The virtue of obedience is seen as outdated today, if not downright toxic – and yet, are we any freer than our forebears?
In this provocative work, Jacob Phillips argues not. Many feel unable to speak freely, their opinions policed by the implicit or explicit threat of coercion. Impending ecological disaster is the ultimate threat to our freedoms and wellbeing, and living in a disenchanted cosmos leaves people enslaved to nihilistic whim. Phillips shows that the antiquated notion of obedience to the moral law contains forgotten dimensions, which can be a source of freedom from these contemporary fetters. These dimensions of obedience – such as loyalty, discipline and order – protect people from falling prey to the subtle forms of coercion, control and domination of twenty-first-century life.
Fusing literary insight with philosophical discussion and cultural critique, Phillips demonstrates that in obedience lies the path to true freedom.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1 Allegiance
2 Loyalty
3 Deference
4 Honour
5 Obligation
6 Respect
7 Responsibility
8 Discipline
9 Duty
10 Authority
Notes
About the Author :
Jacob Phillips is Director of the Institute of Theology and Liberal Arts at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
Review :
‘This book is not a thunderous polemic, still less a dry work of abstract argumentation. Phillips, writing in effective and elegant prose, draws on literature, modern history and personal experience to craft richly human insights into thinking and living well […] stimulating and insightful.’
The Critic
‘A thoughtful, fascinating read.’
Tim Stanley, author of Whatever Happened to Tradition? 'Obedience is Freedom musically weaves together high and low culture, ancient and modern, the sacred and profane, in a richly resonant texture of ideas. This is a book that will surprise and delight both the very well-read and the very online.'
Mary Harrington, Contributing Editor, UnHerd
‘We live in the wreckage created by the individual liberationist transformations of the twentieth-century Left and Right. More an exploration than a polemic, Phillips uses literary criticism, storytelling and the history of ideas to envision another path based on solidarity, loyalty and obligations, without which we are liberated from all duties, only to find ourselves alone in a harsh and unjust world.’
Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normie
“Jacob Phillips has written a book which needed to be written and which needs to be read […] this work cements his reputation as a fine essayist in the best of English traditions.”
European Conservative
“Utterly unique.”
Seamus Flaherty, Merion West
"Phillips calls on an eclectic range of philosophers, poets, and novelists as tutelary spirits; and he extracts unexpected lessons from disparate, real-world events."
The Irish Examiner
"brilliant and unusual”
Spiked
“Paragraph after paragraph, a seductive threnody unfolds, structured by an almost syllogistic order.”
Henry Hopwood-Phillips, The Critic
“erudite…crowded with well-expressed insights”
Chronicles Magazine
