catholics could be possible. And so, the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) was born. Two American Catholic philosophers – Christopher Lutz and Jeffrey Nicholas – suggested that a conference on MacIntyre’s work should be held annually. From then on, every year since 2007, ISME conferences have been held in different cities and their universities: from Dublin, Vilnius, and Paris in Europe to Saint Louis, Grand Rapids, and South Bend in the USA. There are over 200 members of ISME now.
Some critical observers lamented ISME’s parochial character – a sentiment occasionally shared by Alasdair himself, who was at times embarrassed by the society. Yet, its mission has been not only to promote interest in MacIntyre’s thought, but also to bring proponents of different intellectual traditions – Marxism, Aristotelianism, Thomism, Nietzscheanism, management studies, and business ethics – into constructive conversation. Now that its inspirational figure has passed away, my sincere hope is, if we are to believe its critics, that the society will move beyond the remnants of its parochialism and continue the enquiry that Alasdair MacIntyre himself began.
My own research in political philosophy and critical theory has been informed by Alasdair’s work a great deal. What became essential to me in his After Virtue project was not his post-liberalism (to use John Gray’s words) or the politics of local communities (although I wrongly endorsed them in my first book[1]), but the normative critique of society with a view to what a collectively flourishing life could be. Most critical theorizing today is still informed by Nietzsche-inspired, Deleuzian-Foucauldian non-normative theorizing — a radical critique of everything for all the ills done to the world — a critique that criticizes the establishment simply because it has authority and power, the kind of critique that could also be called a neurotic postmodern sensitivity. MacIntyre’s critique of capitalist modernity, in this respect, is different because it is based on a positive vision of what collective human flourishing could be (the type of vision he offered in Dependent Rational Animals).
Alasdair was also unbelievably kind. He lent me his support many times – from endorsing one of my books to congratulating me on an academic program I created. One such endorsement was for an employer that did not deserve to be endorsed by a star like MacIntyre. For the study program in ‘Economics and Politics’ that I created at a private Lithuanian university of the German Fachhochschule type, he wrote in his characteristically ironic way: “In a world in which we no longer have to deal with the state or with the market, but now in so many cases with the state-and-the-market, that strange hybrid beast, it makes no sense to study politics without economics or economics without politics. [The] new programme is at the cutting edge.”
Finally, among MacIntyre’s many talents was his extraordinary ability to confront difficult questions with irony and wit – to say what needed to be said when it mattered, and to know when to stop talking, a quality increasingly rare among philosophers. Rest in peace, dear Alasdair.
Andrius Bielskis is a philosopher and professor at Kaunas University of Technology (Kaunas) & Mykolas Romeris University (Vilnius), Lithuania
[1] Andrius Bielskis, 2005. Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political: from Genealogy to Hermeneutics. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.