Against the self-images of the age – Alasdair MacIntyre

Essays on Ideology and Philosophy

Preface

We are placed at the opening of the work, where MacIntyre establishes the collection as a set of essays written over a decade, unified by a single preoccupation: the self-image that the modern age projects of itself.

MacIntyre begins by stating that the essays in this volume were written between 1958 and 1968. He describes them as “essays in philosophical criticism” that share a common target. That target is what he calls the self-images of the age — the dominant pictures that the present era holds of itself, its own nature, its values, and its possibilities. These self-images, he argues, are not neutral descriptions but are themselves ideological formations that obscure the real character of modern social life. The task of the philosopher, as MacIntyre conceives it here, is to dismantle these self-images by exposing their internal contradictions and their failure to correspond to lived experience.

The preface also positions these essays as a methodological critique of the dominant modes of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world, particularly linguistic analysis and ordinary language philosophy. MacIntyre argues that these philosophical schools have become entirely divorced from the moral and social crises of the age, and have thus become part of the very ideology they should be criticizing. He writes: “The philosopher who believes that the task of philosophy is solely that of clarifying concepts, and who cheerfully suspends judgment about everything outside the classroom, is in danger of serving the established order of things.” The essays that follow are meant to demonstrate that philosophy must re-engage with the concrete historical and social realities that its own methods have taught it to disregard.

This is a crucial opening because it tells the reader that the work is not a systematic treatise but a series of interventions. MacIntyre is not constructing a philosophical system; he is attacking the assumptions that make such systems seem unnecessary. The self-images of the age are not simply false beliefs — they are active forces that prevent genuine understanding. The preface thus sets the reader on notice: each essay will take a specific self-image — whether in politics, ethics, psychology, or religion — and show how it functions to conceal the truth about modern life.

Chapter One: The Ideas of 1914

We are in the first substantive chapter, where MacIntyre examines the dominant political ideologies of the First World War and traces their survival into the present.

MacIntyre begins by recalling the celebrated phrase “the ideas of 1914” — a term used by German intellectuals during the First World War to distinguish German culture from the supposedly decadent Western liberal ideas of 1789. He shows how these ideas were not merely wartime propaganda but expressed a deep ideological divide that has persisted. On one side stood the Anglo-French tradition of liberal individualism, which prized individual rights, parliamentary democracy, and free markets. On the other stood the German tradition of collectivist nationalism, which valorized the state, organic community, and duty over individual freedom. The war, MacIntyre argues, was fought not only by armies but by these competing self-images of what a properly ordered human society should be.

The key argument unfolds as MacIntyre traces what happened to these two ideological camps after 1918. Liberal individualism, having won the war, quickly became the dominant self-image of the victorious powers. Yet it was hollow. MacIntyre writes: “The victory of liberal individualism was a victory of a set of ideas which had lost their intellectual and moral substance.” The slogans of freedom and democracy were retained, but the social conditions that had given them meaning — small-scale property ownership, genuine local communities, meaningful work — had been destroyed by the very industrial capitalism that liberal ideology defended. Meanwhile, the collectivist ideas of 1914 were taken over not by the defeated German Empire but by the revolutionary movements of the left, particularly Leninism. The result was that the twentieth century became a struggle between a hollow liberalism and a deformed collectivism, both derived from the original clash of 1914.

What matters here is MacIntyre’s method: he is not simply recounting intellectual history but showing how these ideological self-images continue to structure political debate in the present. The liberal versus collectivist opposition remains the dominant framework, but it is a false opposition because both sides share a common failure. Neither offers a vision of human flourishing that corresponds to actual human needs. The “ideas of 1914” are not dead; they are the invisible architecture of modern political consciousness.

Chapter Two: The Relevant Even-Swap Argument

We move to a more specifically philosophical essay, where MacIntyre analyzes a standard argument in contemporary moral philosophy and exposes its ideological function.

The chapter opens by identifying a pattern of argument that MacIntyre calls the “relevant even-swap” argument. This is a form of reasoning common in both academic ethics and everyday moral discourse. The structure is simple: when someone makes a moral claim — say, that capitalism is unjust — the listener demands that the speaker “swap” their proposed alternative into the same situation and show that it would produce better results. For example, if you criticize market competition, you must demonstrate that some alternative economic arrangement would not produce worse outcomes. The argument assumes that the current state of affairs is the neutral baseline, and any alternative must prove itself superior under the same conditions.

MacIntyre’s analysis proceeds by showing how this apparently neutral argumentative form actually smuggles in substantive ideological commitments. He writes: “The relevant even-swap argument presupposes a picture of the world in which all significant alternatives are already on the table, and in which the existing order is the standard against which everything must be measured.” This is not a logical requirement but a social assumption. It freezes the present as the horizon of possibility, making radical criticism appear irrational by definition. The person who demands a “swap” is not engaging in open inquiry; they are enforcing a prohibition against thinking beyond the given.

The deeper point is that the relevant even-swap argument is a self-image of the age — a way that modern moral philosophy represents itself as reasonable and neutral while actually serving to defend the status quo. MacIntyre connects this to the broader decline of moral philosophy into a purely technical discipline. When philosophers accept the even-swap argument as legitimate, they implicitly accept that the existing social order is the only possible arena for moral reasoning. The result is that ethics becomes an exercise in adjusting the current system rather than questioning its foundations. The chapter is therefore not just a logical criticism but a demonstration of how philosophical method itself can become an ideology.

Chapter Three: The Virtues of the People

We turn now to an essay on the relationship between moral philosophy and the concept of the “virtues”, where MacIntyre examines how modern thinkers have misunderstood the classical tradition.

MacIntyre begins by noting that the word “virtue” has largely disappeared from modern moral vocabulary, except in certain conservative or religious contexts. When it does appear, it is usually tied to the idea of “the people” — the notion that ordinary people possess a kind of practical moral wisdom that intellectuals have lost. MacIntyre traces this idea through several thinkers, from the Romantic celebration of folk wisdom to contemporary appeals to “common sense” morality. The claim is always the same: the virtues are not the invention of philosophers but the inheritance of a community, and the task of ethics is to recover them from the corruption of modern sophistication.

MacIntyre subjects this view to rigorous criticism. He argues that the appeal to “the virtues of the people” is itself a modern invention, a reaction to the breakdown of genuine moral communities. In pre-modern societies, virtues were taught and practiced within stable social roles — the warrior, the farmer, the priest — and were inseparable from those roles. But modern society has destroyed those roles. The “people” to whom contemporary thinkers appeal are not members of a coherent moral community; they are isolated individuals living under capitalism, whose “common sense” is itself largely shaped by the dominant ideology. MacIntyre writes: “The virtues of the people turn out to be the vices of the market, dressed up in homespun language.”

The crucial move is that MacIntyre does not reject the concept of virtue itself. On the contrary, he insists that any adequate moral philosophy must recover a genuine account of the virtues. But this recovery cannot be achieved by nostalgia or appeals to an idealized past. It requires a clear-eyed analysis of what social conditions actually sustain the practice of virtues. The modern age has destroyed those conditions, and the appeal to “the people” is a way of pretending that they still exist. The chapter thus functions as a critique of both modern moral philosophy and its romantic critics, showing that both fail to confront the real structure of modern social life.

Chapter Four: On Having Changed the World

This chapter engages directly with Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” — and subjects it to philosophical scrutiny.

MacIntyre begins by acknowledging the power of Marx’s dictum. It seems to capture something essential about the failure of philosophy to engage with real human suffering. The philosopher who merely interprets the world is complicit in its injustices. But MacIntyre then asks a disturbing question: what if the attempt to change the world, undertaken without adequate interpretation, leads to catastrophe? He writes: “Those who have tried to change the world in the twentieth century have all too often succeeded in changing it for the worse, and their failure has been a failure of interpretation.”

The essay unfolds as a critique of activism as a self-image of the age. MacIntyre argues that the demand for immediate political action, divorced from theoretical understanding, is itself an ideological formation. It reflects the impatience of a society that has lost faith in reflection and substitutes the mere appearance of transformation for genuine change. The activist, like the philosopher he condemns, is trapped in the very world he claims to oppose. His actions are determined by the same categories and assumptions that structure the existing order, because he has not taken the time to understand how that order actually works.

MacIntyre’s conclusion is not a defense of quietism but a call for a different relationship between theory and practice. He insists that genuine transformation requires a deeper kind of interpretation — one that goes beyond both academic abstraction and activist sloganeering. The eleventh thesis is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Changing the world requires understanding it first, and understanding in the deepest sense means grasping the historical and social conditions that make change possible. The chapter thus functions as a warning against the self-image of the revolutionary who believes that action alone is sufficient, while showing that the philosopher who refuses to act is equally trapped.

Chapter Five: The Antecedents of the End of History

In this essay, MacIntyre examines the idea that history has come to an end, or that it is approaching an end — a self-image that has recurred in various forms throughout modern thought.

MacIntyre traces the idea of the end of history from its Hegelian origins through its Marxist transformations to its contemporary manifestations in liberal triumphalism. The core claim is always the same: that the fundamental conflicts of human history have been resolved, and that what remains is merely the working out of a settled framework. For Hegel, this resolution came with the modern state. For Marx, it would come with communism. For contemporary liberals, it has come with liberal democracy and market capitalism. Each version presents itself as the final revelation of history’s meaning.

MacIntyre’s critique is devastating. He shows that each claim to have reached the end of history is actually an attempt to freeze the present into permanence, to declare that the current order is not merely one historical moment among others but the culmination of all development. He writes: “Every assertion that history has ended is a political act, an attempt to foreclose the future and to declare that no legitimate alternative to the present exists.” The end-of-history thesis is thus the ultimate self-image of the age: a way of denying the possibility of radical change by claiming that change is no longer necessary.

The deeper argument is that the end-of-history thesis is not simply a philosophical error but a social pathology. It reflects a society that has lost the capacity to imagine a fundamentally different future. By declaring the present as the final stage of development, it makes any serious criticism appear as a regression to an earlier, superseded stage of history. MacIntyre’s analysis therefore serves to expose how modern liberalism, despite its rhetoric of openness and progress, has become the most rigid and conservative ideology of all — one that cannot even admit the possibility of its own supersession.

Chapter Six: The Idea of a History of Philosophy

LOCATE: We move from the end-of-history thesis to a methodological inquiry into how philosophy itself ought to be understood historically — a chapter that asks whether the history of philosophy is a mere record of errors or something more substantive.

PRESENT: MacIntyre opens by confronting the dominant view among analytic philosophers that the history of philosophy is largely a story of mistakes. On this view, philosophical progress consists in the gradual elimination of error, and past philosophers are of interest only insofar as they anticipated or failed to anticipate current positions. Against this, MacIntyre argues that the history of philosophy must be understood as a dialectical enterprise. The key idea is that philosophical problems are not timeless puzzles awaiting solution but are instead embedded in particular historical contexts, and that the formulation of these problems changes over time. He writes:

“The history of philosophy is not a museum of discarded errors, but a series of attempts to articulate and to resolve the conflicts which arise from the nature of human thought and action.”

This leads MacIntyre to distinguish between two types of philosophical inquiry. The first is systematic philosophy, which aims to provide a comprehensive and final account of reality, knowledge, and morality. The second is critical philosophy, which examines the assumptions and methods of existing philosophical systems. But the crucial point is that these two are not separable: every systematic philosophy contains implicit critical judgments, and every critical philosophy presupposes some systematic commitments. The history of philosophy is therefore not a linear progression but a series of confrontations between rival frameworks, each of which claims to have overcome the limitations of its predecessors. The task of the historian of philosophy is not merely to catalogue these confrontations but to understand the internal logic that drives them — the way in which each successive position is shaped by its attempt to answer the questions left unresolved by the previous one.

CLARIFY: This chapter functions as a methodological foundation for the entire collection. MacIntyre is resisting both the ahistorical approach of analytic philosophy (which treats past thinkers as potential conversation partners for present debates) and the relativistic approach of historicism (which reduces all philosophy to mere expressions of their time). Instead, he proposes that philosophy is genuinely progressive — not in the sense of approaching a final truth, but in the sense that each major philosopher refines the questions and arguments available to subsequent thinkers. The history of philosophy is thus not an optional extra but an integral part of philosophical reasoning itself.

Chapter Seven: The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past

LOCATE: This chapter deepens the argument of the previous one, focusing specifically on the problem of how contemporary philosophers should relate to the history of their discipline — a question that MacIntyre treats as urgent rather than merely academic.

PRESENT: MacIntyre identifies three dominant contemporary attitudes toward the history of philosophy. The first is the Whig interpretation, which reads the past as a preparation for the present and judges past philosophers by how closely they approximate current views. The second is the antiquarian interpretation, which treats past philosophy as a collection of artifacts to be studied for their own sake, with no relevance to present concerns. The third is the eclectic interpretation, which picks and chooses elements from various historical figures to construct a patchwork position. All three, MacIntyre argues, fail to take the history of philosophy seriously as philosophy. He proposes instead a fourth approach: the contextualist interpretation, which insists that philosophical texts must be understood in the context of the debates and problems that generated them, but which also recognizes that those debates and problems may still be philosophically significant. This means that the historian of philosophy must be both a historian and a philosopher — must understand the social and intellectual context of a text and also be able to evaluate its arguments. The key term here is tradition — a living body of inquiry that develops through time, in which each generation takes up the questions of its predecessors and attempts to answer them more adequately. MacIntyre argues that philosophy is always carried out within some tradition, whether acknowledged or not, and that the pretense of doing philosophy without history is itself a philosophical stance — one that is ultimately unsustainable.

CLARIFY: This chapter makes explicit what was implicit in the earlier chapters: that MacIntyre’s method is itself a form of philosophical argument. He is not simply a historian of ideas; he is developing a philosophical position about the nature of rationality and inquiry. The claim that all philosophy is tradition-bound is not a relativistic one — it does not mean that all traditions are equally valid. On the contrary, MacIntyre argues that traditions can be evaluated by their capacity to explain their own development and to resolve the problems they inherit. The historian of philosophy, properly understood, is therefore engaged in the same enterprise as the systematic philosopher — the pursuit of truth through rational debate, but with the crucial addition that this debate is understood to take place across time, not only in the present.

Chapter Eight: The Character of a Tradition

LOCATE: Having established the importance of tradition, MacIntyre now turns to defining what a tradition actually is, and how it differs from both mere custom and from arbitrary authority.

PRESENT: A tradition, MacIntyre writes, is not simply a set of beliefs inherited from the past. It is an ongoing argument about the goods that constitute that tradition. This means that a living tradition is inherently conflictual — it contains within itself competing interpretations of its own core commitments. The stability of a tradition comes not from uniformity of belief but from a shared sense of what the relevant questions are and what counts as a good answer. The key passage is:

“A tradition is not something that can be possessed or exchanged; it is something that possesses those who participate in it, and it is through participation that they become who they are.”

MacIntyre distinguishes between three stages in the development of a tradition. The first stage is the founding moment, in which a set of beliefs and practices is established in response to specific questions or crises. The second stage is the period of development, in which the tradition elaborates its core commitments, encounters internal and external criticisms, and refines its positions. The third stage is the epistemological crisis, in which the tradition confronts problems that it cannot solve using its own resources. How the tradition responds to this crisis determines whether it will survive, transform, or collapse. A tradition that can recognize its own limitations and incorporate insights from rival traditions demonstrates epistemic superiority over one that cannot. However, MacIntyre is careful to note that this process is not automatic or inevitable — traditions can decay, become rigid, or simply die. The decline of a tradition is marked by the loss of the ability to engage in genuine argument, as positions become hardened into dogmas and the tradition’s original questions are forgotten.

CLARIFY: This chapter provides the conceptual tools for understanding MacIntyre’s broader critique of modern liberalism. If liberalism is a tradition — and MacIntyre argues that it is, despite its own self-understanding as the rejection of tradition — then it can be evaluated by the same criteria. The question becomes whether liberalism is a living tradition capable of sustaining genuine argument about its own goods, or whether it has entered a phase of decline in which its core commitments have become dogmas that can no longer be questioned. This sets the stage for the later chapters, in which MacIntyre will apply this framework to specific political and moral questions.

Chapter Twelve: The Social Context of the Virtues

LOCATE: This chapter is a sustained analysis of the moral philosophy of Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, examining how their conception of the virtues is embedded within a specific social order.

PRESENT: MacIntyre begins by arguing that the Scottish thinkers, particularly Hume and Adam Smith, understood the virtues not as abstract principles but as qualities that enable individuals to function effectively within a particular form of social life. The key concept here is the distinction between “artificial” and “natural” virtues. For Hume, natural virtues are those qualities that are immediately useful or agreeable to ourselves or others — benevolence, generosity, charity. Artificial virtues, by contrast, are those that require the existence of social conventions to be intelligible — justice, property, promise-keeping.

MacIntyre presents Hume’s account of justice with great care. According to Hume, justice is not a natural impulse but a remedy for certain inconveniences that arise from human nature and the conditions of human life. Human beings are naturally partial to themselves and their nearest relations; they also live in conditions of moderate scarcity, where goods are not so abundant that everyone can have whatever they want, nor so scarce that cooperation is impossible. Given these conditions, the only way to secure stable possession of goods is to establish conventions that define property rights. Justice is the virtue of adhering to these conventions.

“The virtue of justice, therefore, is a product of artifice and convention, not of nature; and its motive is not a direct concern for the public good, but a regard for the system of rules that alone makes social cooperation possible.”

Adam Smith, MacIntyre notes, develops this line of thought further. In Smith’s account, the “impartial spectator” is the internalized voice of social judgment — the mechanism by which individuals come to see their own actions as others would see them. The virtues are those qualities that the impartial spectator approves of, and this approval is grounded in sympathy: the capacity to enter into the feelings of others. Smith’s moral philosophy is thus thoroughly socialized — the moral self is constituted by its relations to others, and moral judgment is a matter of tuning one’s sentiments to the sentiments of the community.

MacIntyre then points to a tension within the Scottish system. On one hand, Hume and Smith treat the virtues as socially embedded — they make sense only within the context of a particular form of commercial society, where property relations, contract, and exchange are the central institutions. On the other hand, they present their account as a universal theory of human nature. The Scottish thinkers believed that commercial society was the natural and universal form of human social life, and that the virtues appropriate to it were the virtues appropriate to human beings as such.

CLARIFY: MacIntyre’s presentation of the Scottish Enlightenment serves a strategic purpose within his larger argument. He wants to show that even the thinkers most commonly associated with the modern rejection of tradition — Hume, Smith, the empiricists — were in fact operating within a tradition of moral inquiry that took the social context of the virtues as central. The problem, as MacIntyre sees it, is that the Scottish thinkers failed to recognize the historical contingency of their own social order. They naturalized commercial society and its virtues, treating them as if they were timeless truths of human nature. This failure is not merely a theoretical error; it has practical consequences. If the virtues of commercial society are mistaken for the virtues of humanity as such, then it becomes impossible to ask whether commercial society itself might be a moral catastrophe — whether it might systematically corrupt the virtues it claims to cultivate.

Chapter Thirteen: The Idea of a Moral Tradition

LOCATE: In this pivotal chapter, MacIntyre synthesizes the arguments of the preceding chapters to construct a positive account of what a moral tradition is and how it functions as a vehicle of rational inquiry.

PRESENT: MacIntyre opens by rejecting two common conceptions of tradition. The first is the conservative or Burkean view, which treats tradition as an unchanging body of inherited wisdom that must be preserved against innovation. On this view, the authority of tradition is grounded in its antiquity and continuity; questioning it is a form of impiety. The second is the liberal or Enlightenment view, which treats tradition as the enemy of reason — as prejudice, superstition, and the dead hand of the past. Both views, MacIntyre argues, are caricatures. They mistake the decadent or degenerated forms of tradition for the real thing.

A living moral tradition, MacIntyre argues, is precisely an “historically extended, socially embodied argument” about the goods that constitute the tradition. It is not a monolith but a debate — a continuing conversation in which participants disagree about the interpretation of their shared inheritance, about the relative importance of different goods, and about how to respond to new circumstances. The unity of a tradition is not the unity of unanimity but the unity of a common set of questions, texts, and exemplars that define the terms of the debate.

“A living tradition is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.”

MacIntyre then introduces a crucial distinction between “authority” and “power” . Authority within a tradition is exercised by those who have mastered the tradition’s habits of thought and practice — who can participate in its arguments with skill and judgment. This authority is not arbitrary; it is grounded in the recognition by other participants that this person knows what they are talking about. Power, by contrast, is the capacity to enforce compliance regardless of understanding. In a healthy tradition, authority and power are aligned: those who have authority also have the power to guide the tradition’s development. In a decadent tradition, they become separated: power falls into the hands of those who lack authority, and the tradition becomes a hollow shell.

A tradition can die in two ways. The first is by “epistemic closure” — when the tradition becomes so rigid that it can no longer respond to new challenges or incorporate new insights. The second is by “dissolution” — when the tradition becomes so fragmented that its members can no longer agree on what counts as a good reason or a valid argument. Both forms of death are forms of failure: the tradition ceases to be a vehicle of rational inquiry and becomes a mere artifact, preserved by inertia or enforced by power.

CLARIFY: This chapter is the theoretical heart of the book. MacIntyre is offering a rival account of rationality to the one that dominates modern philosophy. On the standard modern view, rationality is a matter of following procedures that are neutral between competing traditions — logic, evidence, argument from shared premises. MacIntyre rejects this picture. He argues that all reasoning takes place within some tradition, and that there is no neutral standpoint from which traditions can be evaluated. But this is not relativism, because traditions can be compared on rational grounds: one tradition can show itself superior to another by demonstrating its capacity to solve problems that the other tradition cannot solve, or by incorporating the other tradition’s insights into a more comprehensive framework. The standard of rationality is not a set of timeless procedures but the history of inquiry itself — the narrative of how traditions have succeeded or failed in their own terms.

Chapter Fourteen: The Claims of Theosophy

We are in the final major chapter of the collection, where MacIntyre examines a specific contemporary movement — theosophy — as a case study of a self-image that fails to understand its own historicity and rationality. The chapter is an extended critique of the theosophical claim to possess a universal, esoteric wisdom that transcends particular traditions.

MacIntyre begins by locating theosophy within a broader pattern: the attempt to escape from the particularities of history and tradition into a realm of timeless truth. Theosophy claims to offer a synthesis of all religions, a secret doctrine that underlies all esoteric teachings. But MacIntyre argues that this claim is incoherent on its own terms. He writes:

“Theosophy claims to be a universal religion, but it is in fact a particular and local phenomenon, a product of the late nineteenth-century Western esoteric revival, and its claim to universality is a mask for its failure to come to terms with its own historicity.”

The theosophist, MacIntyre argues, mistakes the form of universality for its substance. By claiming access to a secret tradition that transcends all particular traditions, theosophy avoids the hard work of engaging with actual historical traditions on their own terms. It substitutes a vague syncretism for genuine dialogue, and it evades the question of truth by retreating into a realm of private illumination. The theosophical claim to possess a higher knowledge is not a claim that can be tested or falsified; it is a claim that insulates itself from criticism by appeal to authority and mystery.

MacIntyre goes further: theosophy is not merely mistaken about its own nature; it is a symptom of a deeper cultural malady. It represents the desire for certainty without commitment, for universality without particularity. In a culture that has lost confidence in its own traditions, theosophy offers a counterfeit transcendence — a way of feeling spiritual without having to belong to any actual community of belief and practice. The theosophist is not a person of faith, but a person who wants the benefits of faith without its costs.

The chapter serves as a concrete illustration of the book’s overall argument. The theosophist’s self-image — as a bearer of universal wisdom — is a false one, because it denies the historical and tradition-bound character of all rational inquiry. And this false self-image leads to practical failures: the theosophist cannot enter into genuine dialogue with other traditions, cannot learn from history, cannot be corrected by experience. Theosophy is, in MacIntyre’s view, a paradigm case of the kind of intellectual pathology that the book as a whole seeks to diagnose. It is a warning: the rejection of tradition does not lead to enlightenment, but to a rootless and self-deceptive form of spirituality.

Chapter Fifteen: The End of Ideology and the End of Religion

The final chapter of the collection brings together the themes of ideology, religion, and the nature of rational commitment. MacIntyre examines the claim — widespread in the 1950s and 1960s — that ideology has come to an end, and that the age of grand political and religious systems is over. He argues that this claim is itself an ideology, and a dangerous one.

The “end of ideology” thesis, MacIntyre notes, was advanced by thinkers such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. It held that the great ideological conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — between capitalism and socialism, liberalism and conservatism — had been resolved, or at least rendered obsolete, by the welfare state, economic growth, and the rise of pragmatic, technocratic politics. The future, on this view, belonged not to ideologues but to managers and experts who could solve problems without reference to ultimate values.

But MacIntyre argues that the “end of ideology” is itself an ideological claim. It is not a neutral description of social reality but a normative vision of what society should be like — a society without fundamental disagreement, where politics is reduced to administration. And this vision serves the interests of those who benefit from the existing order. The “end of ideology” is a way of ruling out radical alternatives without having to argue against them on their merits.

MacIntyre extends this critique to religion. The “end of religion” thesis — the secularization thesis — makes a similar mistake. It assumes that religion is a premodern survival that will inevitably disappear with the advance of science and reason. But MacIntyre argues that this assumption is not a neutral hypothesis but a piece of ideological self-congratulation. It allows secular intellectuals to see themselves as the vanguard of history, while dismissing religious believers as backward or irrational.

The key point is that both the “end of ideology” and the “end of religion” theses share a common structure: they predict the disappearance of forms of life that they find objectionable, and they present this disappearance as inevitable. But predictions of this kind, MacIntyre argues, are not predictions at all; they are performative utterances, ways of authorizing one’s own position and delegitimizing others. They are the self-images of an age that does not want to admit that it too has commitments, that it too is ideological, that it too is religious in the sense of being founded on ultimate values that cannot be scientifically proven.

The book ends on a sobering note. The age of the self-images is not over; it is only changing form. The task of the philosopher is not to declare the end of ideology or the end of religion, but to understand the actual commitments that animate our culture — to see them for what they are, and to judge them by standards of truth and rationality that are not themselves merely the products of the age. MacIntyre does not claim to have completed this task, only to have begun it. The essays in this collection are offered as contributions to a continuing inquiry, one that must be taken up anew by each generation. The final sentence of the book is not a conclusion but an opening: the work of understanding the self-images of the age remains to be done.