Richard Stivers received an Earhart Foundation research fellowship to write this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book on American morality. The book places American morality in its historical and cultural context.

When a term is overused, it tends to fall out of fashion.

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct.

Putting a recognizable face on contemporary American cynicism.

How to understand this cultural ambiguity? The authors in this volume explore the possibilities of a rationality beyond rationalism, reflecting beyond the borders of human imagination on the hidden God.

Instead, she posits that cynicism emerged in the works of French Enlightenment philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot.

He finds that, far from the simple selfishness or apathy for which it is so often dismissed, the cynicism in these texts is suffused by a desire for the certainty promised by norms such as national teleology, ethnic identity, and civic ...

This collection of essays—the first of its kind in English—brings together the work of an international group of scholars examining the entire tradition associated with the ancient Cynics.

Combating the notion of a 'healthy' cynicism, Overcoming Cynicism demonstrates that the cynic engages not in genuine critique, but rather in a denial of the possibility of fruitful change.