ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a broad sketch of Alasdair MacIntyre's narrative. It explains why he thinks ours a new dark age', an unprecedented time of crisis and confusion, and explores his attempt to show a path beyond the iron cage' even while accepting Weber's pessimistic diagnosis. The chapter sets out MacIntyre's narrative of modernity and what he calls the Enlightenment Project. The antinomy between instrumental managerialism and the irrational inner will that he perceived in emotivist culture, and which in turn defines his work, impels the political structures of bureaucratic individualism. MacIntyre's limited grounds for hope rest on an Aristotelian conception of the individual subject and practical activity. MacIntyre's claim that only in local communities committed to the virtues conducive to political deliberation can the human telos, flourishing. The chapter shows that MacIntyre's theory of dialectical construction is far from unproblematic a unitary summum bonum and a perfected deductive science.
