The thinker who saw liberalism's flaw

Kenan Malik

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“Since I understood liberalism,” Alasdair MacIntyre once told an interviewer, “I have wanted nothing to do with it.”

His death, last month, has robbed us of one of the most important moral philosophers of the past century. Born in Glasgow in 1929, he spent most of his life teaching in America. The issues with which he wrestled - the problems of liberalism, the degradation of moral thinking, the nature of belonging and identity, the significance of culture and tradition - now dominate much contemporary debate.

MacIntyre trod a long and convoluted philosophical path, starting as a Marxist, being drawn in the 1970s to Aristotelian virtue ethics, and eventually converting to Catholicism. Throughout this journey, he observed, "my critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged".

For MacIntyre, liberalism not only fails adequately to understand an individual's embeddedness in society but also fractures social bonds through its celebration of individualism and of the market. This argument was trenchantly expressed in his most famous book, After Virtue, published in 1981.