The Good-Enough Life (Princeton University Press; 2022; translations into Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Persian, and Slovak)

A Financial Times Critics’ Pick Book of the Year; A Seminary Coop Notable Book of the Year; A Next Big Idea Club Top Happiness Book of the Year; A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all.

Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction to the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By spending less energy and resources competing with each other, each one of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around.

Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.

Reviews

“This book found me at just the right time. . . . [The Good-Enough Life] offers a bit of an antidote or a countercultural approach to designing communities and systems. . . [It’s a] philosophical, semi-political, pro-social, contemplative approach to designing a new way forward.”—Alyson Stoner, New York Magazine

“This is an amazing and deeply inspiring book. Alpert employs a prose style that is wrought like fine gold jewelry. There is scarcely a page from which this reader does not wish to quote and share Alpert’s wisdom with others.”—Randolph Cornelius, Choice

“[I]nnovative and…exciting…His arguments for holding ourselves not to the monolithic standard of greatness but to the seemingly looser metrics of goodness and enoughness are, paradoxical though this may seem, guides toward a more determined way of inhabiting the world.” Lily Meyer, The Atlantic

“What a book like this one…offer[s] is the jolt of reorientation. The Good-Enough Life is a grand narrative.” Emily Ogden, LA Review of Books

“[W]e should bestow social recognition – regard, honour, respect – on common moral qualities, not on uncommon talent. It should be good enough just to be good enough….[This is] Alpert’s case, and he makes it well.” Andrew Stark, Times Literary Supplement

“Love of humanity and a commitment to the objective are singularly lacking in our culture. We need to put them at its centre. This book may help us.” Alan Dent, Northern Review of Books

“The Good-Enough Life….reveals an ethics-shifting proposition…Alpert argues forcefully that….[r]ather than admiring and thus pursuing wealth, we should admire and emulate those who – through virtue, wisdom, and compassion – improve society.” Jimmy Morgan, Topanga New Times

Advance Praise

“In this delightfully inspiring book, Avram Alpert draws on virtue ethics, Buddhism, and African American philosophy to encourage us to let go of the cult of greatness. An attitude of ‘good-enoughness’ has the power to replace anxiety and burnout with more meaningful, ethical, and pleasant lives. This is the guide we all need to become good enough.”—Skye C. Cleary, author of How to Be Authentic

“The Good-Enough Life is a great book. In a style that feels like a conversation among friends, Alpert makes a convincing case that it is our deep, often unspoken commitment to ‘greatness’ that stands in the way of improving the quality of our political, social, and economic lives. Learning to seek ‘good enough’ may be the key to social transformation.”—Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“In this eclectic and enjoyable tour of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, Avram Alpert bridges philosophy and self-help to envision something that seems to be slipping from our grasp: a livable world. He shows how an inhabitable planet and an equal society depend on cultivating egalitarian virtues and pursuing the modest satisfactions of what is good enough.”—Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

“Alpert is a kind of Carl Sagan of social egalitarianism, packing a wealth of information into an engaging page-turner. This book offers a new aspirational ideal: a good-enough way of living that can enable vastly more people to lead decent lives.”—Cheshire Calhoun, author of Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living

A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us about Living Well without Perfection (Columbia University Press, 2021)

In many ways, Buddhism has become the global religion of the modern world. For its contemporary followers, the ideal of enlightenment promises inner peace and worldly harmony. And whereas other philosophies feel abstract and disembodied, Buddhism offers meditation as a means to realize this ideal. If we could all be as enlightened as Buddhists, some imagine, we could live in a much better world. For some time now, however, this beatific image of Buddhism has been under attack. Scholars and practitioners have criticized it as a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the actual experiences of Buddhists.

Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Finding unexpected affinities across world literature—Rudyard Kipling in colonial India, Yukio Mishima in postwar Japan, Bessie Head escaping apartheid South Africa—as well as in his own experiences living with Tibetan exiles, Alpert shows how these stories illuminate a world in which suffering is inevitable and total enlightenment is impossible. Yet they also give us access to partial enlightenments: powerful insights that become available when we come to terms with imperfection and stop looking for wholeness. A Partial Enlightenment reveals the moments of personal and social transformation that the inventions of modern Buddhism help make possible.

Advance Praise

“Alpert…examines Buddhist thought across world literature in this pleasant outing…Buddhist students and literature lovers will find much to ponder in Alpert’s close textual readings.” — Publishers Weekly

“The stories about the Buddha, with their promise of awakening and liberation, are among the richest and most inspiring tales ever told. By focusing on the creation and complexities of a new, twentieth-century Buddhism, and the novels it has produced, Avram Alpert’s A Partial Enlightenment delivers a brilliant work of literary history less concerned with the mythology of absolute perfection than the embedded, political, and existential realities that make modern Buddhism—an authentic way to ‘fail better’—relevant for our lives today.” — Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award

“A groundbreaking contribution to Buddhist literary studies, A Partial Enlightenment provides a new lens through which to examine the influence of modern Buddhist themes in twentieth-century world literature. In his role of scholar-seeker, or contemplative critic, Alpert performs a complex, inclusive, and personal practice of literary exegesis, one that will enlighten academic and lay readers alike.” —Ruth Ozeki, New York Times best-selling author of A Tale for the Time Being

“In this stunningly sincere and groundbreaking work, Alpert takes the reader on a  journey, often personal and always provocative, through a forest of literature to see how Buddhist thought and practice is embedded and intertwined with modern fiction. He shows the readers…that literature doesn’t neatly present Buddhist truths, but complicates the very way Buddhism is received and taught. It is a story of disenchantment and tentative re-enchantment with Buddhist ideas and meditation practices with a healthy dose of Beckett’s robust existential despair. It is a story of intellectual struggle and imperfect readings that enlightens, as well as forces the reader to simply lift her head, breathe deeply, and dive back in. No study of the modern encounter with Buddhism is complete without reading this truly refreshing and wonderful book.” — Justin McDaniel, author of The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand

“Alpert’s timely book makes a significant contribution to re-evaluating Buddhism’s role in engaging with the struggles and complexities of the postcolonial world. The book is at once a personal chronicle of disenchantment and discovery and a literary history that charts global Buddhism and the aesthetics of human fragmentation and connectivity. Alpert’s compelling readings of modern novels uncover a simple truth of Buddhist ethics at their core: We may be limited in our understanding of the universe, but we have the power to act kindly towards living beings. An ethics of social relationality emerges as the book’s most profound insight, making its innovative readings indispensable for students and scholars of religion and literature.” — Gauri Viswanathan,  author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief

Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (published in May 2019 by SUNY Press)

We have long lived in a world made by global connections. Our products, our travels, our ideas–all of these have their origins in places and peoples both near and far. But when scholars narrate the history of the modern self, they ignore these connections and focus on changes in European science and philosophy. In this provocative new book, Avram Alpert argues that we need to rethink the story of the modern self as a global history. He first shows how canonical European thinkers like Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant explicitly formed their ideas of selfhood in relation to the travel accounts flooding into Europe from colonial missionaries. He then pushes this history beyond Europe, showing how a diverse series of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and D.T. Suzuki, critiqued these ideas of global selfhood with their own creative responses. Spanning four continents and four centuries, the book argues that all of these writers partake of a shared global history forged in the violence of colonial rule. The resulting narrative shows that the modern self is not a European invention, but a global, evolving, and fraught attempt to make ourselves the kinds of beings who can live with the complexity of a world that is at once connected and never fully knowable

“Alpert’s scholarship is impressive, offering a focused sweep of intellectual history and incisive readings of many important figures (and the scholarly literature devoted to them). He is a fantastic writer. His prose is direct and evocative, conveying complex ideas in clear and probing terms. This style transforms a long text into a relatively quick and, at times, gripping read.” — Jane Anna Gordon, author of Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon

“Through textual and historical analyses and great interpretive abilities, Alpert shows persuasively that Montaigne, Rousseau, Emerson, Suzuki, and others—separately and together—are thinkers not of a Western (monopolizing the sense of modern) tradition, but of global, pluralist thought. His way of reading these thinkers can be a model for others interested in decolonizing and deracializing modern thought while preserving much of the canon with its present membership; with its male, Western-European and Anglo-American membership. But Alpert has done more. Through his arguments he has made room for Du Bois, Fanon, and Suzuki to be included in the canon. This is intellectually progressive and politically significant, and will make a fresh reading experience for many readers.” — Peter K. J. Park, author of Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830

“This very erudite and engaged book shows how fruitful the history of the self from a global perspective can be…The book will undoubtedly provide food for researchers from different fields who study the question of the self.” — Marie-Clarté Lagrée, Global Intellectual History (book review)

“This is an original and masterful synthesis of diverse sources and intellectual traditions. It is massively learned (ninety pages of endnotes) and engages in technical debates with other scholars, yet never loses the thread of the author’s own central argument about the global context of modern ideas about the self. Alpert’s writing is clear, incisive, and lively.” —John Barbour, H-net reviews