This is a book for our political moment. As Doug Schoen (The End of Authority, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) warned us nearly a decade ago, we are facing a wholesale lack of trust in our institutions. This problem has deep roots within liberalism, and it cannot be solved by tweaking the liberal paradigm, in which different conceptions of the good exclude each other as well as a nonexclusive common good. The essence of liberalism is contained in the language of "values," which in politics serves as wedges to divide people, as Jo Renee Formicola has shown (The Politics of Values, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Scholars are beginning to imagine a postliberal paradigm, preeminently John Milbank and Adrian Pabst in their Politics of Virtue (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The liberal approach is nearing its end, yet at the moment its tentacles seem impossible to escape. In no small part this because its assumptions are embedded in our political language, in the language of "values," as well as terms like "morality," "sovereignty," and "secular." Only a thoroughgoing survey, reaching back to the early modern era, can uncover the nature of liberalism's basic assumptions and diagnose its breakdown.
This book therefore complements and grounds critiques of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018). This book does so by questioning values language, building on Edward Andrew's The Genealogy of Values (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), the only monograph on the topic in English. Central to liberalism is a denial of a good that is qualitatively superior to individual interest: individuals disagree about the good - they have different values - and the state protects us from fighting each other. By contrast, a postliberal political philosophy is able to understand the common good as friendship and social trust, which are built up by loyalty. The pursuit of "values" and of "morality" in liberalism actually distorts and harms the common good as friendship: if I am loyal to certain impersonal "values," that means I am not loyal to you. Political thinkers have, however, systematically ignored the phenomenon of friendship over the past five hundred years.
No other book on liberalism connects so many dots. The target audience is graduate students and scholars. Topics covered along the way in this work include the shortcomings of the concept of "sovereignty" and the invention of "morality" as its supplement, the inappropriateness of the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, the true nature of the secular and the sacred, the necessarily symbolic expression of the common good, and the false conceptualization of "religion" and politics.
Show moreThis is a book for our political moment. As Doug Schoen (The End of Authority, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) warned us nearly a decade ago, we are facing a wholesale lack of trust in our institutions. This problem has deep roots within liberalism, and it cannot be solved by tweaking the liberal paradigm, in which different conceptions of the good exclude each other as well as a nonexclusive common good. The essence of liberalism is contained in the language of "values," which in politics serves as wedges to divide people, as Jo Renee Formicola has shown (The Politics of Values, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Scholars are beginning to imagine a postliberal paradigm, preeminently John Milbank and Adrian Pabst in their Politics of Virtue (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The liberal approach is nearing its end, yet at the moment its tentacles seem impossible to escape. In no small part this because its assumptions are embedded in our political language, in the language of "values," as well as terms like "morality," "sovereignty," and "secular." Only a thoroughgoing survey, reaching back to the early modern era, can uncover the nature of liberalism's basic assumptions and diagnose its breakdown.
This book therefore complements and grounds critiques of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018). This book does so by questioning values language, building on Edward Andrew's The Genealogy of Values (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), the only monograph on the topic in English. Central to liberalism is a denial of a good that is qualitatively superior to individual interest: individuals disagree about the good - they have different values - and the state protects us from fighting each other. By contrast, a postliberal political philosophy is able to understand the common good as friendship and social trust, which are built up by loyalty. The pursuit of "values" and of "morality" in liberalism actually distorts and harms the common good as friendship: if I am loyal to certain impersonal "values," that means I am not loyal to you. Political thinkers have, however, systematically ignored the phenomenon of friendship over the past five hundred years.
No other book on liberalism connects so many dots. The target audience is graduate students and scholars. Topics covered along the way in this work include the shortcomings of the concept of "sovereignty" and the invention of "morality" as its supplement, the inappropriateness of the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, the true nature of the secular and the sacred, the necessarily symbolic expression of the common good, and the false conceptualization of "religion" and politics.
Show morePhilip J. Harold is dean of Constantin College of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas and was formerly professor and associate dean in the School of Informatics, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Robert Morris University. His previous books include Other People’s Money: Politics in Pennsylvania and Prophetic Politics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Sanctification of Suffering.
A compelling argument that the individualism which vitiates
liberalism is not so simple as an attachment to a false theory of
human nature, but rather is found in our own deeply rooted
commitments, as if to something completely obvious, to delusory and
unstable notions of value, sovereignty, and even morality.
A contribution to the well-established genre of criticisms of
liberalism, Against Values takes as its central target the modern
focus on values and its attendant atomistic and agonistic idea of
the self. In Harold's telling, values replace older organizing
concepts, such as justice and virtue, that emphasized the
relational nature of human association.... The book as a whole
argues for a post-liberal political philosophy that reconstructs
the idea of the common good in terms of friendship, trust, and
loyalty, pointing back to an embedded condition. Recommended.
Graduate students and faculty.
Drawing expertly on an astonishing array of sources--ancient,
modern, and postmodern--Philip Harold proposes a provocative
thesis: the eclipse of the classical language of friendship,
virtue, and the good by the now-dominant language of values is one
of the hidden causes of our current cultural crisis. After this
book, the burden of argument will now fall on those who wish to
defend this language.
One of the great challenges today is the power of technology,
especially social media, that flattens these diverse and
multifaceted relationships which makes the discourse of values
rather than virtues more attractive. It is easy to preach one's
values as a keyboard warrior; less so face-to-face to children's
schoolteacher. How we get out of this dilemma is not clear but at
least Harold has provided us a philosophical genealogy to explain
our "value" situation today. Against Value has done a great service
to clarify why we are in a state of constant disagreement, for we
are looking to the wrong solution. It is not in values where we
will be saved but only in virtue; the recovery of virtue can help
bind our wounded society back together.
Thanks to a careful genealogy hailing back to unexpected ancestors
like Martin Luther, this book deconstructs values-speech. It
reveals how well-meaning people are hoist by their own petard when
their values-speech ultimately encourages the kind of subjectivism,
relativism, and social rivalry that they would like to eliminate.
Harold replaces values with the common good, looked for in
friendship and actuated in loyalty. This is a book I wish I'd
written.
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