Written in Eagletons very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the unthinkable: bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.
Slavoj ´ižek

This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment.
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University

Written with Eagletons usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice.
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research

In this ambitious new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the worlds greatest cultural theorists, turns his attention to the now much-discussed question of ethics. In a work full of rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj ´ižek, weighing the merits and deficiencies of each theory, and measuring them all against the richer ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In a remarkably original move, he assigns each of the theories he examines to one or other of Jacques Lacans three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and shows how this can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of an ethics of personal sympathy, an impersonal morality of obligation, and a morality based on death and transformation.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His recent publications includeHow to Read a Poem (2006),The English Novel (2004),Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003),The Idea of Culture(2000),Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1999), andThe Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), all published by Wiley-Blackwell.

PART I THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY 1

Introduction: The Mirror Stage 1

1 Sentiment and Sensibility 12

2 Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 29

3 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith 62

PART II THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SYMBOLIC 83

Introduction: The Symbolic Order 83

4 Spinoza and the Death of Desire 91

5 Kant and the Moral Law 101

6 Law and Desire inMeasure for Measure 130

PART III THE REIGN OF THE REAL 139

Introduction: Pure Desire 139

7 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 154

8 Fictions of the Real 180

9 Levinas, Derrida and Badiou 223

10 The Banality of Goodness 273

Conclusion 317

Index 327