A Difficult Marriage? Alasdair MacIntyre and the Postliberal Right

When Hegel died, his followers split into “left” and “right” Hegelians, diverging over the nature of his concern with history, his attitude to religion, and his political orientation. The same fate awaits Alasdair MacIntyre, the influential emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, now enjoying his ninety-sixth year of life. A dedicated Marxist for the first two decades of his adult life, he became a leading critic of modernity and the Enlightenment with his 1981 book After Virtue, wherein he abandoned Marxism and adopted Aristotelianism. A few years later he converted to Catholicism and adopted the standpoint of Thomas Aquinas. So he stands to this day. Friends of modernity and the Enlightenment thus took his Aristotelianism, Thomism, and Catholicism as elements of a reactionary standpoint and treated his philosophy dismissively. Left-wing admirers, drawing also on later work (such as the Reader, Ethics and Politics, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity) in which MacIntyre reveals continuing affinities with both Enlightenment thought and the early Marx, responded by arguing that MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment and his turn to Aristotle and Aquinas continue and deepen what remains a recognizably left-wing project—a project still aligned with Marx in being resolutely anti-capitalist. 

Over the last decade, however, a third group of readers have adopted and endorsed the critique of modernity and the Enlightenment they find articulated in After Virtue and subsequent works, and they have elaborated it into a conservative philosophy opposed to the modern left. These are the thinkers of the postliberal right. The inspiration they have taken from MacIntyre involves a vastly different reading of his concern with history, his attitude to religion, and his political orientation than that offered by the left MacIntyreans. But is their standpoint authentically MacIntyrean?

MacIntyrean Postliberalism?

MacIntyre has himself explicitly disavowed the postliberal-adjacent Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, disavowed “conservatism” generally, and conservative interpretations of his work more broadly. He and his followers have spilled considerable ink disavowing “misunderstandings” and “misappropriations” of his work, most often aiming their guns at “conservative” and “communitarian” readings of After Virtue and its several sequels. MacIntyre himself singled out and endorsed the characterization of his standpoint as “revolutionary Aristotelianism,” a reading articulated in opposition to the “profoundly mistaken” or “most absurd” suggestion that MacIntyre “is a political conservative.” The keynote speaker at the 2019 MacIntyre at 90 conference thanked that same “magisterial” paper for the fact that now, “The ludicrous notion of MacIntyre as a conservative is heard far less often than it once was.”

This is seemingly a problem for the postliberal right, whose adherents find it important to stress that their philosophical standpoint is fundamentally the same as MacIntyre’s. Dreher’s Benedict Option takes its title from After Virtue’s final words; Patrick Deneen’s 2014 article, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” names MacIntyre as first among his side’s “intellectual heroes,” and closes by calling Deneen’s side “the MacIntyre/Schindler school” of American Catholic political thought. When Milbank and Pabst explain what “ethical and political approach” connects with their term “virtue” in their 2016 book The Politics of Virtue, they cite MacIntyre’s major works; and in an article from late 2023 Edmund Waldstein explains how “Integralism is based on a thoroughly teleological understanding of reality” by explicating MacIntyre’s account of the teleological worldview. Other examples abound.

The leading opinion among MacIntyre scholars seems to be that MacIntyre’s anti-conservatism prohibits an affinity with the postliberal right. But does that follow? Examining the reasons why MacIntyre opposes “conservatism” confirms that, as David McPherson observes,

But MacIntyre’s opposition to both modern liberalism and “contemporary” conservatism is one of the influential reasons why the postliberal right takes the shape it does. Dreher writes, “MacIntyre doesn’t grasp that I agree with him that in our society, ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ are two sides of the same coin.” Dreher is here parroting postliberalism’s most influential tract, Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. It’s central to Deneen’s standpoint: “Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin.” Contra Matt McManus’s recent claim, the postliberal right is deeply sympathetic to MacIntyre’s anti-capitalism. As a case in point, consider Sohrab Ahmari—who has called MacIntyre a “genius”—and his latest book on what he calls “private tyranny,” i.e., the tyranny of the free market, of deregulated capitalism, of Wall Street, etc. It’s this that distinguishes postliberals as a unique faction of the right doing battle with the capitalist-friendly factions. It’s their sharing MacIntyre’s opposition to individual autonomy as the highest political virtue, and thus to left- and right-wing strivings for it, that marks them as postliberal. MacIntyre’s opposition to pro-capitalist conservatism thus speaks in favor of the postliberal right sharing his standpoint, not against it.¹

MacIntyre’s opposition to both modern liberalism and “contemporary” conservatism is one of the influential reasons why the postliberal right takes the shape it does…this alignment isn’t coincidence, but rather influence: the postliberals reject right-liberalism because they’ve taken MacIntyre’s double opposition against liberalism and ‘conservatism’ to heart.

MacIntyre himself seems to adhere to the view articulated above, that his anti-conservatism can only but differentiate his philosophy from that of the postliberal right. He’s against The Benedict Option, he says, because

But it is not quite as simple as that: the postliberals are not “conservative,” if this is to indicate a generally pro-capitalist attitude. This is MacIntyre’s meaning of the term when he elsewhere explains what he means in rejecting “conservatism” as the “mirror image” of liberalism: in the 2007 Prologue to the third edition of After Virtue he writes,

The postliberal right shares MacIntyre’s opposition to factions of the right fitting this description of “conservatism.” They call this “right-liberalism,” and their reasons for rejecting it mirror MacIntyre’s own. Again, this alignment isn’t coincidence, but rather influence: the postliberals reject right-liberalism because they’ve taken MacIntyre’s double opposition against liberalism and ‘conservatism’ to heart.

There are at least two more elements to MacIntyre’s inference that call for consideration: Dreher disputes the characterization, but MacIntyre takes The Benedict Option to call for “a withdrawal from society,” clarifying that, “When I said we need a new St. Benedict, what I was suggesting was that we need a new kind of engagement with the social order, not any kind of withdrawal from it.” Secondly and relatedly, MacIntyre insists that the communities and traditions he defends are communities and traditions of enquiry into the human good. As such, they can be “revolutionary” or radically critical of the status quo. He distinguishes his concepts of community and tradition from “conservative” appeals to the same, casting the latter as mere appeals to shared cultures or to how things have been done. Insofar as the postliberal right fits this characterization, their standpoint is indeed different from MacIntyre’s.

Rather than evaluate these disputes here, however, I will use my remaining space to sketch a natural reading of After Virtue that will illuminate Deneen’s analysis of ‘the logic of the liberal regime’ and the vision of the postliberal right more broadly.

A Postliberal-right reading of After Virtue

MacIntyre’s blunt and “extreme” thesis in After Virtue is that ‘morality has been destroyed’ with the advent of modernity. The story he tells is of a decline from the healthy, well-ordered, “premodern, traditional” moral cultures to our own unhealthy, disordered modern moral cultures. The healthy well-ordered cultures of the West are those embodying the classical and Christian ethical tradition of the virtues. For MacIntyre, the big difference between premoderns and moderns (like us) is that the former understand statements about one’s duties and obligations, and moral claims and judgments generally, as objective factual statements that can be rationally grounded, whereas we moderns in the main understand moral commitments as subjective, as mere expressions of personal preference, attitude or emotion, and as ultimately grounded in an arbitrary “criterionless choice.” This difference is explained by the fact that the classical and Christian tradition affirms, whereas in the Enlightenment we moderns abandoned, the teleological conception of man.

The moral scheme attending that conception has three elements: a conception of our nature as it is in its untutored state; a conception of our nature as it could and would be if we realized our true potential, i.e., our essence or telos; and the moral precepts that facilitate the transition from the first state to the second. In this scheme, the human being’s essence or telos is understood as part of nature, something real or objective.

Within this scheme it’s possible to justify statements like, ‘you should feed and cultivate these desires, redirect those ones, but starve these others.’ This tradition can justify its demanding ethical precepts by giving as reasons for following them, ‘doing so will help you realize your true nature, your essence; defying them will frustrate your most essential desire to self-actualize.’

When moderns mistakenly abandoned teleology, they were left with only the conception of our untutored nature through which to justify the moral rules they’d inherited. This was impossible, for those moral rules were originally designed to lead us away from that natural state and towards our telos. It was only through the reference to our telos that the moral rules had authority over our untutored nature and its desires. MacIntyre details several failed, doomed, attempts undertaken by the Enlightenment project in its quest to ground morality in our untutored nature. When it definitively failed, our culture was left to conclude that moral commitments must be arbitrary and subjective acts of will. We could no longer give intelligible reasons why some desires should be frustrated, contained, or redirected.

It’s After Virtue read on these lines, I suggest, that inspires Deneen’s postliberal account of the ‘logic of the liberal regime.’ The two fundamental principles of Deneen’s account of the advent of modernity are, first, that the true anthropology of the Classical and Christian tradition was replaced with liberalism’s false anthropology, and, secondly and relatedly, that the Classical and Christian traditions’ true conception of freedom as self-rule acquired through the acquisition of virtue was replaced with liberalism’s false conception of freedom as the satisfaction of one’s desires. Deneen is only able to characterize and diagnose the problems faced by both sides of our liberal regime because he adopts the Aristotelian standpoint external to their shared liberal standpoint. This conforms to MacIntyre’s foundational statement that, “it is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture.” 

Both MacIntyre and Deneen seek to preserve or recover a demanding moral framework that couldn’t but appear as oppressive to anyone whose view of history fits the dominant liberationist account of the rise of modernity or liberalism.

The central concern of Deneen’s analysis is with how the impulse for liberal freedom “disassembles” virtue-inculcating communities. Both MacIntyre and Deneen call for recovering the tradition of the virtues in local communities and protecting them against liberal (including capitalist) forces. They both seek to preserve or recover a demanding moral framework that couldn’t but appear as oppressive to anyone whose view of history fits the dominant liberationist account of the rise of modernity or liberalism. Animating both projects is the belief that modernity destroyed morality proper.

Conclusion

Why does MacIntyre seem reluctant to recognize any validity in the postliberal right’s reading of his work? His main antipathy to conservatism stems from his anti-capitalism, but this, I have argued, is no reason to oppose the postliberals. Insofar as postliberal appeals to tradition do not rise beyond a celebration of shared culture, the two standpoints may indeed significantly differ. But there may be another reason for his reluctance. Dreher speculates that MacIntyre is of “an advanced generation of old lefties who simply cannot deal with the fact that the young people most interested in their work are people on the Right.” The suggestion here is not that the postliberals understand MacIntyre’s philosophy better than he does, but rather that his vision is clouded about where that philosophy falls on the left-right spectrum as it appears today (as compared to how it looked in 1981)—even though, ironically, it is MacIntyre’s influence, perhaps more than any other thinker, that is responsible for the changed nature of the right.

Kant definitively and unambiguously rejected Fichte’s interpretation of his philosophy, endorsing instead the now-forgotten J. Schulze, but it was Fichte who defined how Kant was understood by all post-Kantian German idealists. MacIntyre, whose philosophy aims to arm “plain people” with the conceptual clarity they need to resist their oppression by modern state and market forces, has remained silent on Deneen and his cohort, endorsing instead Kelvin Knight, but it is Deneen who has garnered the popular following.

As befell Hegel, as MacIntyre nears his end, the battle over his philosophical legacy is just beginning.

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Daniel Addison is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mercy University. He completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of John McDowell in 2013. He has written on politics for Human Events, ArcDigital and Merion West.

1. This point is understood by the scholar who has most extensively examined the relation of the postliberals’ standpoint to MacIntyre’s, Nathan Pinkoski. See his “Why Alasdair MacIntyre is not a Conservative Post-Liberal,” The Political Science Reviewer, 43:2 (2019), 531-63; “Revisiting Alasdair MacIntyre on Liberal Toleration,” Public Discourse, June 21, 2020; and “After Virtue and the Rise of Postliberalism,” in After Virtue at 40 (2023), pp.85-106. As the title of the first indicates, however, Pinkoski’s conclusion is at least in tension with my own: that conservative postliberals are MacIntyrean. ↩︎

Image made by John Chrobak using “Alasdair MacIntyre,” by Sean O’Connor licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic; “Monastero del Sacro Speco (Subiaco) (3),” by Cruz.croce licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.