Born in Glasgow in 1929 to a physician father and a homemaker mother, Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre grew up in a world shadowed by war and ideological upheaval. His early years were steeped in the gritty realism of Scotland’s working-class ethos, but his mind was restless, drawn to the big questions of existence. He studied at Queen Mary College in London, earning a degree in classics, and later at the universities of Manchester and Oxford, where he honed his philosophical edge. By his 20s, he was a card-carrying Marxist, joining the Communist Party of Great Britain and later Trotskyist groups, his pen blazing with critiques of capitalism’s alienating grind. But MacIntyre was no ideologue. His intellect was a living thing, always probing, always evolving. By the 1960s, he’d shed Marxism’s certainties, flirting briefly with Anglicanism before embracing atheism, only to find his way to Roman Catholicism in the 1980s — a spiritual odyssey as complex as the moral puzzles he tackled.

MacIntyre’s career was a tapestry of academic posts across two continents. He taught at Manchester, Oxford, and later in the United States at the University of Notre Dame, where he became a professor and senior research fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. His early work, such as A Short History of Ethics (1966), mapped the evolution of moral thought from Homer to the Enlightenment, but it was After Virtue that made him a philosophical giant. Published when he was 52, the book was a thunderbolt, arguing that modern moral discourse had collapsed into incoherent fragments. The Enlightenment, he claimed, had severed morality from its roots in tradition and community, leaving us with “emotivism” — the idea that “good” is just a dressed-up version of “I like it.” This wasn’t just academic nitpicking; MacIntyre saw a civilization adrift, unable to agree on what makes a life worth living.

After Virtue proposed a radical antidote: a return to Aristotelian ethics, where virtue, qualities such as courage, justice, and wisdom, aren’t abstract but embedded in shared practices such as chess, farming, or family life. These “practices,” MacIntyre argued, give us standards of excellence and a sense of purpose tied to community, not individual whims. The book sold over 100,000 copies, a staggering figure for a dense philosophical tome, and became a cornerstone of virtue ethics, a field MacIntyre almost single-handedly revived. Its influence rippled across disciplines, from theology to political theory, but its impact on conservative thought was seismic. Conservatives, especially American Catholics, embraced MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism’s rootlessness, seeing in his work a blueprint for reclaiming tradition in a world obsessed with autonomy. Thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher leaned on his ideas to argue for communities grounded in shared moral narratives, while his distrust of capitalism’s atomizing effects resonated with postliberal critics of modernity.

MacIntyre’s later works, such as Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), reiterated his thesis: Moral reasoning only makes sense within a tradition. He wasn’t dogmatic, though. His “peculiarly modern understanding” of Aristotle, as he called it, acknowledged that no tradition is final or infallible. This made him hard to pin down ideologically — neither a reactionary nor a progressive, he was a thinker who defied categories. His pugnacious wit and exacting teaching style shaped generations of students, to whom he was a beloved, if demanding, mentor. “A great light has gone out,” said Notre Dame’s Deneen, capturing the void left by MacIntyre’s passing.

MICHAEL LEDEEN, 1941-2025

His personal life was as rich as his intellectual one. A devoted husband and father, MacIntyre’s warmth shone through in his care for his family and students, always asking after their lives with genuine concern. He won accolades such as the Aquinas Medal and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but his real prize was the clarity he brought to a muddled world. He didn’t just diagnose our moral malaise — he offered a way out, urging us to build communities where virtue could flourish again.

As South Bend mourns, one can picture MacIntyre chuckling at the irony of his legacy: a man who spent his life arguing for tradition, yet whose ideas sparked a revolution. He’d probably say we’re still missing the point, too busy debating to live virtuously. But that’s the MacIntyre way: always pushing us to do better, with a twinkle in his eye and a challenge in his heart.

Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.