The Death of Character

Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil

Moral education has become the exclusive province of psychology in America. The last book written by a sociologist on this subject was Emile Durkheim in his volume on Moral Education in 1925. Seventy-five years later, JDH has produced a comprehensive historical sociology of the evolution of moral education in America.

Hunter traces “the death of character” to the disintegration of the moral and social conditions that make character possible in the first place. The dilemma he uncovers is especially acute in the realm of moral education, where society explicitly takes on the task of instilling enduring moral commitments and ideals within young people. The various strategies for accomplishing this task—psychological, communitarian and traditionalist—all operate, in the end, within a framework that renders the goal unachievable.

Our problem, Hunter argues, is not an absence of morality but rather the emptying of meaning, significance and authority from the morality that is advocated. Morality is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes, severed from the social, historical and cultural encumbrances that make it concrete and ultimately compelling. Thus, while intending to deepen innate moral sympathies and build character, moral education accomplishes just the opposite. In ways that are as tragic as they are ironic, its lessons finally lead children to a moral cosmology that is beyond good and evil.

Media & Praise

  • “James Hunter has a talent for writing important books — books that freshly map the contours of our culture, and in so doing, transform the way we talk and think about our lives. With The Death of Character he has done it again, mercilessly dissecting our confused discourse about moral educations. Hunter shows that the way back to ‘character’ will be much harder than we have been willing to acknowledge.” —Wilfred M. McClay, author of Land of Hope

  • “Excellent, accessible and well-written … This is a book to be widely read and discussed by everyone concerned with moral education in the very broadest sense of the term.” —Adam B. Seligman, Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Boston University

  • “A brave exploration of spinelessness and self-deception in the dominant moral sectors of our time.” —Michael Novak, the American Enterprise Institute

  • NYT’s David Brooks Quotes Hunter on Character: “The Man Trump Wishes He Were: Jim Mattis and the Formation of Character”