Against Values Av Philip J. Harold

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 Renée 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