"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
