Introduction

Abstract

You cannot lead people to what is good; you can only lead them to some place or other. The good is outside the space of facts. In the preface to his 1904 play John Bull's Other Island, George Bernard Shaw remarks that a healthy man is unconscious of the working of his bones until he breaks one. Then he thinks of little else but having it set. In that respect, the recent soul searching and self-scrutiny in the humanities is a symptom of the malaise that afflicts them. The humanities have become self-reflexive because they are under threat, blocked, and queried by neoliberal, econometric ideologies of higher education. When the value of something is self-evident and secure, it needs no audit o..