Editing Alasdair MacIntyre (section)

===''After Virtue'' (1981)===
{{main|After Virtue}}
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Probably his most widely read work, ''After Virtue'' was written when MacIntyre was already in his fifties. Up to then, MacIntyre had been a relatively influential [[Analytic philosophy|analytic philosopher]] of a [[Marxism|Marxist]] bent whose moral inquiries had been conducted in a "piecemeal way, focusing first on this problem and then on that, in a mode characteristic of much analytic philosophy."<ref>''The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. 1'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) viii</ref> However, after reading the works of [[Thomas Kuhn]] and [[Imre Lakatos]] on [[philosophy of science]] and [[epistemology]], MacIntyre was inspired to change the entire direction of his thought, tearing up the manuscript he had been working on and deciding to view the problems of modern moral and [[political philosophy]] "not from the standpoint of liberal [[modernity]], but instead from the standpoint of ... Aristotelian moral and political practice."<ref name= "Tasks_viii">''The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. 1'', viii.</ref>

In general terms, the task of ''After Virtue'' is to account both for the dysfunction of modern moral discourse in modern society and to rehabilitate the alternative that is teleological rationality in Aristotelian [[virtue ethics]]. MacIntyre's [[philippic]] articulates a politics of self-defence for local communities who aspire to protect their traditional way of life from the corrosive capitalist [[Market economy|free market]].<ref name= "BlackledgeKnight2011">{{cite book| first1 =Paul | last1 = Blackledge| first2 =Kelvin | last2 = Knight|title=Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=mfpLYgEACAAJ |access-date= 21 December 2012 |date= 15 June 2011 |publisher=University of Notre Dame Press |isbn= 978-0-268-02225-9 |page= 31}}</ref>