ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to ascertain the ways in which Alasdair MacIntyre contests Weber's vision of modernity and the modern subject even while accepting many elements of that vision. It begins by exploring those aspects of his thought that both question key assumptions of the Weberian worldview and avoid quandaries marring the perspectives of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. The chapter explores MacIntyre's account of human flourishing and his defence of a conception of ethics which breaks fundamentally with Weber's subjectivism. MacIntyre's Thomist realism excludes the possibility of non-subjectivist pluralism, is inconsistent with the idea of dialectical construction and has as its guiding ideal the surmounting or transcendence of politics. The chapter attempts to draw out some of the broader implications of the author's arguments with and against three thinkers Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre for understanding of the possibilities and challenges of politics in the present. It argues that MacIntyre's celebration of consensual pre-modernity over conflictual modernity is inconsistent.
