Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, is intrigued in this book by the ways in which important liberties are threatened by legislative actions designed to distribute various benefits and favors to selected groups of people. As Epstein notes, “The conventional wisdom has it that government is subject to extensive limitation when it regulates and none when it contracts” ( p.312). But, Epstein warns, this simplistic attitude badly ignores the importance of limiting all of government’s...

This was one of the last books by the late Dr. Russell Kirk, who was perhaps America’s foremost intellectual conservative, an eminent scholar in the social sciences and humane letters, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. It might be said to be both a defense of the traditional European-American culture so much under attack by intellectuals and activists today, and a summary of the major cultural contributions of Britain to...

American political discourse has coarsened in recent years. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than with the issue of poverty. As Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, both currently serving in the Department of Health and Human Services, put it, “when the topic of es up, dialogue often turns angry and judgmental; the prose es purple.” Yet purple prose almost seems appropriate when dealing with today’s welfare system. It is, as many contend, overly expensive; the multiplicity of...

What role should Christianity play in the life of the polis? This question has engaged Christian thinkers for two millennia and, judging from this volume, we are no closer to agreement now than we were at the time of the early Church fathers. The contributors to this recently reissued collection of essays, which prised of lectures delivered in the mid-1980s at Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and Religion, all wish to affirm the relevance of Christian faith to public...

M. Stanton Evans, former editor of The Indianapolis News and chairman of the American Conservative Union, is now director of the National Journalism Center, in Washington, D.C. His exposition here of the place of religion in American public life is a remarkable synthesis of history, sound philosophy and political judgment. In the classic phrase of Fr. Francis Canavan, the great Fordham Jesuit, the present stage of Western culture can be described as “the fag end of the Enlightenment.” For...

In this wide-ranging sequel to his The Politics of Plunder (Transaction, 1990), Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow draws together essays, columns, and articles to illuminate statism’s rising threat to freedom and religion. A Christian libertarian, Bandow rightly insists that “liberty–the right to exercise choice, free from coercive state regulation–is a necessary precondition for virtue. And virtue is ultimately necessary for the survival of liberty.” Only choices freely made have moral or religious import. Markets work better if people...

These twelve essays priseCatholicism and Liberalism were originally read for study sessions at Georgetown University in 1989 and 1990 under the auspices of the Woodstock Theological Center and Georgetown’s Department of Government. The distinguished collaborators in this project convened to explore ways to improve relations between the historically antipathetical forces of liberalism and Catholicism. At the threshold of the 1990s both traditions looked vital and promising. Emboldened by the West’s triumph over the Soviet Empire, Francis Fukuyama celebrated “Western...

Over the last fifty years, the dogma of “corporate social responsibility” has e the favorite tool of American liberals to cajole and shame the owners and managers of corporations into adopting major features of their liberal social agenda. John Hood has written this book to attack this dogma and defend the moral way in which the vast majority of American businesses are run. One assumption behind the liberal dogma is the alleged conflict between a mitment to profit-seeking for...

With crime and illegitimacy soaring, and cities often resembling Hobbes’s state of nature, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” our policy wonks are hoping that national service, tax credits, etc. will manipulate us into coexisting decently again. But social order depends far more on attitudes and conduct than on legislation. Gentility Recalled lucidly and thoughtfully explores the enormous role of manners in creating a decent, orderly society and shows that, indeed, it’s the little things that...

As its title implies, Michael Novak’s Business as a Calling brings a somewhat missionary zeal to the defense merce and capitalism, subjects that have been mainly exposed in the recent past to the zealotry of frenzied opponents. Mr. Novak’s effervescence and originality as an advocate and his rigor as a scholar make for a provocative and interesting read. He traces the rise of capitalism, the docile acceptance by its practitioners that they were concerned with means and not ends,...

As the years of his pontificate mount up, so do the books devoted to this singular pope, with the promise of some good things still in store, notably the ing biography by George Weigel. From many angles, one has sought to fathom John Paul II’s secret, or perhaps to glimpse his distinctive gifts at work, a contemplative actor surely but patiently shifting the tumblers of the vault of history. There are already several biographies to choose from, numerous collections...

The American Roman Catholic is a curious animal, forever trying to modify the docile, traditional, receptive spirit of the Catholic by the independent, innovative, frontier mentality of the American. Results of his endeavor vary from the impressive and influential to the disedifying and disastrous. His task is never-ending simply because it is impossible: “American” cannot modify “Catholic.” In the aptly named American Catholic, Charles Morris seeks to give the definitive history of this creature. From the start, he acknowledges...