Against Values: How to Talk About the Good in a Postliberal Era [Paperback]

Todays wholesale lack of trust in our institutions is a problem with deep roots in liberalism, and it cannot be solved by tweaking a liberal paradigm in which different conceptions of the good create conflict that is resolved by a sovereign state without reference to a nonexclusive common good. Ultimately, the essence of liberalism is contained in the language of values which serve as wedges to divide people.

Philip J. Harold takes this problem head-on with a thoroughgoing survey, reaching back to the early modern era, to uncover the nature of liberalisms basic assumptions and diagnose its breakdown. As opposed to traditional liberal denial of a good superior to individual interest, Harold proposes a postliberal political philosophy able to understand the common good as friendship and social trust built up by loyalty. While critiquing values language, Harold also addresses the concept of sovereignty and the invention of morality as its supplement, the inappropriate 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.

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 Harolds 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 poslÚ