Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Good between Philosophy and Social Theory: An Introduction
David Henig and Anna Strhan

Part I: Theoretical Perspectives

Chapter 1. Where is the Good in the World?
Joel Robbins

Chapter 2. Nowhere and Everywhere
Michael Lambek

Chapter 3. Between Durkheim and Bauman: A Relational Sociology of Morality in Practice
Owen Abbott

Chapter 4. For the Agony of 'the Good' and of the Moral Courage to Do It
Iain Wilkinson

Chapter 5. Thinking Time, Ethics and Generations: An Auto-Ethnographic Essay on the Good between Philosophy and Social Theory
Victor Jeleniewski Seidler

Part I: Commentary
Steven Lukes

Part II:Approaching the Good in Everyday Life

Chapter 6. 'To See a Sinner Repent is a Joyful Thing': Moral Cultures and the Sexual Abuse of Children in the Christian Church
Gordon Lynch

Chapter 7. Making the Good Corporate Citizen: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Ethical Projects of Management Consultancy in Contemporary China
Kimberly Chong

Chapter 8. 'God isn't a Communist': Conservative Evangelicals, Money and Morality in London
Anna Strhan

Chapter 9. Doing Good: Cultivating Children's Ethical Sensibilities in School Assemblies
Rachael Shillitoe

Chapter 10. Locating an Elusive Ethics: Surface and Depth in a Jewish Ethnography
Ruth Sheldon

Chapter 11. Radical Hope as a Practice of Possibilities: On the Fragility of Goodness and Struggles for Justice in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
David Henig

Part II: Commentary
Maeve Cooke

Index

Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous publications, including the books Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (UC Press, 2004), and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (OUP, 2020).