Michael Ignatieff is Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest and former Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

[This] is a selective moral progress report, an ‘intimate sociology and anthropology of ethics’ that is engaging, articulate and richly descriptive… Ignatieff’s deft histories, vivid sketches, and fascinating interviews are the soul of this important book. They take us from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, to Bosnia, Myanmar, South Africa and Japan; and they inform his answer to its guiding question. For Ignatieff, the ideology of human rights has fallen short. What sustains the fragile flourishing of global cities and diverse communities is not faith in human rights but the ‘ordinary virtues’ of tolerance, forgiveness, resilience and trust, made possible by adequate maintenance of the rule of law. The ordinary virtues are an open-source operating system, a moral vernacular by which members of different ethnic and religious groups are able to live, if not together, then side by side.

Michael Ignatieff is Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest and former Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

[This] is a selective moral progress report, an ‘intimate sociology and anthropology of ethics’ that is engaging, articulate and richly descriptive… Ignatieff’s deft histories, vivid sketches, and fascinating interviews are the soul of this important book. They take us from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, to Bosnia, Myanmar, South Africa and Japan; and they inform his answer to its guiding question. For Ignatieff, the ideology of human rights has fallen short. What sustains the fragile flourishing of global cities and diverse communities is not faith in human rights but the ‘ordinary virtues’ of tolerance, forgiveness, resilience and trust, made possible by adequate maintenance of the rule of law. The ordinary virtues are an open-source operating system, a moral vernacular by which members of different ethnic and religious groups are able to live, if not together, then side by side.

Michael Ignatieff is Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest and former Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

[This] is a selective moral progress report, an ‘intimate sociology and anthropology of ethics’ that is engaging, articulate and richly descriptive… Ignatieff’s deft histories, vivid sketches, and fascinating interviews are the soul of this important book. They take us from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, to Bosnia, Myanmar, South Africa and Japan; and they inform his answer to its guiding question. For Ignatieff, the ideology of human rights has fallen short. What sustains the fragile flourishing of global cities and diverse communities is not faith in human rights but the ‘ordinary virtues’ of tolerance, forgiveness, resilience and trust, made possible by adequate maintenance of the rule of law. The ordinary virtues are an open-source operating system, a moral vernacular by which members of different ethnic and religious groups are able to live, if not together, then side by side.