There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing in their actions, often partially and in a variety of different ways, the very same conceptual changes which at the level of philosophical theory are articulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, by Diderot and Condorcet, by Hume and Adam Smith and Kant. There ought not to be two histories, of political and moral action and one of political and moral theories, because there are not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-ladden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 61.