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 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. * Choice Reviews * 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 ones values as a keyboard warrior; less so face-to-face to childrens 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. * VoegelinView * 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 Id written. -- Rémi Brague, author of Curing Mad Truths 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. -- Michael Pakaluk, Catholic University of America Drawing expertly on an astonishing array of sourcesancient, modern, and postmodernPhilip 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. -- D.C. Schindler, professor of metaphysics and anthropology, The John Paul II Institute, and author, The Politics of the Real
