In Walter M. Miller Jr’s 1959 post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Lebowitz, surviving human knowledge is hit by a calamity after a nuclear war destroys civilisation. Any signs of learning, from the literate and scientists to books and instruments, are annihilated by mobs. Centuries on, surviving artefacts and relics from the past world have been stripped from their original context and natural science sits in a state of deep disorder.

Alasdair MacIntyre, the giant of late 20th-century moral philosophy, who died on 21 May at the age of 96, argued in his seminal work After Virtue that morality has suffered a similar catastrophe. We seem to believe in objective moral truth and falseness and use traditionally recognisable concepts like ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Yet in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, we have lost the inherited classical and religious framework that provided the context for such words. We are left with a morality of personal emotion with no external reference point, adrift in a sea of pluralism and individualism while clinging to fragments of lost traditions.

MacIntyre’s answer to this moral chaos was quite different to the arguments of his fellow critics of the Enlightenment project, such as Michel Foucault. Rather than tear everything down, he rejected abstract theory and reformulated Aristotle and the tradition of the virtues. This framework connects human flourishing to the telos, or function, of humans as rational beings in the context of concrete practices and existing conditions. MacIntyre inspired a revival of virtue ethics, although he denied being a proponent.

Modern academic philosophy is in a sorry state, obsessed with deconstruction and sliding into cultural irrelevance. By contrast, MacIntyre’s work confronts the reader with life-defining choices: Nietzsche or Aristotle? Liberal individualism and nihilism or emergence from the darkness into moral community?

Born in Glasgow in 1929 to Gaelic-speaking parents, MacIntyre read Classics at the University of London and obtained an MA from Manchester University. He didn’t have a doctorate and once opined that ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.’

After various positions at Manchester, Leeds, and the universities of Oxford, Princeton, and Essex, he moved permanently to the US to teach at Brandeis University. This was followed by stints at Boston University, Vanderbilt University and Duke University, before he settled at the University of Notre Dame. His first book was Marxism: An Interpretation in 1953 and his last was Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity in 2016. In between, heavyweight titles included After Virtue in 1981, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990 and Dependent Rational Animals in 1999.

MacIntyre wore various intellectual and religious hats throughout his life. In his earlier career he was involved in communist and socialist politics and an interlocutor of the Marxist writer EP Thompson. He was in different periods a professing Anglican, Presbyterian, and atheist. None of these confessions proved satisfying. His journey ultimately led him from revolutionary Marxism and the depths of analytical philosophy to the Catholic Church, via his own hybrid of Aristotle and Aquinas.

His reference to his recognition of a ‘more fundamental order’ indicated the importance of his final conversion. This went hand in hand with his philosophy, given he concluded that Aquinas was a better Aristotelian than Aristotle himself.

Yet, MacIntyre remained deeply influenced by Marx’s critique of capitalism and reviled both liberal individualism and contemporary conservatism. He saw modern conservatism as the mirror image of modern liberalism; its foundational vision of the unfettered free market destroys moral community in a similar way to amorphous liberal individualism.

MacIntyre complained of how modern liberal societies are ‘committed to denying any place for a determinative conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception’. He was also critical of nationalism and amusingly quipped that dying for the modern bureaucratic nation state was like ‘being asked to die for the telephone company’.

His evisceration of Enlightenment moral philosophy and his opposition to liberalism have inspired significant debate and controversy. This is perhaps no surprise for a philosopher whose project was about, in his own words, ‘resisting as prudently and courageously and justly and temperately as possible the dominant social, economic, and political order of advanced modernity’.

After Virtue is MacIntyre’s best known and most discussed work. The thrust of the book’s argument is that the Enlightenment moral project, from Hume’s ideas on sentiment and desires to Kant’s categorical imperative to Bentham’s utilitarianism, failed to provide a new rational justification for morality at the same time as it removed the context to the preceding tradition.

This has left modern morality in a state of unsatisfying emotivism. Morality has become about nothing more than feeling, for there is no longer any agreement on fundamental means by which to judge conflicting beliefs. This can be seen clearly in the shrillness of modern debate and the claim that a moral position can be ‘right for me’. We have been left in a situation of vague utilitarianism.

One of MacIntyre’s key insights is that philosophies emerge out of their own traditions and cultures and have their own biases. For instance, the Bloomsbury Group just so happened to be enraptured by GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, in which figures such as John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf found that aesthetic pleasure and ‘personal affections’ were the highest goods.

It is now painful to read Woolf’s rapturous statement about how Moore’s now debunked philosophy replaced ‘the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in which Jehovah, Christ and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of commonsense’.

MacIntyre’s worldview did not make him some sort of retrograde nostalgist for the Middle Ages. He defended toleration and freedom of speech and made the important point that flawed modern philosophies can still result in moral social goods. He pointed to the 19th-century view of utility, which inspired Edwin Chadwick’s public health reforms and John Stuart Mill’s support for female emancipation and the extension of the suffrage.

MacIntyre presented a brand of Aristotelianism centred on everyday life. He thought the recovery of the virtues would come from the ‘plain persons’ involved in setting up families and households and sustaining schools and local political community. It is these persons who will recover teleology. They will rediscover the tradition of Aristotle (added to but not confused by Christianity and other theisms) that takes ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ to ‘man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-essential-nature’.

MacIntyre was onto something. There is a prophetic element to his arguments which link into current post-liberal thinking and signs of growing interest in traditional religion, amid widespread moral confusion and a teetering liberal consensus. Echoes of his intellectual influence can be found in the work of American critics of liberalism such as Charles Taylor, Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen, and British philosophers and theologians such as John Gray, John Milbank, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. They are all writing in MacIntyre’s shadow.

The conclusion of After Virtue remains a piercing cry to those seeking a way through the noise of the modern moral culture:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark age which is already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.

It remains to be seen what sort of communities will ultimately emerge from the new moral dark age that MacIntyre exposed with such power, but his influence and relevance continues to grow almost half a century on from his diagnosis. May he rest in peace.