The Good Enough Life

This book is a highly original exploration of what life could and should be. It juxtaposes a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the good life with an ethnography of people living in a small Irish town.

Attending carefully to the everyday lives of these people, the ethnographic chapters examine topics ranging from freedom and inequality to the creation of community and the purpose of life. These chapters alternate with discussions of similar topics by a wide range of philosophers in the Western tradition, from Socrates and the Stoics through Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger to Adorno, Rawls, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum.

As an ethnography, this book reveals just how much we can learn from a respectful acknowledgement of what ordinary modest people have achieved. By creating community as a deliberate and social project that provides the foundation for a more fulfilling life, where affluence has not led to an increase in individualism, the people in this town have found a way to live the good enough life. The book also shows how anthropology and philosophy can complement and enrich one another in an enquiry into what we might accomplish in our lives.

Acknowledgements


Introduction: Cuan and Kant

1: An Exceptionally Free Society

2: Philosophers of Freedom

3: The First Satiable Society

4: Philosophers and Consumerism

5: Inequality, Drugs and Depression

6: Justice as Fairness

7: The Body and Sports

8: The Origins of Philosophy in Sport

9: Creating Community

10: Placing Heidegger

11: Engaging the World

12: The Stoics and Epicurus

13: Hegel, Cuan, Anthropology and Philosophy


Endnotes

Bibliography

"Miller's book is a brilliant case for the importance of a book of praise, as distinct from the customary critique, showing what it means for a society to allow its members a good life in a world of much one-sided individualism."
—Arne Johan Vetlesen, University of Oslo

"Daniel Miller shows us what a truly humane anthropology can be. In an age of rhetorical drama his writing can seem disarmingly modest in tone, but the conversation he prompts between philosophy and fieldwork yields rich ethnographic insights."
—Webb Keane, University of Michigan and author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories

"... a rich description of cultural life."
—The Irish Times

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London.