What Alasdair MacIntyre got right – and wrong

Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last week, was one of the most influential thinkers of the past 50 years. It is hard to think of any other philosopher writing in the late 20th-century who has had such an impact. He might be less famous than Foucault or Derrida, but it is his conservative brand of postmodernism that launched a fairly coherent intellectual movement. For a few decades its adherents were mostly academics; now it has become politically influential too.

Like those aforementioned Frenchmen, he was a powerful critic of the rational Enlightenment. And like them, his thought was strongly shaped by Marxism, and its critique of liberal political assumptions. But unlike them he decided that it was not enough to be suspicious of all ideologies. The task was to reconstruct meaning, amid the chaos and nihilism of modern thought.