A Great Illiberal American

Alasdair MacIntyre came to America in 1969. He was forty years old at the time, and only a few years removed from the communist and Trotskyist commitments that had been central to his early work. He would not convert to Catholicism for more than a decade, but already he was exploring new lines of thought. MacIntyre would ultimately make his mark as one of the twentieth century’s greatest champions of tradition, drawing on both Aristotle and Wittgenstein, as interpreted especially through the thought of Elizabeth Anscombe.