Books published by Encounter Books,USA

This book has two currents. The first is an analysis of the three concepts of freedom that are called, respectively, negative, positive, and inner. Negative freedom is defined as an absence of coercion, positive freedom as an ability to rule oneself and others, inner freedom as being oneself; that is, being the author of one's decisions. Each concept is analyzed both in terms of its development in the history of ideas and in terms of its internal logic. The major problem of negative freedom is to find widely accepted rules according to which this freedom can be distributed. Positive freedom's major difficulty is to define what constitutes a free person. The greatest dilemma with inner freedom is how to correlate it with the proper interpretation of the human self. The book advances the thesis, and this constitutes the other current of its narrative-that we have been witnessing the advent of a new form of despotism, much of it being the effect of liberalism's dominant position. Precisely because it took a reductionist position, liberalism has impoverished our view of freedom and, consequently, our notion of human nature with its political, moral, and metaphysical dimensions.

"Spanning several decades of the 20th century, this posthumously published novel explores the colorful personal history of the Kennedy family and the exploits of JFK. The fictional account is told from the point of view of the real-life Lem Billings, a prep school friend and later campaigner for Kennedy's presidential race, so dear to the family that Joseph Kennedy Sr. referred to him as his "second son." The late Peter Collier had the great fortune of obtaining oral histories from Lem Billings himself for the novel. The work is shaped by Collier's competent prose and informed by the recollections from the man who knew the Kennedys best."--

"The book starts with an account of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620, which is to say that it endorses a very old idea of the best place to catch the first glimmer of the American republic: 1620, not 1619. I'm well aware that the claims of 1620 have their own weaknesses. The country's 'very origin, ' as the Times puts it, isn't something that can be settled once and for all. Many threads from many origins all eventually cohere into a nation. But there is something vital about 1620 that is worth pointing out and that is increasingly lost to national consciousness in our multicultural age. 1620 is a strong counterpoint to 1619, not just in proximity but in spirit. The rest of the book is best thought of as a voyage of discovery, so I will forego the usual practice of offering an advance tour of the chapters. What will come, will come"--

"Western civilization fashioned a capitalism that created a worldwide cornucopia but produced few grateful beneficiaries. Indeed, the market's creative destruction and individualist autonomy have become a challenge to capitalism's legitimacy. Even a sensitive person like Pope Francis called capitalism's "limitless" freedom a "fundamental terrorism against all humanity." The sympathetic economic historian Joseph Schumpeter had identified capitalism's "crumbling walls" a half-century earlier and predicted approaching civilizational collapse. Capitalism only survives today in what Schumpeter's classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy called a "fettered" form, harnessed by bureaucratic regulations that impede productivity, compound the problems they were designed to fix, and dissolve the moral structure that underlay capitalist civilization's creativity and moral legitimacy. A response to these challenges must begin with capitalism's defining author Karl Marx accurately setting capitalism's roots in feudalism and the implications of that historical inheritance, predominantly what Walter Lippmann identified as Rousseau's "Christian heresy." That revolution converted heavenly perfection into impossible to fulfill demands on earth, culminating in what F.A. Hayek considered the "superstition" that science could rationalize markets to achieve social perfection. To unravel this capitalist enigma, we identify the historical roots of the confusion, review the alternative rationalized solutions, and provide a pluralist John Locke-inspired legitimizing-synthesis to fuse a freedom and tradition moral scaffolding sufficient to hold the walls and preserve the best of capitalist civilization"--

"America is increasingly polarized around elections, but as James R. Copland explains, the unelected control much of the government apparatus that affects our lives. Congress has largely abdicated its authority. "Independent" administrative agencies churn out thousands of new regulations a year. Courts have enabled these agencies to expand their powers beyond those authorized by law-and limited executive efforts to rein in the bureaucratic behemoth. No ordinary citizen today can know what is legal and what is not. Some 300,000 federal crimes exist, 98 percent of which were created by administrative action rather than Congressional lawmaking. The proliferation of rules and the severity of sanctions give enormous discretion to unelected enforcement agents-upending the rule of law. Private attorneys regulate vast swathes of conduct through lawsuits, based upon legal theories never voted upon by the people's elected representatives. A combination of historical accident, decisions by judges and law professors, and self-interested advocacy by the plaintiffs' bar have left the United States with the world's most-expensive litigation system. Finally, state and local officials have increasingly pursued agendas to dictate the terms of national commerce. In reaching beyond their borders, these "new antifederalists" have been subjecting the citizens of Wyoming and Mississippi to the whims of the electorates of New York and San Francisco-inverting the constitutional design. In this timely new book, Manhattan Institute legal scholar Copland discusses how unelected actors have assumed control of the American republic-and where we need to go to chart a corrective course"--

"With a new preface by the author."--Cover.

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most important general medical journals in the world. Doctors rely on the conclusions it publishes, and most do not have the time to look beyond abstracts to examine methodology or question assumptions. Many of its pronouncements are conveyed by the media to a mass audience, which is likely to take them as authoritative. But is this trust entirely warranted?Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor retired from practice, turned a critical eye upon a full year of the Journal, alert to dubious premises and to what is left unsaid. In False Positive, he demonstrates that many of the papers it publishes reach conclusions that are not only flawed, but obviously flawed. He exposes errors of reasoning and conspicuous omissions apparently undetected by the editors. In some cases, there is reason to suspect actual corruption.When the Journal takes on social questions, its perspective is solidly politically correct. Practically no debate on social issues appears in the printed version, and highly debatable points of view go unchallenged. The Journal reads as if there were only one possible point of view, though the American medical profession (to say nothing of the extensive foreign readership) cannot possibly be in total agreement with the stances taken in its pages. It is thus more megaphone than sounding board. There is indeed much in the New England Journal of Medicine that deserves praise and admiration. But this book should encourage the general reader to take a constructively critical view of medical news and to be wary of the latest medical doctrines.

Prosecutors can "indict a ham sandwich," we hear, and laugh at the absurdity. Yet the joke captures a truth: federal prosecutors wield enormous power over us all. And the federal criminal justice system is so stacked in favor of the government that shocking numbers of innocent people have been sent to prison. In Conviction Machine, two leading authorities combine their knowledge and experience to describe the problems within the Department of Justice and in the federal courts-and to offer solutions. Both have already published books exposing flaws and abuses in the system. Harvey A. Silverglate, a prominent criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer, showed that every one of us is vulnerable to criminal prosecution in Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor in three districts under nine United States attorneys from both political parties and lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals, witnessed appalling abuses by prosecutors that prompted her to write Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.Together, Powell and Silverglate shine a light on the defects of the system: overzealous prosecutors, perjury traps, negligent judges, perverse limits on self-defense, vague and overabundant criminal statutes, insufficient requirements for criminal intent, and no accountability for prosecutors. Most important, they provide a much-needed blueprint for reforming the Department of Justice and the criminal justice system, including actions an average citizen can take to help restore justice.

Americans have never been more divided, and we're ripe for a breakup. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence, invite us to think that we'd be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of law, we are already two nations. There's a second reason why secession beckon

American health care is at a crossroads. Health spending reached $3.5 trillion in 2017. Yet more than 27 million people remain uninsured. And it's unclear if all that spending is buying higher-quality care. Patients, doctors, insurers, and the government acknowledge that the healthcare status quo is unsustainable. America's last attempt at

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written-the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan "experts," an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court-the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language-he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas's biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America's future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

Vexing social issues such as the opioid epidemic, criminal violence, and chronic unemployment are the target of social programs Americans fund with their tax dollars. Husock argues that over the past century, the U.S. has lost sight of the more powerful antidote to these problems: positive social norms.

"The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency shocked the political establishment, triggering a wave of hysteria among the bicoastal elite that may yet never subside. The biggest shockwaves of all however were felt not in the progressive parishes of Manhattan or San Francisco, but in the halls of the political elite's cherished and oft-overlooked center of power: Washington, D.C.'s sprawling 'administrative state.' For President Trump represented an existential threat to its denizens, which came to be known as 'swamp creatures.' How did it come to pass that the 'deconstruction' of this obscure institution - the 'draining of the swamp' - would become a core aim of the Trump administration, impacting everything from judicial appointments to the federal budget and regulatory policy? Could public aversion to policies and practices for which the administrative state was sometimes surreptitiously and other times overtly responsible explain President Trump's rise? What was the intellectual basis for the argument that the administrative state need be dismantled in the first place? The answers to these questions and many more lie in the underappreciated but revolutionary scholarship of Professor John Marini, collected in his timely, comprehensive, accessible new book, Unmasking the Administrative State"--

"This book expands on Mac Donald's ... reporting on 'the Ferguson effect' and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: [in Mac Donald's view, it isn't] racist cops [that] are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate"--Amazon.com.

Britain yesterday; America today. The reality of being top dog is that everybody hates you. In this provocative book, noted historian and commentator Jeremy Black shows how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today, and the selective way in which certain countries are castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.