From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, a thought-provoking volume of nine essays that elegantly and fiercely addresses latest developments in American culture and argues for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.

Written through the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime being a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is normally a precise and nuanced insider’s take a look at shifts in American culture—especially in approximately The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies the American academy—that more and more people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, an anatomy of essential and dangerous concepts, and a cri de coeur lamenting the erosion of standard liberal values, Boyers’s assortment of essays is usually devoted to such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism which have converted academic life right into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who ought to know better, committed to the drawing up of enemies lists and driven with the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a general public intellectual and longtime professor assumes those in his personal progressive cohort who labor in the hold of the poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is normally a finely tuned work of cultural involvement from the front lines.