MacIntyre’s blunt and “extreme” thesis in After Virtue is that ‘morality has been destroyed’ with the advent of modernity. The story he tells is of a decline from the healthy, well-ordered, “premodern, traditional” moral cultures to our own unhealthy, disordered modern moral cultures. The healthy well-ordered cultures of the West are those embodying the classical and Christian ethical tradition of the virtues. For MacIntyre, the big difference between premoderns and moderns is that the former understand statements about one’s duties and obligations, and moral claims and judgments generally, as objective factual statements that can be rationally grounded, whereas we moderns in the main understand moral commitments as subjective, as mere expressions of personal preference, attitude or emotion, and as ultimately grounded in an arbitrary “criterionless choice.” This difference is explained by the fact that the classical and Christian tradition affirms, whereas in the Enlightenment we moderns abandoned, the teleological conception of man.

The moral scheme attending that conception has three elements: a conception of our nature as it is in its untutored state; a conception of our nature as it could and would be if we realized our true potential, i.e., our essence or telos; and the moral precepts that facilitate the transition from the first state to the second. In this scheme, the human being’s essence or telos is understood as part of nature, something real or objective.

Within this scheme it’s possible to justify statements like, ‘you should feed and cultivate these desires, redirect those ones, but starve these others.’ This tradition can justify its demanding ethical precepts by giving as reasons for following them, ‘doing so will help you realize your true nature, your essence; defying them will frustrate your most essential desire to self-actualize.’

When moderns mistakenly abandoned teleology, they were left with only the conception of our untutored nature through which to justify the moral rules they’d inherited. This was impossible, for those moral rules were originally designed to lead us away from that natural state and towards our telos. It was only through the reference to our telos that the moral rules had authority over our untutored nature and its desires. MacIntyre details several failed, doomed, attempts undertaken by the Enlightenment project in its quest to ground morality in our untutored nature. When it definitively failed, our culture was left to conclude that moral commitments must be arbitrary and subjective acts of will. We could no longer give intelligible reasons why some desires should be frustrated, contained, or redirected.

In MacIntyre’s account, there is a stark difference between the cultures that had morality and our modern ones that don’t, in terms of their social structures, and corresponding differences in how they conceive the self. Cultures that had morality saw the social roles people found themselves inhabiting— “brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe”—as imposing objective obligations upon them that were impossible to “evade.” Moderns, by contrast, see “the essence of moral agency” precisely in “the capacity of the self to evade” identification with the social roles it’s thrown into, and thus to evade also the obligations that come with them. For MacIntyre, morality was possible and actual in the social structures of the premodern traditional societies, where the individual was demandingly tied to his role; it was lost in modernity when he was liberated from it. MacIntyre explicitly contrasts his account of modernity’s development with the standard liberationist account: what he sees as the loss of morality, is celebrated historically for the most part not as loss, but as selfcongratulatory gain, as the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at it birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology.

"It will never be a good world," Baxter often heard men say, "while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people's sores. It will never be well with us till we have Parliaments of countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants."

"The King and his party being conquered by the sword," White wrote, "I believe the sword may justly remove the power from him and settle it in its original fountain next under God - the people." He held that all laws made since the Norman Conquest which were contrary to equity should be abolished.... He objected not to Charles I as a person but to the kingly office.

"The ground of the late war between the King and you [Parliament] was a contest whether he or you should exercise the supreme power over us," declared a Leveller petition a week after the rendezvous at Ware; "so it's vain to expect a settlement of peace amongst us until that point be clearly and justly determined, that there can be no liberty in any nation where the law-giving power is not solely in the people or their representatives." "Is not all the controversy, whose slaves the poor shall be?" asked the Leveller pamphlet, The Mournfull Cries of Many Thousand Poore Tradesmen in January 1648.

Turning to the field of mathematics and science, and especially that twilight world of alchemy and magic which historians are more and more coming to recognize as of crucial importance in the origins of modern science...