Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was philosophically trained at Manchester University and subsequently taught at Manchester, Leeds University, Oxford University, and the University of Essex before emigrating to the United States in 1970. Since then he has held teaching posts at Brandeis University, Boston University, Vanderbilt University, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame.

By his late teens MacIntyre became sympathetic to Marxism as a theoretical articulation of the failures of contemporary social, economic, and political institutions, resulting in the publication of his first book, Marxism: An Interpretation, at the age of twenty-three. While never giving up his view that modernity merits wide-ranging criticism and that such criticism must come from a rationally defensible theoretical standpoint, he came to believe that Marxism lacked the necessary resources. What is needed, MacIntyre held, is a moral and political philosophy built on an...