Beyond Authenticity: MacIntyre on Overcoming Liberal Individualism

Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is often received as a late restatement of his Aristotelian–Thomist doctrine, or dismissed as the work of a Christian conservative philosopher. This paper argues instead that it should be recognised as a methodological and epistemological masterpiece. The book is constructed as a deliberate attempt to free readers from the conceptual schema of liberal modernity at a perceptual level, by mobilising the techniques of cognitive reconstruction, genealogy, and resensitisation. To grasp this project, I situate it within the tradition of paradigm-based epistemology—tracing its roots in MacIntyre’s Marxist formation, his dialogue with Kuhn’s philosophy of science, and his openness to psychology and cognitive science. I then reconstruct the path the book intends the reader to travel: from recognising the complicity between abstract moral universalism and liberalism, to the epiphanies of perceiving anew the distortions of community and the fragmentation of modern life, culminating in a hindsight narrative that renders the modern liberal ethos no longer credible. The exemplar life of C.L.R. James is invoked to resensitise us to the possibility of unity and integration. The main limitation of MacIntyre’s project, I suggest, lies not in its philosophical scope but in its medium: as an academic philosopher, he left the task of mediating his achievement to a broader audience to future MacIntyrean intellectuals. Yet the book nonetheless sets a new standard for what philosophy can do: by articulating the sophistication needed to escape the imaginative block of liberal individualism, it redefines the state of the art in practical philosophy.