Totila e San Benedetto, by Spinello Aretino, San Miniato al Monte, Firenze. Wkicommons. Some rights reserved.Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers. His publications invariably attract an intense interest and the scrutiny of professional philosophers. He is known especially for his books After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Version of Moral Inquiry (1999), Dependent Rational Animals (1999), as well as multiple provocative and inspiring papers. His latest work, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016) is already stirring lively debates.
The lengthy series of books he published, known among admirers and foes alike as the “Interminably Long History of Ethics” (a pun on his earlier Short History of Ethics, 1966), is strongly informed by two major influences, Karl Marx’s philosophy and Thomist Aristotelianism. Judged by scholarly standards in the western academic world, any allegiance between Thomism and Marxism is something rather out of the ordinary. This is fully recognized by MacIntyre himself who commented that the only thing Marxists and Thomists have in common is their shared belief that Thomism and Marxism have nothing in common. Nonetheless, he continues to pursue a perspective that, as he claims, would be capable of accommodating both of these traditions within one Weltanschauung.
The Benedict Option
Recently MacIntyre’s name has reverberated outside his profession. This is owing not to his latest book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, but to something that has become known as “The Benedict Option”. The idea is being propagated by American writer Rod Dreher, a radical conservative and relatively recent convert to Catholicism. His book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation [1], published in the wake of the presidential election which brought conservative Christian politicians into the US Government, has become an American bestseller overnight.
