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Against Fairness
Stephen T. Asma
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From the school yard to the workplace, there’s no charge more damning than “you’re being unfair!” Born out of democracy and raised in open markets, fairness has become our de facto modern creed. The very symbol of American ethics—Lady Justice—wears a blindfold as she weighs the law on her impartial scale. In our zealous pursuit of fairness, we have banished our urges to like one person more than another, one thing over another, hiding them away as dirty secrets of our humanity. In Against Fairness, polymath philosopher Stephen T. Asma drags them triumphantly back into the light. Through playful, witty, but always serious arguments and examples, he vindicates our unspoken and undeniable instinct to favor, making the case that we would all be better off if we showed our unfair tendencies a little more kindness—indeed, if we favored favoritism.
 
Conscious of the egalitarian feathers his argument is sure to ruffle, Asma makes his point by synthesizing a startling array of scientific findings, historical philosophies, cultural practices, analytic arguments, and a variety of personal and literary narratives to give a remarkably nuanced and thorough understanding of how fairness and favoritism fit within our moral architecture. Examining everything from the survival-enhancing biochemistry that makes our mothers love us to the motivating properties of our “affective community,” he not only shows how we favor but the reasons we should. Drawing on thinkers from Confucius to Tocqueville to Nietzsche, he reveals how we have confused fairness with more noble traits, like compassion and open-mindedness. He dismantles a number of seemingly egalitarian pursuits, from classwide Valentine’s Day cards to civil rights, to reveal the envy that lies at their hearts, going on to prove that we can still be kind to strangers, have no prejudice, and fight for equal opportunity at the same time we reserve the best of what we can offer for those dearest to us.
 
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American Values, Religious Voices
100 Days. 100 Letters
Andrea L. Weiss and Lisa M. Weinberger
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans questioned how to respond to the results and the deep divisions in our country exposed by the campaign. Many people of faith turned to their religious communities for guidance and support. Many looked for ways to take action. In November 2016, biblical scholar Andrea L. Weiss and graphic designer Lisa M. Weinberger teamed up to create an innovative response: a national nonpartisan campaign that used letters and social media to highlight core American values connected to our diverse religious traditions.
 
American Values, Religious Voices: 100 Days, 100 Letters is a collection of letters written by some of America’s most accomplished and thoughtful scholars of religion during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. While the letters are addressed to the president, vice president, and members of the 115th Congress and Trump administration, they speak to a broad audience of Americans looking for wisdom and encouragement at this tumultuous time in our nation’s history.
 
This unique volume assembles the 100 letters, plus four new supplemental essays and many of the graphic illustrations that enhanced the campaign.
 
Published near the midway point of the Trump presidency, this book showcases a wide range of ancient sacred texts that pertain to our most pressing contemporary issues. At a time of great division in our country, this post-election project models how people of different backgrounds can listen to and learn from one another. The letters offer insight and inspiration, reminding us of the enduring values that make our nation great.
 
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Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate
Free Speech and the Inculcation of Values
Robert Wheeler Lane
Temple University Press, 1995
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 1995 "What makes Lane's approach unique is that he weaves together different perspectives on the nature of school into a very colorful but informative and lucid tapestry that seeks the outer limits of free expression within the boundaries of the school context, always with an eye toward promoting the goal of inculcation of values, a worthy end for students and school officials alike." --Samuel M. Davis, Allen Post Professor of Law, University of Georgia *In a 1969 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the suspension of student for protesting the Vietnam War violated the First Amendment. *In 1972, the U.S. court of appeals upheld the suspension of black high school students for protesting the playing of "Dixie" at a pep rally. *In 1986, a U.S. district court ruled that the suspension of a student for directing a vulgar gesture at one of his school teachers in a fast-food restaurant was unconstitutional. On what grounds do public school students merit First Amendment protection? These three examples illustrate the broad range of litigation that has attempted to answer this question. Robert Wheeler Lane reviews the obstacles of this important issue and suggests a mix of protection and autonomy for students. Pulling together evidence about the aims of public education, the changing legal status of children, and the values underlying freedom of expression, Lane debates the relationship between constitutional litigation and the dual pursuits of academic excellence and classroom order. Ultimately, utilizing both lower court and Supreme Court decisions, he finds that independent student expression deserves considerable constitutional protection; student expression assisted by school officials (such as school-funded student newspapers) should be subject to some control; and nonstudent expression (such as a school's selection of library books) should be left largely to the school's discretion. His conclusions suggest that in forging First Amendment protection for public school students, strongly held positions need not be extreme.
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Boggs
A Comedy of Values
Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money.

"Lawrence Weschler, who evidently admires [Boggs]-something not difficult to do-has written what may be the most extraordinary biography imaginable: "weird," to use a favourite Boggs word. It does something towards changing our entire outlook on money and its uses. And the reader is left with an uneasy feeling that anything in this world can be created by drawing it." —Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph

"As ideal a subject matter as money is for Boggs' genius, Boggs is as ideal a topic for Weschler's considerable talents. . . . A writer any less lucid than Weschler would smudge the lines, making of Boggs a counterculture caricature or a high-art huckster. And a writer any less confident would knock the balance, making academic mud pies of Boggs' enlightened chaos." —Jonathon Keats, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"[A] witty and engaging chronicle. . . . Weschler's fascinating account of the artist as agent provocateur demonstrates both the significance of Boggs's art and his determination to continue his unusual critique of the idea of money." —Henry Wessells, Washington Post Book World

"[A] witty, excellently written account of a bizarre and fascinating snippet of modern life." —Paul Ormerod, Times Higher Education Supplement

"The book, like the artist, challenges people to pause and consider the extent to which the economic bedrock of everyday life is in part a confusing welter of artistic abstractions. It's a work that is at once informative, entertaining, and provocative-a reading experience, one might say, of rather good value." —Toby Lester, Atlantic Monthly

"[A] fascinating tale, especially in these days of fluctuating currency rates, the euro, and inexplicable Net-stock valuations." —Paul Lukas, Fortune

Lawrence Weschler, a recipient of the prestigious Lannan Literary Award for 1998, is the author of numerous books, including Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas, and Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Class and Conformity
A Study in Values
Melvin Kohn
University of Chicago Press, 1989
First published in 1969 and augmented by the author with a new essay in 1977, Class and Conformity remains a model of sociological craftsmanship. Kohn's work marshals evidence from three studies to show a decided connection between social class and values. He emphasizes that occupation fosters either self-direction or conformity in people, depending upon the amount of freedom from supervision, the complexity of the task, and the variety of work that the job entails. The extent of parents' self-direction on the job further determines the value placed on self-direction for their children; thus, Kohn finds, is the most critical and pervasive factor distinguishing children raised in different socioeconomic classes.
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Common Values
Sissela Bok
University of Missouri Press, 2002
In Common Values, now with a new preface,Bok writes eloquently and clearly while combining moral theory with practical ethics, demonstrating how moral values apply to all facets of life—personal, professional, domestic, and international. Drawing on a great deal of historical material, Bok also includes in her examination consideration of the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights; the World Parliament of Religions; the publication of Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II's proclamation on morality; and the International Commission of Global Governance. Bok's defense of shared morality addresses a crucial topic for our time.
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Cultural Persistence
Continuity in Meaning and Moral Responsibility Among the Bearlake Athapaskans
Scott Rushforth
University of Arizona Press, 1991
The Bearlake Athapaskan-speaking Indians of Canada's Northwest Territories have valued industriousness, generosity, individual autonomy, and emotional restraint for many generations. They also highly esteem "control" in human thought and behavior. The latter value integrates the others in a coherent framework of moral responsibility that persists as a central feature of Bearlake culture. Rushforth here provides an ethnographic description and analysis of these beliefs and values, which considers their relationship to examples of Bearlake social behavior.
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Culture
A Problem That Cannot Be Solved
Charles W. Nuckolls
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the conflict between the ideals of individualism and community defines American culture. In this groundbreaking new work, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls discovers that every culture consists of such paradoxes, thus making culture a problem that cannot be solved. He does, however, find much creative tension in these unresolvable opposites.
    Nuckolls presents three fascinating case studies that demonstrate how values often are expressed in the organization of social roles. First he treats the Micronesian Ifaluks’ opposition between cooperation and self-gratification by examining the nature versus nurture debate. Nuckolls then shifts to the values of community and individual adventure by looking at the conflicts in the identities of public figures in Oklahoma. Finally, he investigates the cultural significance in the diagnostic system and practices of psychiatry in the United States. Nuckolls asserts that psychiatry treats genders differently, assigning dependence to women and independence to men and, in some cases, diagnoses the extreme forms of these values as disorders.    
    Nuckolls elaborates on the theory of culture that he introduced in his previous book, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, which proposed that the desire to resolve conflicts is central to cultural knowledge. In Culture: A Problem that Cannot Be Solved, Nuckolls restores the neglected social science concept of values, which addresses both knowledge and motivation. As a result, he brings together cognition and psychoanalysis, as well as sociology and psychology, in his study of cultural processes.

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Culture and Well-Being
Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics
Alberto Corsin Jimenez
Pluto Press, 2008
The concept of well-being has emerged as a key category of social and political thought, especially in the fields of moral and political philosophy, development studies, and economics.



This book takes a critical look at the notion of well-being by examining what well-being means, or could mean, to people living in a number of different regions including Sudan, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, India, Sierra Leone, and the UK.



The contributors take issue with some of the assumptions behind Western concepts of well-being. They explore what characterizes a "good life" and how this idea has been affected by globalization and neoliberalism.



The book makes a major contribution to social theory by presenting new analytical models that make sense of the changing shapes of people's life and ethical values.

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Dance of Values
Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project
Elena Vogman
Diaphanes, 2018
Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians, and philosophers to the present day. Dance of Values aims to conjure the phantom of Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s archival body. This “visual instruction in the dialectical method,” as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than five hundred pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections, and extensive quotations. Dance of Values explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary and nonlinear state of its material. Published here for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented in this volume not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.
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Educational Goods
Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making
Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education—what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve?
 
In Educational Goods, two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin by broadening the language for talking about educational policy: “educational goods” are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that children develop for their own benefit and that of others; “childhood goods” are the valuable experiences and freedoms that make childhood a distinct phase of life. Balancing those, and understanding that not all of them can be measured through traditional methods, is a key first step. From there, they show how to think clearly about how those goods are distributed and propose a method for combining values and evidence to reach decisions. They conclude by showing the method in action, offering detailed accounts of how it might be applied in school finance, accountability, and choice. The result is a reimagining of our decision making about schools, one that will sharpen our thinking on familiar debates and push us toward better outcomes.
 
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The Fame of Gawa
A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society
Nancy D. Munn
Duke University Press, 1992
This new edition of the critically acclaimed The Fame of Gawa—originally published in 1986—makes available for the first time this important work in paperback. The Fame of Gawa is concerned with fundamental practices of value creation on Gawa, a small island off the southeast coast of mainland Papua New Guinea, the inhabitants of which participate in the long-distance kula shell exchange ring. Integrating various aspects of the study of society and culture--including the sociocultural construction of space and time, self-other relations and the body, and moral and political problems of hierarchy and equality—Nancy D. Munn shows that it is through achieving fame in the wider inter-island world that the Gawan community asserts its own internal viablity.
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Food for Change
The Politics and Values of Social Movements
Jeff Pratt and Pete Luetchford
Pluto Press, 2013

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.

Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.

Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford and other contributors explore the key political and economic questions of food through the everyday experience and vivid insights of farmers and consumers, using fieldwork from case studies in four European countries (France, Spain, Italy and England). Food for Change is an insightful consideration of connections between food and wider economic relations and draws on a rich vein of anthropological writing on the topic.

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Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism
Max Scheler
Northwestern University Press, 1973
A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
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Gender Differences in Public Opinion
Values and Political Consequences
Mary-Kate Lizotte
Temple University Press, 2020

In this era in which more women are running for public office—and when there is increased activism among women—understanding gender differences on political issues has become critical. In her cogent study, Mary-Kate Lizotte argues that assessing the gender gap in public support for policies through a values lens provides insight into American politics today. There is ample evidence that men and women differ in their value endorsements—even when taking into account factors such as education, class, race, income, and party identification.

In Gender Differences in Public Opinion, Lizotte utilizes nationally representative data, mainly from the American National Election Study, to study these gender gaps, the explanatory power of values, and the political consequences of these differences. She examines the gender differences in several policy areas such as equal rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the environment, as well as social welfare issues. The result is an insightful and revealing study of how men and women vary in their policy positions and political attitudes.

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The Genesis of Values
Hans Joas
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Public and intellectual debates have long struggled with the concept of values and the difficulties of defining them. With The Genesis of Values, renowned theorist Hans Joas explores the nature of these difficulties in relation to some of the leading figures of twentieth-century philosophy and social theory: Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Max Scheler, John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas. Joas traces how these thinkers came to terms with the idea of values, and then extends beyond them with his own comprehensive theory. Values, Joas suggests, arise in experiences in self-formation and self-transcendence. Only by appreciating the creative nature of human action can we understand how our values arise.
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Humanism Challenges Materialism in Economics and Economic History
Edited by Roderick Floud, Santhi Hejeebu, and David Mitch
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Most of the existing research on economic history relies either solely or ultimately on calculations of material interest to explain the major events of the modern world. However, care must be taken not to rely too heavily on materialism, with its associated confidence in perfectly rational actors that simply do not exist. What is needed for a more cogent understanding of the long history of capitalist growth is a more realistic, human-centered approach that can take account of the role of nonmaterial values and beliefs, an approach convincingly articulated by Deirdre McCloskey in her landmark trilogy of books on the moral and ethical basis of modern economic life.

With Humanism Challenges Materialism in Economics and Economic History, Roderick Floud, Santhi Hejeebu, and David Mitch have brought together a distinguished group of scholars in economics, economic history, political science, philosophy, gender studies, and communications who synthesize and build on McCloskey’s work. The essays in this volume illustrate the ways in which the humanistic approach to economics that McCloskey pioneered can open up new vistas for the study of economic history and cultivate rich synergies with a wide range of disciplines. The contributors show how values and beliefs become embedded in the language of economics and shape economic outcomes. Chapters on methodology are accompanied by case studies discussing particular episodes in economic history.
 
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Inventing the Modern American Family
Family Values and Social Change in 20th Century United States
Editedy by Isabel Heinemann
Campus Verlag, 2012
Family is the foundation of society, and debates on family norms have always touched the very heart of America. This volume investigates the negotiations and transformations of family values and gender norms in the twentieth century as they relate to the overarching processes of social change of that period. By combining long-term approaches with innovative analysis, Inventing the “Modern American Family” transcends not only the classical dichotomies between women’s studies and masculinity studies, but also contribute substantially to the history of gender and culture in the United States.
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Kinds of Value
An Experiment in Modal Anthropology
Paul Kockelman
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2020
In this slim volume, anthropologist Paul Kockelman showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists and like-minded scholars have developed for thinking about value. Rather than theorize value head on, he offers a careful interpretation of a Mayan text about an offering to a god that lamentably goes awry. Kockelman analyzes the text, its telling, and the conditions of possibility for its original publication. Starting with a relatively simple definition of value—that which stands at the intersection of what signs stand for and what agents strive for—he unfolds, explicates, and experiments with its variations. Contrary to widespread claims in and around the discipline, Kockelman argues that it is not so-called relations, but rather relations between relations, that are at the heart of the interpretive endeavor.
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Living Worth
Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets
Stefan Ecks
Duke University Press, 2022
In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurations—transactions that aim or claim to make life better—are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks’s theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.
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The Lublin Lectures and Works on Max Scheler
Karol Wojtyla
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The Catholic University of America Press is honored to publish the English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. Under the auspices of an international editorial board, the English Critical Edition will comprise more than 20 volumes, covering all of John Paul’s writings and correspondence in the years before and during his papacy. This collection is essential for several reasons. For one thing, gaining access to the saint’s writings has posed a significant challenge. Except for official papal addresses and documents preserved and disseminated by the Vatican, St. John Paul’s works have been scattered and limited. Many documents need a new translation. Finally, English-language audiences have faced the challenge, even in the case of published texts of dealing with several languages, various translations, and textual idiosyncrasies. The second volume of the series presents Wojtyła’s lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin and his works on Max Scheler. This volume consists of three parts: Karol Wojtyła’s lectures at the Lublin University from 1954 to 1957 (during three academic years); Wojtyła’s articles related to the ethical issues discussed in the Lublin lectures, and his habilitation thesis on Max Scheler from 1953 with other essays related more closely to Scheler’s thought. As was the case with Volume 1, Volume 2 also relies on the original manuscripts and typescripts of Wojtyła’s works. These original texts were compared with the Polish published editions, and the significant differences between them were marked in the scholarly apparatus. Some of the essays in this volume were never published in English, others were never published before.
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Manufacturing Morals
The Values of Silence in Business School Education
Michel Anteby
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Corporate accountability is never far from the front page, and as one of the world’s most elite business schools, Harvard Business School trains many of the future leaders of Fortune 500 companies.  But how does HBS formally and informally ensure faculty and students embrace proper business standards? Relying on his first-hand experience as a Harvard Business School faculty member, Michel Anteby takes readers inside HBS in order to draw vivid parallels between the socialization of faculty and of students.

 In an era when many organizations are focused on principles of responsibility, Harvard Business School has long tried to promote better business standards. Anteby’s rich account reveals the surprising role of silence and ambiguity in HBS’s process of codifying morals and business values. As Anteby describes, at HBS specifics are often left unspoken; for example, teaching notes given to faculty provide much guidance on how to teach but are largely silent on what to teach. Manufacturing Morals demonstrates how faculty and students are exposed to a system that operates on open-ended directives that require significant decision-making on the part of those involved, with little overt guidance from the hierarchy. Anteby suggests that this model—which tolerates moral complexity—is perhaps one of the few that can adapt and endure over time.

Manufacturing Morals is a perceptive must-read for anyone looking for insight into the moral decision-making of today’s business leaders and those influenced by and working for them.

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Media and Values
Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape
David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig and Sarah Ventress
Intellect Books, 2007
Media and Values investigates the moral performance of the media. Based on an exhaustive number of focus groups, surveys, and interviews with senior media staffers in the United Kingdom and Europe, this book charts the changing status of the media as a moral voice. The authors argue that television has lost the authority to espouse a single vision of the proper way to live, and instead reflects the norms of a variety of social groups.  This groundbreaking volume addresses the lack of moral certainty reflected both in television programs and their audiences.
 
“There are great riches here: from the interviews with senior media executives . . . to the discussion of popular television culture's celebration of celebrity.”—John Lloyd, Prospect
 
“This profoundly original and learned book creatively illuminates citizens’ moral reasoning about the media, culture, and government. A tour de force of nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, Media & Values offers wide-ranging insights into the responsibilities of the communication industry, the justifications and consequences of telecoms regulation—and the nature of the good society itself.”—Robert M. Entman, J. B. and M. C. Shapiro Professor of Media & Public Affairs, George Washington University
 
“This is a very important book—a ‘must read.’ The intellectual scope is astonishing: the problem it addresses is quite crucial—namely the moral incoherence of the contemporary world and the way that this shows up in empirical research into individual attitudes/opinions/tastes/judgements. It is clearly a cumulative critical reassessment of the implications of research going back to the sixties. It’s original, powerful, thoughtful and spot-on as a diagnosis of the times and the very real issues we confront today. A major piece of work.”—Paddy Scannell, Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan
 
 
 
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Moral Issues
How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics
Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp
University of Chicago Press, 2024

A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.

Many believe that religious and partisan identities undergird American public opinion. However, when it comes to abortion and gay rights, the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp show that views on abortion and gay rights are just as durable and politically impactful—and often more so—than political and religious identities. Goren and Chapp locate the lasting strength of stances on abortion and gay rights in the automatic, visceral emotions that the media has primed since the late 1980s. Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward these moralized issues affect, and can sometimes even disrupt, religious and partisan identities. Indeed, over the last thirty years, these attitudes have accelerated the rise of the religious “nones,” who have no religious affiliation, and promoted moral sorting into the Democratic and Republican parties.

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The Moral Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Martin Cajthaml
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
The Moral Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand is the first full-fledged monograph on von Hildebrand’s moral philosophy available to date. Despite this pioneering effort, its aim is not to treat all the themes belonging to this area with equal depth and breadth. Rather, it focuses on the themes indicated by the aforementioned questions and relates them according to their inner systematic links rather than according to how and when they appear in von Hildebrand’s works. It also engages von Hildebrand in a critical dialogue, particularly with the ethics of Plato and Aristotle. This book will serve as a very good introduction not just to von Hildebrand´s moral philosophy but to his thought in general.
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Mythology and Values
An Analysis of Navaho Chantway Myths
By Katherine Spencer
University of Texas Press, 1957
In this book, Katherine Spencer examines Navaho cultural values by studying a specific subset of Navaho mythology: chantway myths, part of ceremonies performed to cure illness. She begins with a summary of the general plot construction of chantway myths and the value themes presented in these plots, then discusses “explanatory elements” inserted by the narrators of the myths. She continues with a deeper analysis of the cultural value judgements conveyed by these myths. At the end of the book, Spencer includes abstracts of the myths she discusses.
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National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania
Sorin Mitu
Central European University Press, 2001

This meticulously researched and elegantly written book is the most authoritative study of the emergence of modern Romanian identity in Transylvania during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based upon a plethora of contemporary published sources, Mitu approaches national identity from a variety of perspectives - from within the Romanian community itself and their reaction to the image others had of them.

The author sheds new light on the problems of self-evaluation using a method he describes as "functional analysis" to examine a complex set of ideologies and propaganda. This approach helps the reader to understand the intricate web of contemporary Romanian nationalism.

National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania appeals to scholars of modern Romanian history, those focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy and the study of modern nationalism. The book is an important contribution to the expanding debate on nationalism and national identity from an East European perspective.

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Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values
A STUDY IN STRATEGIES
E. E. Sleinis
University of Illinois Press, 1994
Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values is an assessment of Nietzsche's challenging plan to revalue all values, including knowledge, morality, religion, art, and the state. E. E. Sleinis analyzes the success of Nietzsche's enterprise as well as its inadequacies; among the positive contributions he singles out Nietzsche's theory of value, his conception of higher-order values, and his conception of the maximally affirmative attitude as creations of enduring importance.
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Pictorial Victorians
The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
Julia Thomas
Ohio University Press, 2005

The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.

Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.

Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.

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Political Peoplehood
The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities
Rogers M. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For more than three decades, Rogers M. Smith has been one of the leading scholars of the role of ideas in American politics, policies, and history. Over time, he has developed the concept of “political peoples,” a category that is much broader and more fluid than legal citizenship, enabling Smith to offer rich new analyses of political communities, governing institutions, public policies, and moral debates.

This book gathers Smith’s most important writings on peoplehood to build a coherent theoretical and historical account of what peoplehood has meant in American political life, informed by frequent comparisons to other political societies. From the revolutionary-era adoption of individual rights rhetoric to today’s battles over the place of immigrants in a rapidly diversifying American society, Smith shows how modern America’s growing embrace of overlapping identities is in tension with the providentialism and exceptionalism that continue to make up so much of what many believe it means to be an American.

A major work that brings a lifetime of thought to bear on questions that are as urgent now as they have ever been, Political Peoplehood will be essential reading for social scientists, political philosophers, policy analysts, and historians alike.
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Poverty Of Amer Pol 2Nd Ed
H. Mark Roelofs
Temple University Press, 1998
Maintaining that the American political system is not working well enough to inspire confidence that it can meet the challenges o four time, H. Mark Roelofs attributes that failure, not to its practitioners, but to its very design. He sees that system as split between its legitimizing self-image, social democracy, and its operational element, liberal democracy.

Based on his novel understanding of the American political system, Roelofs presents a devastating and closely reasoned critique that traces our nation's political ills to fundamental flaws in the very design of its founding principles, the character of its major institutions, and the basic pattern of its processes. Dissecting our political and societal problems, he explains the  limitations and basic contributions arising from the social democratic/liberal democratic dichotomy that result in our current political poverty.

While Roelofs's analysis remains the same as in the earlier edition, in this revised edition he has sharpened and extended the argument and expanded and updated his illustrative materials. Improved bibliographical citations and new diagrams make the book an even more useful teaching tool.
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Pursuing Morality
Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar
Justine Chambers
National University of Singapore Press, 2024
A deeply human portrait of a region defined by conflict and military dictatorship. 

Pursuing Morality is an in-depth and fascinating study of ordinary life in Myanmar’s southeast through a unique ethnographic focus on Buddhist Plong (Pwo) Karen. Based on extensive in-depth fieldwork in the small city of Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State, Justine Chambers shines a new light on Plong Buddhists’ lives and the many ways they broker, traverse, enact, cultivate, defend, and pursue moral lives.
 
This is the first ethnographic study of Myanmar to add to a growing body of anthropological scholarship that is referred to as the “moral turn.” Each chapter examines the lives of Plong Buddhists from different vantage points, calling into question many assumptions about Southeast Asian values and the nature of Buddhist Theravada practice. Critiquing the notion that moral coherence is necessary for ethical selfhood, Chambers demonstrates how the pursuit of morality is varied, performative, and embedded in an affective notion of the self as a moral agent in a relationship with wider structural political forces. This vivid account of everyday life in Myanmar complements existing scholarship on the region and offers a deeper understanding of Buddhism, moral anthropology, and ethics in Southeast Asia.
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Rational Lives
Norms and Values in Politics and Society
Dennis Chong
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches in the social sciences, contending that political conflict over cultural values is best explained by group loyalties, symbolic motives, and other "nonrational" factors. However, Chong shows that a single model can explain how people make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that our preferences result from a combination of psychological dispositions, which are shaped by social influences and developed over the life span.

Chong's book yields insights about the circumstances under which preferences, beliefs, values, norms and group identifications are formed. It offers a provocative explanation of how ingrained social norms and values can change over time despite the forces maintaining the status quo.

"Going beyond the tired polemics on both sides, [Chong] constructs a new interpretation of human behavior in which culture and individual rationality both matter. The synthesis is a more comprehensive and powerful explanatory framework than either side could have produced, and Chong's creativity should influence subsequent interpretations of our social life in fundamental ways."—Christopher H. Achen, University of Michigan
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Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics
Philip Blosser
Ohio University Press, 1995

“My interest in [Max] Scheler’s critique of Kant runs back nearly a decade…. The more I read of Scheler, the more I began to see the value of a project dealing with his critique of Kant in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wetethik, which would possess the virtue of focusing in a single project three important strands of philosophical interest: phenomenology, Kantianism, and ethics….

“The study is divided into six chapters and two appendices. Each of the chapters constituting the body of the work contains a brief analysis of the Kantian position or discussion of the basic questions at issue in it, an exposition of Scheler’s critique of the Kantian position and its presuppositions, and a detailed appraisal of Scheler’s critique.”—from the introduction by the author

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Social Media in Trinidad
Values and Visibility
Jolynna Sinanan
University College London, 2017
Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed towns on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for the town’s residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban region is a place in between: somewhere city dwellers look down on but that other villagers look up to. The town’s chief core value asserts that one should not elevate oneself over others, and Sinanan explores how residents carefully navigate social media as a tool for visibility while still advocating against more cosmopolitan values.      
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Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West
Engaging with János Kornai's Scholarship
Miklós Rosta
Central European University Press, 2020

Leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of János Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of post-communist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone.

In conclusion János Kornai’s thoughts on a variety of research topics as well as the value of democracy are included as he delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in 2018.

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The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development
Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies
Adrienne Jankens
Utah State University Press, 2026
The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development explores the role of writing programs—specifically practicum courses—in developing teachers and articulating programmatic values. Drawing on interviews, curricular analysis, program archives, and teacher research, Adrienne Jankens explores how implicit values shape decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and programmatic structures.
 
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
 
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens’s own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
 
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The Tanner Lectures Vol 26
Peterson, Grethe B
University of Utah Press, 2006
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 26 features lectures given by Stephen Breyer, Carl Bildt, Axel Honneth, Paul Farmer, and Avishai Margalit.
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Value Wars
The Global Market Versus the Life Economy
John McMurtry
Pluto Press, 2002

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Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law
James B. Atleson
University of Massachusetts Press, 1983

Chosen as a Lawyer's Literary Club Selection, this book looks behind stated legal rules and doctrines in the field of labor law to clearly formulate the often hidden values and assumptions that motivate those who make labor law decisions. The author demonstrates that the “received wisdom” in labor law, which is that decisions are based on analyses of the rational implications of statutory policy, language, or legislative history, fails to account for the actual history of decision-making, particularly the interpretation of the Wagner Act of 1935 that established collective bargaining and the National Labor Relations Board. Through close interpretation, Atleson shows the legal decisions that have been reached are better explained by such factors as notional of inherent property rights, the need for capital mobility, and the interest in continued productivity.

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Values in Heritage Management
Emerging Approaches and Research Directions
Erica Avrami
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019
Bringing together leading conservation scholars and professionals from around the world, this volume offers a timely look at values-based approaches to heritage management.
 
Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

The free online edition of this open-access book is available at www.getty.edu/publications/heritagemanagement/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
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Values of Happiness
Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life
Edited by Iza Kavedžija and Harry Walker
HAU, 2016
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances.

The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human happiness: What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples’ desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.
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