What are values? Do they truly exist? How do Americans formulate them? In this erudite and provocative book, Hunter Lewis explores the often conflicting value systems that compete for attention in American life. He constructs a framework by which six different American value systems—based on authority, logic, experience, emotion, intuition, and science—are defined and compared, thereby shedding new light on how we come to believe what we believe.

Wide-ranging, yet always accessible, A Question of Values provides seventy-one case studies of specific or composite value systems—Protestant fundamentalism, the Judaism of Golda Meir, the “detached action” of Mohandas Gandhi, and those of Spinoza, Mortimer Adler, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Merton, Sigmund Freud, Eudora Welty, Ronald Reagan, and Henry Kissinger, among many others.

“Confronted with the unexpectedness, diversity, and argumentativeness of American values, with the apparent lack of any real agreement or uniformity in our personal beliefs, the beliefs that guide our everyday speech and conduct and make us what we are, how should we respond?” Lewis asks. He then shows us a way to clear our mental clutter, to decide what our basic moral alternatives are, and “how each thinker or would-be prophet that we meet, either directly or through books and film, relates to these basic alternatives.”

Not only does Lewis illuminate our own values and those of others, he also helps us sort through a variety of social issues—for example, the way values should or should not be taught in the classroom, or the general problem of moral education in American schools and colleges. Lewis makes brilliant sense of the moral and ethical confusion of our times and discovers for us that “values are not the muddle they sometimes seem. There are some basic choices. . . . Our challenge as Americans and as human beings is to identify these options, and then to choose among them, not blindly but with a discerning eye, and thus to answer the recurring biblical question: ‘What manner of men shall we be?'”