This essay is Alasdair MacIntyre’s greatest book on political philosophy and stands as a pinnacle of contemporary political thought. It reflects on the fact that animality, dependence, and vulnerability are central states of the human condition. Human beings are not just rational, independent individuals, as the West has come to believe.
Life in society requires what MacIntyre calls the “virtues of acknowledged dependence,” which modernity has forgotten. By reminding, twenty years ago, upon its publication in the United States, that humans are also animals, MacIntyre was ahead of his time. By emphasizing that his rationality and independence as a rational being do not obscure his fundamental dependence on others in communal life, he is now prophetic.
An essential philosophical reflection on the weakness and fragility of the human being.
Born in 1929 and died in 2025, Alasdair MacIntyre was a Scottish philosopher, long a professor and research director at the University of Notre Dame in Illinois and Duke University in North Carolina.