This study explores the complex quest for the good life in modernist literature and philosophy. While modernism is often characterized by an intense interest in, and a meticulous attention to, language and its uses, it also demonstrates a marked preoccupation with ethical questions. Within the domains of literature and philosophy, modernism's various 'ethical turns' involve, for example, a renewed interest in the Socratic question 'how should one live?', the nature of the good, the significance of virtue, the status of the subject and the social bond, and the relation between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. This study critically examines a range of these ethical turns and demonstrates not only their significance to current debates within critical theory, modernist studies and continental philosophy, but also the possibility of founding a contemporary political ethics upon aesthetic modernism.