Alasdair MacIntyre died a few days ago. I have seen a few notices, but they seem, even though admiring, to rather blunt the force of MacIntyre’s achievements. I first came across his name when I called Maurice Cowling on the telephone in 1992 to arrange being supervised for the history of political thought paper. “Have you read anything?” asked Cowling. No, I said. “Oh,” he said. “Then you’d better read MacIntyre’s Short History of Ethics.” I went to Heffers and bought a copy: now one of the oldest books I still have. NB I kept my copy of MacIntyre; but, even though Bertrand Russell was my intellectual master when I was 20, I let go of my copy of History of Western Philosophy many years ago.
MacIntyre had a long life. Look at the dates. He was fully compos mentis by the 1950s, and wrote his first book, Marxism and Christianity, in that decade, suggesting an axis of interest of which he was to make much. He was, and probably always considered himself to be, on the Left. Well, it was not the secular Perry Anderson / Eric Hobsbawm / E.H. Carr left, or the Methodist-historical E.P. Thompson / Christopher Hill left, or the showy-struck-by-the-1960s Tariq Ari / Christopher Hitchens / Tony Blair left. It was the sort of Left which could never have anything in common with the Hayek Right, but, whether MacIntyre liked it or not, it had something in common with the Burke Right, the Maistre Right, the Donoso Cortes Right: in having a sense that the real problem of modernity was the lack of any appeal to a standard outside of ourselves.
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