Alasdair MacIntyre began to mean something to me as a third-year university student, since After Virtue hit harder than anything else on the syllabi for PHIL 372 Contemporary Ethics and PLPT 407 Liberalism and Its Critics at the University of Virginia. The former was wonderfully taught by his last dissertation student, Rebecca Stangl. Students didn’t say “based” back then, early in what we thought would be the Age of Obama, nor did they ask to be “redpilled.” Still, I was fascinated by this philosopher with no time for trolley problems or rights talk, who brusquely changed the subject to character and “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” Like so many, I was more of a fan than a student. So, I think, were many of the younger people who packed the audiences for his annual lectures at the Center for Ethics and Culture fall conference in the last decade of his life.

Nothing is more disappointing for a curious student than a class that turns out not to be about his half-baked questions after all. And nobody is more annoying to a professor than this same student who loses interest in class but is overexcited about something vague and otherwise. I was this student. So was MacIntyre, except of course he could explain—forcefully. And he changed the subject not only in one class, but also in every academic field that has to do with ethics. Forget wasting time with the Enlightenment project’s overly precise moral science of actions; the proper objects of ethics in any undestroyed moral community are character and practices, and the virtues therein that lead to flourishing. Let’s talk instead about why courage is important in a fishing village in ways for which commercial fishing cannot account. Spare us the highfalutin lip-service to democratic deliberation; without a shared language to secure moral agreement, of course debates around war, abortion, and universal healthcare descend into the shrillest kind of emotional manipulation. Let’s talk instead about why Yeats could not accept Burke’s poetic image of the modern state as a great tree, and why the bureaucratic state is more like a telephone company that asks you to die for it. The Iraq War, partial-birth abortions, and Obamacare—this was the atmosphere in which I first read After Virtue. He was the most-discussed philosopher, living or dead, among my peers during my undergraduate years. 

All of which is to say that when I became a fan of MacIntyre, he was already a legendary figure. Even his protégé Stanley Hauerwas was a bête noire in theology, and his epigones were rumored to be enfants terribles in business ethics. MacIntyre had long since barreled through British and American universities with his “paradigm shifts” (pardon the social-science shibboleth) and changed his own mind on the way, abandoning revolutionary communism for neo-Aristotelianism, Thomism, and eventually the Catholic Church. (What never changed, however, was his basic interest in how working-class people solve practical problems under the disruptive conditions of modern capitalism. What Leo XIII joined together, Thomism and the social question, MacIntyre refused to set asunder.) It is a remarkable fact that the most influential moral philosopher of the late twentieth century was a brilliant, combative, and radical convert to Roman Catholicism. But that is only the incipit of his legend.

An insistently “Mr.” MacIntyre was proud not to have a Ph.D.; indeed, his self-education and voracious reading may have made him the most widely read philosopher ever. He made enthusiastic book recommendations one did not expect: of course Jane Austen in After Virtue, but also Albert Murray’s Omni-Americans (on race and the Blues), and Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power (about building bus terminals in Aalborg). Then there were the cutting reviews of books that one did expect him to dislike. In the London Review of Books he groaned that Richard Rorty threatens to consign “postmodern” philosophers to cultural conversations: “If I am doomed to spending the rest of my life talking with literary critics and sociologists and historians and physicists, I am going to have to listen to a great deal of philosophy, much of it inept.” Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rorty were poor analytic thinkers, he said. Yet MacIntyre agreed with Bernard Williams that moral decisions and motives must feel authentically like our decisions and motives, and so the camel’s nose of continental philosophy came right back under the Anglo-American tent. “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” MacIntyre asked, and demanded an answer. He was the rare philosopher who insisted that philosophy required both analytical clarity in argument and a hermeneutic approach to the social contexts of these arguments. But it was not enough for MacIntyre to talk about Wittgenstein’s ladder with other philosophers, issuing poxes on both their analytic and continental houses. He liked to tell how he broke up The Beatles by lending a certain neighbor a non-metaphorical ladder for her art exhibit at the Indica Gallery in 1966.

Something deeper but also typically adolescent drew me to MacIntyre as well: wondering how countercultural I was. He made me reflect in a personal way about the stories of which I find myself a part: an American story, a Catholic story. Strangely, back then, nobody I knew seemed to take for granted that Catholics ought to be “based.” The last American president to oppose gay marriage had just been elected. Regis High School gave me the impression that Eugene McCarthy’s postwar liberalism undergirded by Catholic social-justice principles had not died in 1970, but was still a going concern. My professors in Charlottesville corrected me. It was a shock. What I had taken for granted as the city center belonged, in their mind, to a peripheral ghetto. Galvanized by the George W. Bush era, they insisted that moral and religious beliefs, if held too strongly, were problematic. They were pragmatists, like Rorty, who thought real democratic citizens should have beliefs that were revisable in the give-and-take of communication. They possessed what Patrick Deneen calls the democratic faith. 

In my political theory classes especially, MacIntyre, who scoffed at being asked to die for the telephone company, was part officially sanctioned opposition, part whipping boy. But since I had strong moral and religious beliefs, and moreover thought they were important for citizens, I identified with MacIntyre. Of course I blurred him with some beloved octogenarian Irish-Catholic teachers from back home, who were unashamed of treating the universal Church as their own tribal inheritance, anciently begrudged against the multifarious frauds of modernity, proud of their records as good citizens but stubborn about any enlightened civic education their betters might offer—and just about everything Evelyn Waugh noticed about the same sort of men in 1947. When Jews and Catholics wonder where we fit into modernity, respectively, it is grandiosely called the theologico-political problem. I could not articulate this in college, even as I read John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and Thomas Pfau to learn about how exactly modernity supplanted these predecessor cultures. But among these magisterial genealogies of modernity, as my friend Andrew Kuiper calls them, none was ever so exciting as After Virtue. 

When I came to Notre Dame for graduate school in 2015, MacIntyre had been retired from teaching for five years. As a young man excited about big ideas and talking about MacIntyre, I had a lot of ground to make up in my education. Talking to MacIntyre confirmed that. In his office in Geddes Hall, the fiery philosophical giant was mellow, generous with his time, and patient with my questions. I thought my first joke to him met with a grimace; in fact, he just squinted before he began to chuckle. He was warm about political theory, my academic subfield which demands both grasp of philosophical arguments and historical contexts, at least in principle. But at that time, I was being drawn to teachers who were less encyclopedic and more rabbinical, and who, willing to trade MacIntyre’s intellectual breadth for more scholarly depth, seemed to read the same books over and over. One was his wife, Lynn Joy, a David Hume scholar who discussed “Alasdair’s” critique of the conventional eighteenth-century British morality of her subject with a twinkle in her eye. Susan Collins insisted more emphatically that Aristotle was far from the priggish Greek gentleman that MacIntyre finds in A Short History of Ethics. MacIntyre approved of my more contextual work on Saint Thomas and tyrannicide (at least when I finally dared to show it to him) but he disapproved of my work on Aristotle’s treatment of the passions related to envy and justice. He told me I needed to read Wittgenstein (and re-read his own work!) and think through how attitudes and feelings always depend on a context of cultural practices and institutions. I did. He told me I should read his friend Kelvin Knight’s article “After Tradition” to better understand my own objections and the neo-Aristotelian responses. I did. He helped me consider my questions more fully without ever showing annoyance.

MacIntyre remained a contrarian to the end, nonetheless, a master of what my dissertation advisor called the “MacIntyrade”. In his annual keynote at the fall conference of the Center of Ethics and Culture, hundreds of people listened to him read his papers clearly and slowly, spellbound. But often he was taking aim at sacred cows: human dignity, or God’s knowledge about what might happen in the future, or—in the case of a graduate student conference we organized for which he generously gave a keynote address—the “Benedict Option”. As far as I can tell, very little about MacIntyre (or Wittgenstein for that matter before him) can be explained by his historical context and the conventional practices of philosophy in Britain and the United States. I think MacIntyre was one of those few individuals who are seized by a fundamental questioning mood, deeper than any practices or institutions, a perplexity that can be described in art or phenomenology but not by a linguistic analyst of maxims. Could he not recognize himself as such a philosopher? I wish I thought to ask him while he was alive. Then I would know what to read today.