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.

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 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.

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 I’d 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 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.

D.C. Schindler, professor of metaphysics and anthropology, The John Paul II Institute, and author, The Politics of the Real