Understanding contemporary political life requires zooming out to the big picture presuppositions of modernity. Modernity comes in many shades and histories. Many traditions like to think they can help overcome the pathologies of modernity. But they operate within its frame: The nation-state and capitalism being just two institutional forms we cannot quite escape. Characterising the nature of modernity has been the greatest philosophical prize at least since Hegel. Is it emancipatory? Or does it unleash another dialectic of oppression? What kind of moral life does it make possible? What are its contradictions?

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, passed away in May. He was an unsurpassed diagnostician of modernity, sharper than his more feted contemporaries like Habermas, Taylor and Foucault. His career is a distressingly rare model of what genuine philosophical seeking looks like. He learnt from every stream of thought and refused all fads and fashions. It is not an accident that his brilliant collection of essays is called Against the Self-Images of the Age. Almost everything he wrote was luminous, deep or profound. Every topic he touched — moral philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, history of ideas, philosophy of science, sociology — was transformed by his interventions. He did not settle for the easy comforts of a single theory. He resisted the temptations of self-satisfied cleverness, where you win an argument but miss the point. His method, if it can be called that, was to often draw attention to the deep and hidden presuppositions of any claim. At every turn, saying: Have you thought of that?

His masterpiece, After Virtue, published in 1981, anticipates many of the........

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