MacIntyre's communitarian political philosophy rests on a neo-Aristotelian account of human psychology in which persons are teleological (purpose-seeking) and other-directed in a strong, reciprocal sense: fulfillment depends on recognition from others whom one esteems, achieved through participation in socially embedded "practices" governed by inherited norms and virtues, rather than through individually willed or contracted arrangements. This account subordinates the individual to community and tradition (contra Enlightenment social-contract and workmanship theories that place the willing individual agent at the center), while treating human nature as malleable and requiring ethical cultivation to move from an untutored state toward the realization of one's telos, and it holds that critical reasoning about ends is possible only from within, not outside, an inherited tradition or practice.
MacIntyre's communitarian political philosophy rests on a neo-Aristotelian account of human psychology in which persons are teleological (purpose-seeking) and other-directed in a strong, reciprocal s…