Against Values

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.