After MacIntyre

On May 21, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre died at the age of 96. MacIntyre is best known as the author of After Virtue (1981), which was considered one of the most important books on ethics of the last quarter of the last century. It was a highly influential work, which, despite its reservations, circulated as a manifesto of communitarianism, the name often given to the unstoppable tendency to criticize liberalism as a disastrous theory that uproots ethical and political reflection from communitarian cultural traditions.

But what made After Virtue unique above all was its defense of a return to Aristotle's virtue ethics, conceived as a system that integrated morality into shared narratives that gave meaning to human actions.

From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, there can be a step when you walk in a certain direction. MacIntyre, who converted to Catholicism in 1983, was quick to take it and was one of the pillars of the resurgence of Thomism. For several years now, and particularly in the United States, where MacIntyre, born in Glasgow, had lived since 1969, Saint Thomas, whom Pope Leo XIII, who was so talked about a few weeks ago, consecrated as the Church's master of thought in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), has once again enjoyed great prestige. History takes many twists and turns, and the discourse on Christian roots carried the Summa Theologica in its portfolio.

'After Virtue', one of the most important ethics books of the last quarter-century

To understand the action he wanted to carry out with After Virtue, it cannot be ignored that MacIntyre presented the slogan of returning to Aristotle as an alternative to the modern project initiated with the Enlightenment, which, according to his diagnosis, had ended up collapsing.

The book ended with a description of the present forty years ago as an era comparable to that of the decadent Roman Empire, which was entering a dark age, but in which, unlike then, the barbarians were not beyond the borders, but in the governments.

His final phrase caught on: "We are not waiting for Godot, but for someone very different, for Saint Benedict." As Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger often pointed out in those days, Benedict of Nursia was the one who had planted the roots of Western civilization. And the project was to mobilize creative elites to recover them.

Rod Dreher's famous book , Operation Benedict , followed this thread, referring to MacIntyre. Although he never acknowledged them as heirs, the author of After Virtue became a leading figure in post-liberal Christian ultraconservatism, which, through JD Vance, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Dreher himself, often speaks of the common good in Thomistic terms.

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In an obituary published in Compact magazine, a magazine close to this sector, it was stated that his merit lay in having exposed the ruins of our time and that finding the ways out was a job for others.