Alasdair MacIntyre on the Writing of History

Tributes to Alasdair MacIntyre published since his death on May 21, 2025 have noted his impact on a wide range of academic fields, not just philosophy. His work has shaped inquiry in the fields of theology, political theory, sociology, psychology, classics, communication, law, education, and many more. Even business ethics, a discipline about which he was quite dubious, has been an area of interest among those devoted to MacIntyrean inquiry.

One field that is often mentioned is history, although not as often or as readily as we might expect. One reason for this reticence, surely, is that historians—“working historians,” as they often refer to themselves—will not to have much to do with philosophy or “theory,” not even if it is a philosophy or theory of history. Philosophers and theorists think, read, talk, and write about ideas. Historians unearth and reconstruct the past. They get their hands dirty going through archives. They build their accounts of the past like artisans, without preconceptions, or with as few as possible. Historians strive to eschew “theory” as part of their guild’s commitment to objectivity. But MacIntyre maintained that historians do espouse a philosophy, that histories are theoretically informed, even when this goes unacknowledged in the work of historians and in the discipline of history.

An essay by David Bell in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books demonstrates this point. It reviews Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, an important history that recounts how the idea of freedom as the ability to act for the good of the society or humanity became gradually attenuated and eventually replaced with the notion of freedom of choice. Now, Bell surmises, it is virtually impossible to return to the former idea of freedom unless one heeds the voices of “reactionary Catholic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, whose dreams are of the united Christian West of the Middle Ages”—to which Bell says “no thanks.”[1]

But here he assumes there are only two options: untrammeled choice no matter what the choice itself, or a resurrection of the reactionary Catholic Medieval state. A third possibility of constructing communities of friendship and formation in the traditional virtues on a local (non-state) level is simply not within his political vision. But as we shall see, this is the all too often overlooked possibility that lies at the heart of MacIntyre’s philosophy.

In what follows, I present the significance of MacIntyre’s work on the writing of history, in five parts: by placing historians’ commitment to objectivity in the historical context of the Cold War and the end-of-ideology movement (part 1); then by setting forth MacIntyre’s understanding of history in his early writings (part 2), in After Virtue (part 3 and 4), and in his later writing, one essay especially which cites the work of an actual “working historian,” namely E.P. Thompson, whose history of the English working class remained significant for MacIntyre throughout his Thomistic Aristotelian period, thus showing his mature philosophical position to be properly described as Aristotelian and revolutionary (part 5).

In conclusion, I summarize the significance of MacIntyre’s philosophy for writing history: how not to do it, how to do it, and how it provides a preamble for a theology of history.

I. Objectivity in History: An Anti-Ideological Ideology

We begin with the period in which MacIntyre began writing, in the 1950s during the early years of the Cold War. My comments focus on historians in the United States because developments there quickly spread throughout Europe and the West, and because an in-depth, well-researched account of the academic profession of history is provided by Peter Novick in That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession.[2]

Novick’s history of the profession of History begins with the late nineteenth century, when historians in the United States interpreted von Ranke’s ideal of representing the past “as it really happened” as a mandate for objectivity. This meant paying strict attention to historical facts without preconceptions, frames of references, or philosophical accounts of the meaning or nature of history as a whole.[3] After World War I, relativism (Novick’s word) gained ascendancy in the discipline. The key figures were Charles Beard and Carl Becker. Beard directly attacked objectivity, arguing that history is shaped as much by an historian’s economic class, political perspective, or faith. Becker argued that the writing of history was so shaped by the personal perspective of the historian that he revised Luther’s dictum to declare, “everyman his own historian.”[4] But this relativist approach fell into deep disfavor after World War II when a renewed commitment to objectivity took hold in the profession.

Historians in the Cold War period stressed the importance of objectivity in the writing of history for historical reasons. As they saw it, Novick explains, the nation had just emerged from a monumental struggle against fascism and was now embroiled in an even more monumental struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. In this context, the historical relativism of the pre-war decades seemed woefully inadequate as it would undercut national unity and weaken the nation’s moral and intellectual fiber. Moreover, historians argued that the Beard-Becker approach had given license to writing history from any perspective, no matter how dark and destructive. Just as German historians put their scholarship to work for the Nazi regime, now Soviet historians were fabricating histories that served their tyrannical regime. The effective antidote, U.S. historians maintained, was to return to writing history objectively. Researching with dispassion, gathering evidence with detachment, interpreting the past without bias: these were the practices pursued by historians in the Cold War period. Accordingly, historians renounced theoretical frameworks, philosophies of history, any and all preconceived notions of the nature and direction of history. The belief was that if historical scholarship is carried out in the spirit of free inquiry, it would reveal that Soviet historiography had degenerated into intellectual dogmatism that lacked any credibility. At the same time, it would demonstrate that, along with a superior economic and political way of life, a superior mode of scholarship prevailed in “the West.”[5]

In short, historians defended the West against Soviet tyranny by employing a strategy that was, as they saw it, non-partisan and intellectually unassailable: letting the facts of history speak for themselves. The attempt was to remove from the writing of history any element of ideology.

A leading spokesperson for what we can call “non-ideological history” was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. In The Vital Center (1949), he argued that the genius of U.S. democracy is its pragmatism, its avoidance of political extremes, its ability to find consensus among different interest groups.[6] “Isms,” Schlesinger wrote, have no place in academic discourse: “The ideologist contends that the mysteries of history can be understood in terms of a clear-cut, absolute, social creed which explains the past and forecasts the future . . . The history of the twentieth century is a record of [how] humanity has been betrayed by ideology.” For Schlesinger, “the basic conflict of our times . . . is precisely the conflict . . . between ideology and democracy.”[7] Another leader in non-ideological history was Richard Hofstadter, whose The American Political Tradition downplayed class conflict and stressed the consensus and reformist approach that had characterized U.S. politics from the founding to the present.[8] A third voice along the same lines was Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that the realities of self-interest and sin in politics called for disavowing transcendent causes and acknowledging instead the ambiguity and irony that marks all human aspirations.[9]

Novick observes that this opposition to ideology expanded when “the end-of-ideology” became the label for the intellectual movement of the same name. Launched in 1955 at a (CIA-funded) conference sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the movement was spearheaded by three sociologists, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Edward Shils, who proclaimed (using the conference name) “The End of Ideology in the West.”[10] The argument was that class antagonisms had been overcome by the institutions of liberal democracy in the West, so it was now time to turn from political extremism in favor of a pragmatic approach to social problems.

In the context of this end-of-ideology movement, the sociology of Max Weber emerged as centrally important. Novick mentions Weber only in passing, but the distinction in his lecture “Politics as a Vocation” between an “ethic of ultimate ends” and an “ethic of responsibility” was the conceptual lynchpin that had a broad appeal in the academy, including in history. It allowed historians to affirm religious and moral ideals but only as indirectly related to politics, where ideals must set aside for the sake of pragmatic matters such as solving problems on the domestic front and maintaining primacy over the Soviet Union in international relations. As Daniel Bell explained in his book The End of Ideology, the key to effective politics is that it must be stripped of an ethic cast in terms of an ultimate purpose or final end.[11] In this general stance, several key words became common caveats: absolutist, apocalyptic, chiliastic, messianic, millenarian, and utopian—all synonyms for “ideological.”

All of which is to say that in this anti-ideological intellectual ethos of the early Cold War years, historians could think they were on solid ground in claiming that their work had little, if anything, to do with a philosophy or theory. But MacIntyre argued that their work is informed by philosophical assumptions, that it is deeply shaped by a theoretical framework, one forged in the very conceptual scheme of the end-of-ideology movement. In order to begin unfolding his argument, I want to review his early writings on the connections between philosophy, history, and the end-of-ideology movement.

II. MacIntyre on Writing History: Early Writings

The key to MacIntyre’s criticism of academic history can be brought into relief by looking at MacIntyre’s critique of morality, ideology, and bureaucratic power as he developed it in the 1950s and 1960s. His critique of modern bureaucratic power emerged with his outrage, as a Communist, over the brutalizing policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his refusal to accept the suppression under Kruschev of the workers’ uprisings in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. Like many in the British New Left, MacIntyre grounded his critique of Soviet oppression on Marxist grounds by extending Trotsky’s task of demonstrating how the Revolution had been betrayed but could be recaptured. At the same time, he sharply rejected Stalin’s moral critics who had turned from Communism to embrace political liberalism in the West. The key aspects of this two-pronged rejection, along with a searching affirmation of new forms of revolutionary theory and practice, can be found in three of MacIntyre’s early writings.

The first is “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (1958-9).[12] In this essay, MacIntyre faults ex-communist critics of Stalinism for succumbing to the same means-ends reasoning that were used to justify massive crimes under Stalin. Like the Soviet communists, these advocates and apologists of the West are also willing to set aside their self-proclaimed moral principles for the sake of expediency, thus oscillating between a Kantian and utilitarian ethic.[13] The key problem, MacIntyre explains, is that both political alternatives conceive of history as removed from morality. In the Soviet view, history operates in a mechanistic fashion, negating human agency by manipulating the economic base to produce the outcomes in politics, culture, and other elements in the superstructure. In the Western view, history unfolds apart from human needs and desires which are relegated to individual preference and choice. In both conceptions, history is managed by using instrumental rationality to justify the efficient, effective exercise of bureaucratic power—either the collectivist bureaucratic power of Soviet communism or the concealed power of political liberalism in the United States.[14] To these two false alternatives, MacIntyre queries about and gestures toward a “third alternative” which he describes as “a theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign.” In developing this theory, we must answer “traditional questions about human nature and morality.”[15] These “notes,” he concludes, are an “attempt to find expression at a theoretical level for a moral vision that is being born today among socialists, most of whom are not theoreticians”—being born, that is, within the realm of history, in and through genuine human agency.[16]

The second essay, “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” also addresses the relationship of morality and history. Written for Out of Apathy (1960), a volume edited by the historian E.P Thompson, this essay criticizes the political apathy of intellectuals in Britain who are victims of what MacIntyre calls “bureaucracies of the mind” that instill a conformism preventing them from being independent voices of hope.[17] At the root of this apathy and conformism are positivist paradigms of social analysis that depict human behavior as conditioned responses to external stimuli rather than as purposeful, intended, liberating human action. In these paradigms, society is viewed as a complicated machine and human behavior is explained mechanistically; the task is to predict and control human conduct toward the desired results. The focus is on the means of changing partial aspects of social life. The assumption is “that the only feasible means of social policy are limited reformist ones, and that revolutionary ends are never feasible.”[18]

Given this culture of conformism, MacIntyre argues that intellectuals must reject their standard role as an “educational technician who can safely be charged with training the social administrators of the established order.”[19] Instead, they must take up the Hegelian task of reclaiming freedom and rationality for transforming society as a whole; not by a social policy shaped by the utilitarian calculus of providing the most happiness for most people most of the time, but by “awakening what Marx called self-activity.” The role of the intellectual is “to provide all the growing points of human activity against the present social order with coherent theoretical expression, so that they may be rationally guided and effective.”[20] Against the idea of education providing adolescents a youthful poetry of social ideals that eventually they will have to dismiss for the prose of bourgeois middle age, intellectuals “must find a theory and a way of life which will transmute the poetry of adolescence into continuous life-long activity.”[21] Here too, we see the importance of a theory for human agency and action within history.

The third piece of MacIntyre’s writing is not a single essay but several essays in Against the Self-Images of the Age.[22] In these essays, MacIntyre brings greater clarity to his dual rejection of both Soviet communism and Western political liberalism and in his search for a politics that is an alternative to both. His rejection of the Soviet communism in his reviews on books about Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky is based on Trotsky’s criteria for concluding that after World War II a genuine revolution of workers was not going to overturn the Soviet bureaucracy.[23] His rejection of Western political liberalism is clear the first essay of the book.[24]

He debunks the “end-of-ideology” thesis set forth by Shils, Bell, and Lipset in the 1950s and 1960s and connects it to a broad swath of liberal intellectuals, including J.L. Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, and Norman Cohn. Each of these thinkers held that the social conflicts that had generated the politics of revolution had been resolved by the Western-style welfare state so that now social change proceeds on the basis of a consensus among workers, students, managers, corporate executives, and governmental leaders. In this view, the reasonable, rational approach to politics is a liberal, pragmatic approach. Social problems are resolved piecemeal by detailed, technocratic analysis, not by a transformation of society as a whole. Moreover, in this view, the institutions of Western liberalism are presented as the only reasonable alternative to Soviet totalitarianism. But MacIntyre says that this end-of-ideology thesis is itself an ideology of the West and urges his readers not to allow “the fear of 1984 to revive the politics which glorified 1688.”[25]

In the introduction to the second part of Against the Self-Images of the Age, MacIntyre observes that the end-of-ideology thesis presupposes a fact/value dichotomy, “usually in a version derived from Max Weber,” with neutral, objective facts set alongside of individuals choosing their values. This conception of freedom and choice, he argues, is disputed by the Marxist view that individuals are never isolated but always located within their class context to fulfill roles and abide by norms that shape one’s view of the facts and evaluation of them. In Marxism, “key descriptive expressions . . . are also evaluative”; “values are not chosen [but] given; indeed, the view that values are not given but chosen is, in a Marxist view, one of the given evaluations of a liberal, individualist society.”[26] But if political liberalism in the West is to be rejected, and if Soviet communism is also to be rejected, then what emerges, yet again, is the task of developing an alternative to both. MacIntyre continues to work on this task in the other more philosophical essays in the book on the relationship of is and ought, desire and action, and belief and action—all in an attempt to develop a strong account of human agency in history.

It in this agenda—developing a strong account of human agency within history—that eventually brought MacIntyre to the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues as the only compelling alternative to what he calls After Virtue the “Weberian vision of the world.”[27] So, to this book and its claims about the writing of history, we now turn.

III. MacIntyre On How Not to Write History: After Virtue

Although After Virtue presents a comprehensive historical argument, the book does not address the writing of history in a sustained and explicit way. But there are key parts of its large argument that are directly relevant to how we should and should not think about writing history, so we must look briefly at the large argument itself.

The overall argument of After Virtue is introduced in the first chapter where Macintyre offers the “disquieting suggestion” that we draw an analogy between an imaginary catastrophic loss of coherence in scientific inquiry and the loss of coherence in our moral lives in modernity. He traces this loss of moral coherence to the loss of humanity’s telos in the early modern period, specifically, to the Protestant and Jansenist theologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which held that reason cannot furnish an intellectual comprehension of humanity’s end because the power of reasoning was destroyed at Adam’s fall. As a result, a dichotomous conceptual scheme emerged between human nature-in-its-untutored-state and human nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos, but without a middle term to account for how humanity can realize its potential through the exercise of the virtues.[28]

Hence, there arose a dichotomy between is and ought which, MacIntyre shows, developed over time into a dichotomy between facts and value. In modernity, facts are ascertained by empirical methods as a basis for mechanistic explanations of human behavior, and values are relegated to moral sentiments or imperatives removed from rational inquiry. This fact/value split has shaped, and has been shaped by, the thought of a host of figures contributing to “the Enlightenment project”: Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Diderot, Hume, Smith, Mill, culminating with Nietzsche.[29] In the pivotal chapter of the book, MacIntyre moves from the critical into the constructive tasks of his extended argument by depicting our present intellectual and moral situation in terms of a question: “Nietzsche or Aristotle?”[30]

Here we must note that MacIntyre’s argument is directed not only against Nietzsche, as the philosopher of arbitrarily chosen values asserted by a will to power, but also against Weber, the dispassionate analyzer of bureaucratic power through fact-based, social-scientific expertise. For Weber, MacIntyre writes, as for Nietzsche, “questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead, one must simply choose—between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals.” In our contemporary setting, therefore, the bureaucratic rationality applying standards of efficiency and effectiveness in deciding matters of social concern is fully at home with the existentialist and emotivist philosophies of Sartre and Hare telling us that “all faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions given to sentiment and feeling.”[31] This melding of the bureaucratic power of modern corporations and nation-states with the ethics of individual choice pervades the West, especially the United States, creating an ethos of what MacIntyre calls “bureaucratic individualism.”[32] Against this Weberian ethos of bureaucratic individualism, with its reduction of morality to matters of preference, Macintyre argues in the second half of the book for recovering the tradition of the virtues and the conception of humanity’s telos.

For our purposes, we can trace how MacIntyre’s critique of the Weberian worldview relates to the writing of history by turning back to the disquieting suggestion at the outset of the book. In explaining his basic point, MacIntyre maintains that we are so entirely immersed in emotivist culture that we do not even see the need to recover the tradition of the virtues and the concept of a telos of human life. This blindness is due to the pressures to conform to the current political and cultural order, and we are often not even aware of it. Academia is of little help, for philosophy, economics, political science, sociology, and the other academic disciplines have been formed in emotivist culture and shaped by emotivist assumptions and thus are part of the problem. We may think that we can overcome our blindness by careful historical investigation, which could reveal evidence of this modern moral catastrophe.[33] But MacIntyre maintains—and this is the key point for the writing of history—that our blindness to the loss of the Aristotelian virtues is actually compounded by the study of history in modernity.

Why? This is because history is also shaped by our emotivist culture. As MacIntyre explains in a passage that is worth quoting at length:

History by now in our culture means academic history, and academic history is less than two centuries old. Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative presuppositions of academic history derived from the forms of the disorder which it brought about. Suppose, that is, that the standpoint of academic history is such that from its value-neutral viewpoint moral disorder must remain largely invisible. All that the historian—and what is true of the historian is characteristically true also of the social scientist—will be allowed to perceive by the canons and categories of his discipline will be one morality succeeding another: seventeenth-century Puritanism, eighteenth-century hedonism, the Victorian work-ethic and so on, but the very language of order and disorder will not be available to him. If this were to be so, it would at least explain why what I take to be the real world and its fate has remained unrecognized by the academic curriculum. For the forms of the academic curriculum would turn out to be among the symptoms of the disaster whose occurrence the curriculum does not acknowledge.[34]

Academic history, in other words, with its supposed value-free methodology and morally neutral standpoint, cannot see what has really happened, and thus is not value-free and morally neutral at all—not at least from a perspective of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. From that perspective, academic history, because it is written without a substantial conception of humanity’s end, is itself part of the problem.

A crucial part of the argument in After Virtue, then, is that we do not see the loss of the virtues as a moral tradition because our histories do not, indeed cannot, register the loss. As a result, historians are representing the past, not “as it really happened” (to use von Ranke’s phrase), but from their own Weberian perspective. On this point MacIntyre mentions two historians by name, Lewis Namier and Richard Hofstadter.[35] Namier was an historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European politics, especially parliamentary politics in Britain. Hofstadter, as we have seen, was a leader of the “consensus historians” that dominated the field in the United States during the Cold War years. Both joined with the sociologists of the end-of-ideology movement to oppose what they saw as the extremism and fanaticism of Marxist revolutionary politics. So, it is no coincidence that MacIntyre also mentions the sociologists Robert Merton and Seymour Martin Lipset, both of whom tracked the resolution of class conflict in modern capitalist and democratic societies. These historians and sociologists, in spite of different methodologies, shared a fatal flaw of analyzing human events and life patterns with no reference to humanity’s telos. In doing so, MacIntyre suggests, they functioned as apologists of status quo.

These connections between philosophy, history, and the end-of-ideology movement that MacIntyre identified in the first chapter of After Virtue are the product of his work in the prior decades criticizing the ideology and morality of bureaucratic power. Accordingly, After Virtue extends his dual rejection of bureaucratic authority of the state capitalism in the Soviet Union and of Western states and corporations. In both political configurations, bureaucratic power is exercised and justified through a utilitarian calculus of means without any substantive inquiry into humanity’s end.

This is why MacIntyre reiterates his longstanding dual rejection of the Cold War political alternatives. On the one hand, he argues that “as Marxists organize and move towards power they always do and have become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric; for in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority that are not Weberian in form.”[36] This is also why he later notes that while “Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition,” it is also the case that “this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.”[37] From this bleak political backdrop, it becomes clear that history, for MacIntyre, should not be written from a Weberian worldview of either side of the Cold War.

But then, how should history be written? For an answer, or at least the beginning of one, we should turn to other parts of After Virtue.

IV. MacIntyre On How to Write History: After Virtue

To understand the relationship of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism to the writing of history, we should look to the theoretical core of the constructive argument of After Virtue which comes in chapter fifteen. Using everyday examples—gardening, writing a book, conversing at a bus stop—MacIntyre makes three interrelated points: (1) that human action must be understood in light of the agent’s intention; (2) that human action must be understood within sequences of prior and succeeding actions over time; and (3) that the actions of human agents always come in the context of the actions of other human agents so that all intended actions must be placed within, and be seen as partly structured by, the social settings in which they occur. Together, these three points form the basis to MacIntyre’s claim that human action must be understood narratively—a claim that derives from Collingwood’s conception of writing history in light of the agent’s thoughts, and from Elizabeth Anscombe’s argument for a philosophical psychology in keeping with Aristotle’s conception of human action aimed at the good and of the virtues needed to attain the good. For MacIntyre, this account of intended action and the virtues helps us to think of our lives as a complex drama that unfold as a comedy, tragedy, or farce depending on whether or not, or, to what extent, we acquire the virtues enabling us to attain the good.[38]

MacIntyre fleshes out this narrative conception with literary references to Hamlet, The Castle, and the novels of Jane Austen. He also makes brief but important references to historical accounts of Thomas Becket and Leon Trotsky, the Tennis Court Oath in France on the brink of revolution, and the decision to construct an atomic bomb at Los Alamos.[39] In writing history too, he argues, events enacted by human agents are presented in the form of dramatic narratives of the past—as vividly illustrated, MacIntyre notes, in Marx’s historical-dramatist account in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.[40] His mentioning Marx was hardly coincidental, for a crucial aspect of MacIntyre’s argument, retained from Marxism, is that every historical account of human characters and events must be aware of the disparity between the role that the actors imagine themselves to be playing and the role they are actually playing in their economic, political, and social contexts. Historical narratives should account for the way in which historical actors are unaware of the real conflicts at work in their social settings.

Nowhere in After Virtue does MacIntyre offer a full display of what would be entailed in writing such a history. But at one telling point, he notes how catastrophic historical events have been concealed by ideological blindness due to an adherence to Robert Nozick’s quasi-Lockean notion of legitimate entitlement. Tied to a mythology of an act of original acquisition, Nozick holds that one has a right to land because it was purchased by oneself or one’s ancestors. But if this is really true, MacIntyre argues, then there are few places where legitimate entitlements are actually established, for in many places lands have been stolen, usually violently, as happened to the common people of England, to the indigenous peoples of North America, to the Irish, and to non-German Prussians. “This,” says MacIntyre, “is the historical reality ideologically concealed behind any Lockean thesis.”[41] Whole societies of peoples, whole ways of life, have been lost from historical view due to an unacknowledged land theft, obtained through the vice of pleonexia or acquisitiveness.

A similar point is alluded to, or at least implied, as regards to Rawl’s conception of justice and how it marginalizes any number of communities of traditional virtues, viewing them as subcommunities or subcultures, of a so-called wider society; communities of Catholic Irish, for example, and of Orthodox Greeks, Orthodox Jews, Protestant communities of blacks and whites in the south, and others shaped by the religious and household traditions of previous generations.[42] Here again, entire ways of life are obscured from historical view, removed from the registry of worthwhile historical evidence and relegated to the status of insignificant anecdotes. The burden of the argument in After Virtue is to register the loss of such ways of life in modernity. So when commentators dismiss MacIntyre’s argument by remarking that they do not see any catastrophe, they reveal their blindness to the deleterious workings of capitalism and the modern state. This is not a comment one would make if one were viewing history from the perspective of a nineteenth-century farming community in the County Donegal in the north of Ireland or of a Lakota tribe on the Western plains of the United States.

This is the kind of history MacIntyre calls for in After Virtue. And, he revisits the topic of writing history in his later writings.

V. MacIntyre on Writing History: Later Writings

Perhaps the clearest of MacIntyre’s statements on the writing of history comes in an essay called “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” (1994).[43] In this essay, he harks back to his earlier views by arguing that Marx’s abandonment of (Hegelian) philosophy in 1845 left a theoretical task uncompleted, “a road not taken.” The philosophical task was to develop a theory that accounted for practical as well as theoretical life. Had Marx pursued it, MacIntyre argues, in his attempt to develop a “practical philosophy”—that is, a philosophy of practices that entails the transformation of the practitioner—he would have had to rely on some version of an Aristotelian conception of ends.

Marx explained “revolutionary practice” as a “‘coincidence of changing of circumstances and of human activity,’” as an activity of “self-changing” that is at the same time “objective activity.”[44] This practical activity is both “objective” and “revolutionary,” for Marx, in that it transcends “the standpoint of civil society” where activity is reduced to that of individuals pursuing their individual desires and preferences.[45] MacIntyre’s point is that Marx’s argument, expounded in Hegelian and Feuerbachian terms, would have been conceptualized better in Aristotelian terms, that is, in terms of practices, goods internal to practices, the virtues, and humanity’s final end. Thus, we can restate what Marx called “the standpoint of civil society” and “revolutionary practice” in terms of individual and common goods, the latter of which are only achieved through cooperative practice with others.[46]

After explaining how Aristotelian terms offer the best account for how, in Marx’s terms, educators are themselves educated by self-transformative activity, MacIntyre acknowledges that his own attempted restatement of the “Theses on Feuerbach” would be irrelevant unless we can point to an actual example of “just such a form of practice, one which would both be entitled to be called ‘revolutionary’ (the first and the third theses) and be adequately characterizable only by an Aristotelian reference to the goods internal to it.”[47] So we must ask, he says, is there an actual historical example of these kind of revolutionary Aristotelian practices?

MacIntyre says that there is. It is found in E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class; more specifically, in Thompson’s account of “the communal life of hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire” in the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. This was a life, MacIntyre explains, that was characterized by “family independence” and “self-reliance”; it valued “honesty and integrity”; its “‘rhythm of work and leisure’” allowed for cultivating gardens, learning arithmetic, reading and composing poetry. What was remarkable about these hand-loom weavers, MacIntyre observes, is that their life embodied “a particular conception of human good, of virtues, of duties to each other and of the subordinate place of technical skills in human life.”[48] This last point is vitally important because the hand-loom weavers, in sustaining their mode of life, “had to reject what those who spoke and acted from the standpoint of civil society regarded as the economic and technological triumphs of the age.”[49] In other words, the communal life of the hand-loom weavers was a mode of resistance to the emergent capitalism in the industrial centers in Great Britain.

What is crucial to note here is that even though their communal life of the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire was devastated, and their resistance movement was in large part defeated, this does not mean that it was an unrealistic, utopian way of life that could not or would not adapt to the necessary and inevitable development of capitalism. Historians working out of the Weberian worldview would narrate it in this way. Indeed, they would not only narrate it as it happened; they would narrate it as if it had to happen, in the deterministic mode that lies at the heart of history written in the Weberian mode. But this history could also be narrated as a way of life that was destroyed by the economic and political forces unleashed when such destruction is regarded as necessary and inevitable by industrialists, politicians, the press, the police, and, tragically, by the hand-loom weavers themselves. Even if this story is also a story of defeat, the fact that E.P. Thompson told it in this way is crucial for MacIntyre because it provides a basis in history for refuting the charge of utopianism and for arguing that such a way of life was and is possible amid the corrosive effects of capitalism—an argument that should be advanced in Aristotelian terms of the practices and virtues needed to pursue our personal and common goods.

As the above essay shows, the key to MacIntyre’s understanding of writing history is to narrate people’s quests to acquire the virtues needed to live the good life, both their successes and their failures, so that readers are drawn into undertaking the same lifelong quest and so learn to move toward their end. MacIntyre took up this task in his last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. At a few points, he offers brief references to concrete, historical examples: the Jesuit reductions in South America of the seventeenth century, which he calls “the first modern communist society,” and the fishing cooperatives of Thorupstrand, Denmark.[50] But he sets about this task more directly in the concluding portion of the book. He narrates the lives of four people: Vassily Grossman, Sandra Day O’Connor, C.L.R. James, and Denis Faul, “whose lives exemplified virtues, the kind of lives that we need to understand, if we are to understand what the virtues are.”[51] As the very shape of the presentation of these lives shows, this philosophical task of understanding the virtues is at the same time a historical task, one that MacIntyre has left to us to continue working on.

Conclusion

Looking at the significance of MacIntyre’s work on history, we can take some guidance on how to write history and how not to write it. We are not to write history in way that undergirds the Weberian vision of the world, in which the dominant liberal economic and political order and emotivist cultural ethos is seen as preferred or normative or in any case unavoidable. This means writing histories different from those of Namier or Hofstadter, of course, but also different from more recent histories such as John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History or Tony Judt’s Postwar.[52] Both of these highly regarded histories celebrate the West’s victory over the Soviet Union with a truly Machiavellian acceptance of the crimes committed and the lives lost in the process. And both assume in a spirit of Weberian realism that the democracies of the United States and Europe are the only practical (i.e., non-utopian) political possibilities—an all too familiar failure of imagination from a MacIntyrean point of view. What we must identify and resist in these kinds of histories is our tendency to bow before established facts as if they were inevitable facts.

We can also take MacIntyre’s lead in envisioning how to write histories along the lines set forth in his writings throughout his life. In “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” MacIntyre refers to the workers in Hungary striving for a common moral vision and way of life. In “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” he writes of non-conforming intellectuals in the West developing a theory dedicated to self-activity and life-long learning. We can also find clues in MacIntyre’s references to figures such as James Connolly, Victor Serge, Leon Trotsky, Franz Jägerstätter, Edith Stein, and many others.[53]

String together the stories of these characters who gave their lives in opposing the political tyranny and moral barbarism of the twentieth century, and we can see the outline of an alternative history to the Cold War histories of the Soviet Union and the United States and the West—a history of resistance to capitalist injustice and bureaucratic authority, a history of the quest for genuine revolutionary community within which all members may flourish. Writing such histories extends this living tradition of defeated acts of conscience and expanded human agency and community.

Finally, what MacIntyre has left us is a way to construct narratives of people searching for and attaining their particular goods and in the process searching for the good beyond all finite goods, the surpassing good which we call God. In this respect, MacIntyre’s work on history serves as a philosophical preamble to a theology of history, such as the one outlined briefly but cogently by Balthasar. This is the kind of history that places Christ at the center along with the martyrs and the saints as those who redefine, against the so-called realists, what is actually possible within history.[54] It is also the kind of history that leaves room for the workings of divine providence, for godly events, miraculous events, as suggested in Carlos Eire’s history of the impossible.[55] For an appropriate setting for such histories, we can identify certain parallels, as MacIntyre did, between our own age and that of the decline of the Roman Empire, in which case we can say that we are waiting for another—doubtless very different—St. Augustine.

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