Alasdair Maclntyre: An Alternative to Individualism

Abstract

From introduction: "Alasdair MacIntyre is a key figure in the Liberalism-Communitarianism debate, one of the most important and fruitful in the field of Moral and Political Philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. In spite of his resistance to being labeled as a ‘communitarianist’, MacIntyre has been considered one of the most important representatives (with others like Walzer, Sandel, Taylor, Etzioni, et al.) of this current, one that developed to a great extent as a response to Rawls’ Liberalism in his book A Theory of Justice (1971). One of the most important points of Communitarianism is its critique of the liberal view of the self and Ethics and Politics, that is to say, a critique of an individualistic view of the human being (an idea maintained by MacIntyre throughout his intellectual evolution). MacIntyre’s thought has been studied from many points of view, but there is no research on his global critique and alternative to Individualism. For that reason, the aim of this paper is to study and analyze such an alternative. The questions that we have had to answer are two: 1) Which are the concepts on which MacIntyre bases his alternative to Individualism?, 2) Does this alternative overcome Individualism? "(...)