"The Ways of Power advances a hermeneutical conception of ethics, one oriented particularly toward questions of power and the critique of power in the aftermath of foundationalism.".

"Bringing into mutual interrogation such disparate traditions as hermeneutics, liberalism, critical theory and postmodernism, and such figures as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Foucault, Nietzsche and Aristotle, Paul Fairfield argues that the principle question of ethics is no longer how to ground practices and judgement on a secure epistemological foundation.

Rather, what is of importance is how normative discourses rooted in tradition and invested with power may adopt a critical posture toward these same conditions without generating an impossible circularity."--BOOK JACKET.