PHIL/POLI 554 - Back to Virtue: Alasdair MacIntyre on Desire, Narrative, and Practical Reasoning (SP25)

Well before the anti-liberalism of Patrick Deneen and the rise of “integralism,” there was Alasdair MacIntyre. He wrote this in 1988:

Liberalism… is often successful in preempting the debate by reformulating quarrels and conflicts within liberalism, so that they appear to have become debates within liberalism, putting in question this or that particular set of attitudes or policies, but not the fundamental tenets of liberalism with respect to individuals and the expression of their preferences. So, so-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debate within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question. 
 

Prof. MacIntyre was ahead of his time. From the publication of his magisterial After Virtue in 1981, to his provocative God, Philosophy, Universities in 2009, to his Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity in 2016, Alasdair MacIntyre has been the most influential and powerful Thomistic-Aristotelian critic of modern ethics and political liberalism and is one of our greatest living philosophers. In this course we will study his most recent book, a superb synthesis of his four-decade project of “tradition-constituted rationality.”