Undoing the Moral Empire

Regular price €28.50
A01=Lesley Chamberlain
after virtue
alasdair macintyre
Author_Lesley Chamberlain
bernard williams
Category=DNBM
Category=QDTQ
Category=QDTS
charles taylor
emotivism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
evil
forthcoming
goodness
hegel
holocaust
hume
individualism
iris murdoch
lady chatterley
liberalism
moral reasoning
morality
philippa foot
richard wollheim
swinging sixties
truthfulness
utilitarianism

Product details

  • ISBN 9781350457744
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 11 Jun 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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After 1945, Britain wanted to be a new country.

The authority of state and church were giving way, the Empire was dismantled, and it was no longer clear who was leading whom in matters of morals. Individuals were left to reinvent their ethical lives anew.

The lives and works of the philosophers discussed in this book were caught up this sea-change. Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Richard Wollheim, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre were all characters in search of a moral England, with a particular vision of the good society. From communitarianism to swinging Sixties’ individualism, and radical theories of art – which understood questions of ambiguity, error and forgiveness more than the state ever could – this is the story of their sometimes convergent but often discrepant ideas on ethical life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Undoing the Moral Empire is a work of biography, social history and the history of ideas that masterfully reconstructs the shifting sentiments of the post-war era, reconfiguring enduringly relevant questions of freedom, virtue, and society.

Lesley Chamberlain is a critic, novelist, and historian of ideas whose non-fiction work includes Nietzsche in Turin (1996), The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud (2000), Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution (2017), and Rilke: The Last Inward Man (2023).