This is a very uncool book. Despite the unavoidably cool irony of such a claim, I offer a warning from the outset: filled with suspiciously structuralist analyses, close readings of texts long ago mastered, an argument that runs the length of the book, a critique of ideological analyses, and several ridiculously detailed charts, the book just plain ain’t cool. Even the Interludes of Cool aren’t very cool in their annoying brevity. But perhaps worse of all, I don’t lament or regret it. I may even find some sliver of ethical respite in it. My primary concern in this book is, obviously, not actually with coolness.(Or at least not with being cool.) This book is driven by a persistent sense that, living in the materially affluent northern-western hemisphere of the early twenty-first century, we have no meaningful language for social difference, especially race, or ethics—a twinned pair of phenomena that feeds and informs each other. Increasingly inhabiting a lexicon filled with economic metaphors, we seem to assume that the genre of economics can aptly answer any question of difference or value. Or perhaps we’re just losing any sense that things might be otherwise: the repeated response to my writing on neoliberalism and ethics is an immediate dismissal—“isn’t that an oxymoron?” While analytic philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin and Debra Satz have framed such questions as a problem of the limits of markets, I am asking a very different set of questions. Rather than assume the inevitability