Now in his early sixties and teaching at the University of Notre Dame, the Scottish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has had a distinguished career in America and England as a teacher of philosophy, psychology, and religion. His politics are naïve. As a philosopher he lacks the hard clinicality of English philosophers of his generation. But he writes eloquently, informally, and sympathetically about history, religion, and (by implication) literature, and has a breadth of interest that among his English contemporaries is equalled only by Ernest Gellner and among his juniors on the English Left only by Terry Eagleton and John Milbank.

Eagleton, after an early phase propounding liberationist Catholicism, has spent nearly two decades creating a latitudinarian Marxism that has pursued the complicated diplomacy involved in reconciling itself to the intellectual fantasies that have infected the French, German, and American universities in this period. Younger than Eagleton and broader and more theological than MacIntyre, Milbank is a “Catholic” Anglican who has spent his adult life both incorporating and subverting these fantasies. He has warned theologians to take Nietzsche and Foucault seriously and to understand that science—including social science—is not value-free. He argues that social science must of necessity be grounded in theology—the “queen of the sciences”—and should be recognized to have no autonomy in relation to theology.

Eagleton and Milbank are proponents of anti-empirical and, in a sense, anti-academic thought: Eagleton as a “total Marxist” for whom Marxism has to impregnate all types of academic endeavor, Milbank as a