The Tyranny of Virtue

Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies

De: Robert Boyers

Narrado por: Arthur Morey

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.

This isn't a story

so I don't know why you are asking me to review it as such.

This is a serious study of the effects of mob politics on University and other institutions. What we call PC has morphed into something more lethal.

Anyhow Professor Boyers does a passable job describing how mob led political culture started and how it developed.

I used to read Robert Boyers when I subscribe to Salmagundi journal which he edited I stopped many, many moons ago.

Prof. Boyers hasn't changed much from the scholar I used to read. The problem is that Campus politics has changed for the worse and playing an unaffiliated liberal doesn't work anymore if you want to take back the campus from the students (I call then His/her majesty's baby--a notion Freud came up with when describing spoiled brats who always need to have their way.)

I recommend this serious study with some reservation. At one point he wanted to show his liberal non attachment to any ethnic group and by way of example he used the treatment of Hannah Arendt by the New York intellectuals. This was a wrong choice it might have worked better had he chosen the Publication of Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," since Arendt tendentious reporting of the Eichmann Trial was so full of holes that it's read today merely as an example of how warped Arendt's vision was.


Boyer's must have been a teenager when the trial took place and hence he doesn't understand that the passions it unleashed had to do with the fact that Eichmann behavior during during the Holocaust was still raw in many people's mind. Besides it's been shown by Deborah E. Lipstadt in her book "The Eichmann Trial" that Arendt only attended a few sessions of the trial because she flew to Germany to visit her former teacher Karl Jaspers. Prof. Boyers gave no sign that he knew that. (btw Lipstadt's book is available at Audible.com)

Arendt was not a reporter and she was not a Jurist nor was she an historian she was a political philosopher and as such wrote some important essays on philosophical subjects.

Boyer's should have done more research on the subject before using it as his example.