  Those familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre will immediately recognize the New Traditionalists' narrative. For in its broad structure, it bears a close resemblance to the one that MacIntyre tells in his three books After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (MacIntyre 1984, 1988, and 1990,  respectively).[16] The MacIntyrean narrative is broadly declinist in character, depicting the degeneration of Western moral and political thought in the following four stages.