In recent years, Alasdair MacIntyre has supplemented his longstanding critique of the liberal nation-state with a defense, grounded largely in an interpretation of the writings of Aquinas, of the politics of the common good as embodied exclusively in local communities. Even after MacIntyre's account of local politics has been clarified and distinguished from the distortions of some of his critics, there remain weaknesses, chief among which are that the local communities he promotes are pre- or subpolitical and that his hasty dismissal of modern politics involves the sort of caricature of existing political realities alien to Aquinas's prudential assessment of regimes.