Earlier this May, news quietly broke of the death of Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the last great sages of illiberal political philosophy. His seminal work, After Virtue (1981), remains a high watermark of moral and philosophical critique — perhaps the most sublime demolition of modern rationalist ethics ever to grace a university press. Last week, James Alexander — regular contributor to these pages — offered an estimable appreciation of MacIntyre’s legacy, charting the arc of a thinker who always seemed just one exasperated sigh ahead of his age.
MacIntyre’s reflections on moral indignation as the predominant emotion of late modernity — and its peculiar capacity to power protest and performance in equal measure — proved formative for the final book I co-authored with my long-time friend and collaborator, David Martin Jones: The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left. It was an inquiry into precisely that kind of high-octane moralism that now passes for public virtue.
Just over a year ago, David himself died, suddenly and far too young, at 73 — a loss whose sharpness remains undimmed. The news of MacIntyre’s passing returned me to the thought that with David’s death, we also lost one of the sharpest and, in his case, one of most unjustly neglected political thinkers of recent times. David had, alas, the entirely predictable misfortune in academia of being right too early. He had a rare capacity to see what was coming — and, in the peculiar logic of our times, that made him positively unfashionable in polite circles.
One reader of Alexander’s tribute noted that he’d thrown away his copy of After Virtue during a house move, dismissing it as “supercilious, pretentious — something for academic parasites“. Harsh words, no doubt, and likely penned under the influence of flat-pack furniture rage. But whatever one makes of MacIntyre’s occasional hauteur, it is hard to imagine anyone levelling the charge of pretentious opacity at David. His prose was crystal clear, his arguments shorn of academic incense. And that, too, counted against him. In an era when obscurantism is mistaken as a sign of depth, clarity is viewed as something of a faux pas.
The Man Who Saw Clearly — Too Soon
Though his name may not be widely known outside certain contrarian enclaves, many of the phrases now common in our political lexicon bear David’s imprimatur — ‘illiberal democracy’, ‘surveillance state’, ‘cyber-caliphate’, ‘terror franchising’, ‘death-cult’, ‘the culture of “you can’t say that”’ (his wry epithet for the evasions and pieties of modern academia). He had that rare ability to coin terms that didn’t just describe reality but made the emperor drop his diversity pamphlet and reach — instinctively — for the emergency exit.
Unusually for an academic, he had a sense of humour. A dry wit ran through his work, such as his description of North Wales as a ‘Costa Geriatrica’ and the devolved government in Cardiff as the ‘Costa bureaucratica’. He combined intellectual rigour with a certain amused distance, as if he suspected the whole performance might be a bit of a joke, and only hoped someone else might eventually get it too.
That his insights were brilliant only made them more inconvenient. But then, David always knew that seeing clearly is no guarantee of being seen clearly in return.
At the time of his death, David was serving as Director of Research at the Danube Institute in Budapest — a role he approached with characteristic energy and intellectual discipline. It was, in many ways, a fitting final chapter: a post that placed him at the heart of a flourishing tradition-minded counter-culture, shaping a new political discourse aligned with the conservative convictions he had come, in his own distinctive way, to champion. Prior to this, his academic career had taken him through posts in Singapore, Australia and London, which cultivated a kind of detachment that enabled him to dissect modern delusions at several time zones removed: far enough to think, near enough to care.
From Trotsky to Tasmania
David’s path to conservatism was anything but linear. Like the more interesting reactionaries of our time, his route bore the imprint of youthful rebellion turned into reflective doubt. There was, you might say, a faint whiff of Peter Hitchens: a man who began life amid the fragrant anarchy of late-1960s hippiedom, passing through Trotskyism and recreational pharmacology in the 1970s, school-teaching in the tougher corners of the London Borough of Brent, and gradually finding his way to more enduring principles. His intellectual realignment came sharply into focus during his PhD at the LSE, under the tutelage of the redoubtable conservative philosopher Kenneth Minogue. David became Minogue’s favourite doctoral student, eventually marrying Minogue’s step-daughter, Jo.
His scholarly range was as impressive. He authored works on everything from early modern English political thought to the influence of China on Western social theory; from Southeast Asian regionalism to Islamist insurgency and new political religions; from the strategic perils of the liberal peace to the moving tale of Welsh Chartists exiled to Tasmania. It was a body of work united less by topical consistency than by a persistent refusal to flatter prevailing orthodoxy.
And of course, the true summit of his career — though naturally he was too modest to say so — was his appearance in this venerable organ of record, where he contributed on such vital matters as the folly of invoking John Stuart Mill to justify vaccine mandates and offered an elegy of sorts for the lost social cohesion of 1970s Britain.
The End of History Meets the End of Credibility
But what bound together his eclecticism — and what, to my mind, marks David out as one of the most significant and scandalously underrated political thinkers of the early 21st century — was his relentless destruction of the greatest political hallucination of our age: the so-called ‘End of History’. This was the notion, given its canonical form by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, that liberal democracy had emerged as the final stage of political evolution, and that the grubby business of ideological conflict had been decisively laid to rest. Western elites, flushed with the heady fumes of Cold War triumph, seized on this idea and charged forward — straight off a cliff, as it happened.
David, by contrast, never bought into this fantasy. From the mid-1990s onward, he stood — often alone but never unarmed — as the most prolific, obstinate and clear-sighted critic of this delusion. From his early days as a scholar of early modern statecraft in the Elizabethan age and the English Civil War to his later critiques of progressive foreign policy, he knew history didn’t end. It looped. It mocked. It occasionally kicked you in the teeth. To suggest that a particular political model had ‘won’ was to misunderstand both politics and history in equal measure.
Better the Flawed Than the Fanatical
I once asked David which side he would have taken in the English Civil War, had he been alive at the time. With a surname like mine, I rather expected him to say that, like me, he would have been a Parliamentarian: right but repulsive. But no. Without hesitation, he declared he would have stood with the King — not out of slavish devotion to monarchy, but because he preferred the Cavalier’s louche traditionalism to the Puritan’s joyless certitude. His sympathies, as ever, ran with the flawed and worldly over the fanatically righteous.
This aesthetic preference extended into his political instincts. He found more truth in Donald Trump’s humorous belligerence than in the pious abstractions of centrist adminocracy. Trump, for David, was a symptom as much as a cause: the rude return of political realism after decades of denial.
That denial began in earnest with Fukuyama’s ‘last man’, a figure supposedly freed from struggle by the triumph of liberalism. In truth, the ‘End of History’ gave us the Last Manager: a class of Western politicians who mistook international politics for HR policy and who tried to govern the world by vibes, virtue and slide-decks. This dream of a secular, borderless, brunch-fuelled utopia unravelled the way all delusions do: slowly, then all at once.
The End of the End of History
So, when did the ‘End of History’ end? Was it with the 9/11 attacks? The Iraq War? The global financial crisis of 2008? Brexit and Trump in 2016? Covid? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? The Gaza war? All of the above?
Take your pick. The point is that each punctured the illusion. David and I began picking at the loose threads of this narrative in the early 1990s, while working as lecturers at the National University of Singapore. At the time in the euphoric post-Cold War West, Southeast Asia was viewed as a validation of the End of History thesis: glistening cities and economic miracles, presided over by a benign American hegemony. It was all coming together.
But we saw a different picture: opaque patronage systems, economic bubbles based on property speculation, ethno-religious revivalism and rising Islamic assertiveness. Where others saw harmony, we saw volatility. Where others saw a post-ideological paradise, we saw an ideological backlash in slow motion.
This wasn’t iconoclasm for its own sake. It was reality asserting itself through the polite fog of liberal euphemism.
The Road to Dissent Is Paved with Hard Truths
In saying this we weren’t always right. We too were products of history and while we were never convinced of the End of History narrative, we could be pulled into its undercurrents. Like many we were too forgiving of the official rationales for invading Iraq in 2003, and earlier in Afghanistan. We agreed with limited demonstrations of force to teach recalcitrant tyrants a lesson. We assumed — naïvely — that democratic leaders wouldn’t lie about weapons of mass destruction and would at least plan for the aftermath.
They did. They hadn’t. We were wrong.
The reckoning came fast. We began to understand that intention was a poor substitute for consequence. That moral certainty often masks strategic incompetence. And that when ideology replaces inquiry, you get disaster dressed up as doctrine.
From then on, we became unapologetically unfashionable dissenters — increasingly rejected by academia not because we lacked rigour, but because we refused to clap while the rest of the room cheered the emperor’s new policy paper.
The Consolations of Exile
As we came to discover, dissent in modern academia is punished in a particular kind of way. The heretic isn’t gagged exactly, he’s simply ignored. Exclusion comes through polite erasure. Your name vanishes from reading lists. Your arguments are rarely mentioned, let alone analysed. Occasionally, your ideas are paraphrased — badly — by someone tenured and ideologically obedient.
Increasingly, however, the intolerant ‘progressive’ atmosphere inside the universities going into the twenty-teens found us not only airbrushed to the sidelines but secretly, and then overtly, denounced for wrong-think.
David felt the sting of this estrangement more than I did. For him, exclusion from the table of ‘respectable’ discourse was both a professional slight and personally wounding. I, on the other hand, had long since taken up residence on the margins, never harbouring much desire to be welcomed into polite society. But David had an ego — not the vulgar, self-promoting kind, but the quiet sort that comes from having ideas worth hearing and wanting them heard. He didn’t crave attention, but he valued recognition. And he had every right to.
Yet to his immense credit, he never once traded principle for prestige. He wanted to be taken seriously — but not at the cost of his own seriousness. He refused to mouth the platitudes of the moment in exchange for well-mannered applause. If the price of admission to the academic salons was to flatter gibberish, David preferred exile.
And in that respect, he was braver. He had something to lose — and chose to lose it. He could have played the game: nodded at the right conferences, name-dropped the right theorists, published the predictable and the banal. But he didn’t. He held fast to the deeper task: to understand why the West had drifted so blithely into the utopian cul-de-sac of the End of History, and why the architecture of that illusion was now collapsing in real time.
That took a rare kind of courage — the kind that doesn’t strut, doesn’t posture, and is almost never rewarded. But it deserves to be remembered.
The Disenchanted Magicians of Modernity
What made the End of History so seductive was its promise of progressive transcendence — history, finally house-trained. No more inter-state wars or tragic contingency; just policy papers, global governance metrics and a soothing tide of liberal inevitability. It all sounded terribly grown-up: rational, rules-based and vaguely smug. Fukuyama explicitly couched his idea as a rational project. “History,” he proclaimed, “is being driven in a coherent direction by rational desire and rational recognition.”
Tony Blair, perhaps the most devout among the End of History disciples, echoed this in his 2010 memoir A Journey. With his trademark blend of slightly unnerving millenarianism and stilted prose, he wrote: “After 1989, the West set the agenda to which others reacted. Some supported us, some opposed us, but the globe’s direction, the very path of history, seemed chosen by us.”
As David constantly reiterated in his writings, beneath the End of History rhetoric lay theology. One of David’s mentors at the LSE was Michael Oakeshott, who described this kind of rationalism as “a relic of a belief in magic“. By this he meant a belief that, armed with the right formulas, the world could be bent to our will. That human history could be tamed and resolved through institutional design.
But history is not IKEA. It does not come flat-packed with universal instructions. It does not care for your principles. And it rarely says thank you.
The sorcerer waves his wand and utters the incantation. The liberal rationalist waves his blueprint and cites the universal principle. Both hope for obedience from the world. Both are disappointed.
The Last Realist at the End of Illusion
David’s last sole-authored book, History’s Fools (2020), was a prophetic reckoning with the illusions of liberal modernity. It diagnosed the End of History not as a triumph but as a delusion — an enchanted rationalism that mistook its own abstractions for inevitabilities. In David’s reading, this was not so much a political theory as a secular religion: confident, exportable and entirely untroubled by contact with the real world.
He saw in it a worldview that mistook PowerPoint models for political reality, and aspiration for execution — an ideological comfort blanket for a West unwilling to confront its own contradictions. With characteristic clarity, he traced how liberalism, unmoored from its historical foundations, had drifted into something grandiose and dreamlike; brittle yet messianic.
As David observed, by the early 2000s, the liberal magical project had indeed gone full Blair, shifting from strategy to sanctimony. Post-Cold War idealism was no longer just naïve — it was evangelical. Globalism became gospel. Citizenship became conditional. The liberal state no longer protected individuals, it arbitrated identities. Justice became a performance. Inclusion, a bureaucratic sorting hat. Progress, a spreadsheet.
The result was an odd cocktail of identity absolutism and procedural abstraction — a liberalism too moral for nationalism, too abstract for culture, too doctrinaire for compromise. The universal became sectarian. The citizen became a datapoint in someone else’s theory of emancipation.
And reality, again, refused to cooperate.
Reality: The Ultimate Reactionary
By the time of Brexit, Trump and various resurgent wars arrived, the moral architecture of the liberal world order was visibly collapsing. Globalisation had delivered inequality. Diversity had dispensed division and social tension. Technocracy had bred resentment. The West’s interventions to ‘make the world a better place’ had left its credibility in tatters and regions shattered.
Still, the faithful clung on. The post-historical clerisy doubled down, insisting the problem wasn’t the sermon — it was the congregation. When the demos proved unruly, they annulled elections, thwarted referendums and cracked down on seditious accuracy and unsanctioned narrative deviation (i.e., ‘disinformation’ and misinformation’).
History’s Fools was a warning — and one that grows more piercing with each passing year. And in the end, its apostles were undone not by reactionaries or terrorists, but by reality itself.
As David noted, you can’t build peace out of bullet points and blind spots. Politics is not therapy, branding or buzzwords. And history is not over. The future isn’t a safe space. It’s a contest. And it will not be decided by the morally confident but by the strategically competent.
David didn’t live to see the full implosion. But he saw enough. His legacy lies not in doctrines or disciples, but in something rarer: a way of thinking that cut through illusion and a steadiness of mind that held firm while others mistook consensus for truth
In an age where disbelief was the last taboo, he gave us something quietly radical: the licence to call nonsense by its name.
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic based in Australia. He is editor of A Front Row Seat at the End of History: The Untimely Essays of David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, 1999-2024 (2025).
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