From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.

Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming.

Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines. “Robert Boyers has written a probing meditation on his experiences within the left-liberal cultural bubble, including his own college, where he has been a formidable presence for decades. He trenchantly challenges assumptions, slogans and nostrums of those excessively certain and proud of their ‘wokeness.’ I found The Tyranny of Virtue to be instructive and inspiring.” —Randall Kennedy, Michael Klein Professor of Law, Harvard University
 

“This book offers a sustained argument against the virtue-signaling and apologetics that have become a major force in the arts and academic life. Boyers's assessment is all the more persuasive for the way it draws on his own long experience as a teacher, critic, and commentator on American culture.” —David Bromwich, Yale University

“The Tyranny of Virtue: think of virtue as an ideal, and yet also as a tyranny, and all that does not belong to that realm must cower and disappear. We live in a time when true virtue seems to have disappeared, and everything that is not virtuous has taken to wearing virtue as a cloak. Of course I might have begun by saying that I know of almost no one but Robert Boyers who can succinctly penetrate and dispose of this masquerade of a period we are living in. So much that is wrong and dark he reveals in extraordinarily limpid prose, showing us that what is out there will not be made right and clear without the courage to name the human mess we have made. The life of the academy should remain sacred, and this book makes a splendid case for it, for the proposition that virtue is permanently hinged to the ideal of truth—that many-hued and illusive reality. The admirable and triumphant accomplishment of this work is that it adds to the ongoingness of our common enterprise. The Tyranny of Virtue is a wonderful book, and I shall always have it nearby.” —Jamaica Kincaid

“For decades Robert Boyers has been a bracing voice of sanity amid the ideological fashions of left and right. The Tyranny of Virtue is vintage Boyers—a brave and timely challenge to the suffocating moral orthodoxy that has come to envelop academic life and much of our broader public discourse as well. No one who cares about the future of independent thought can afford to ignore this book.” —Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, Rutgers University