Forty years after its original publication, Liberty Fund brings back to print Henry Veatch’s path-breaking popular presentation of virtue ethics. This modern interpretation of Aristotelian ethics is a natural for undergraduate philosophy courses. It is also an engaging work for the expert and the beginner alike, offering a middle ground between existential and analytic ethics. Veatch argues for the existence of ethical knowledge, and he reasons that this knowledge is grounded in human nature. Yet he contends that the moral life is not merely one of following rules or recipes, nor is human well-being something simple. Rather, the moral life, which Veatch calls rational or intelligent living,” is the life of practical wisdom where individual judgment of the particular and the contingent is paramount. Veatch’s Rational Man offers a pluralistic understanding of human well-being without lapsing into moral relativism. For those interested in morality and liberty, Rational Man offers fertile ground for developing an account of free and responsible persons. It has profoundly influenced the work of Den Uyl, Campbell, Machan, Miller, Mack, and many others. Henry Babcock Veatch (19111999) was born in Evansville, Indiana, and educated at Harvard. He was recognized as one of the leading neo-Aristotelian philosophers of the twentieth century. Besides Rational Man, he was the author of Intentional Logic; Realism and Nominalism Revisited; Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation; and many others.

Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics

Politics & Social Sciences

Veatch, Henry Babcock

Philosophy

Amagi

The Present Age challenges readers to reexamine the role of the United States in the world since World War I. Nisbet criticizes Americans for isolationism at home, discusses the gutting of educational standards, the decay of education, the presence of government in all facets of life, the diminished connection to community, and the prominence of economic arrangements driving everyday life in America. This work is deeply indebted to the analyses of Tocqueville and Bryce regarding the threats that bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world. The Present Age relates a tragedy—the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, as the result of the necessary resistance to National Socialist and Communist totalitarianism that fed into and reinforced the profound tendencies toward centralization within modern society. Robert Nisbet (1913–1996), former professor of sociology at Columbia University, is the author of Sociology as an Art Form; The Social Philosophers; Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary; The Sociological Tradition; History of the Idea of Progress; and Twilight of Authority, also published by Liberty Fund.

The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America

History

NISBET, ROBERT

Americas

With The Moral Foundation of Democracy, John H. Hallowell makes a significant argument in favor of the importance of moral values in the orderly functioning of modern democracies. Hallowell begins with a survey of the role that classical liberalism and faith in man as a reasonable, moral, and spiritual actor played in the emergence of democratic self-government. He sharply criticizes positivist thought and moral relativism as direct challenges to the notion that transcendent truths guide individuals in their actions and influence how people participate in a democratic society. Hallowell reminds us that at its core, a well-functioning democracy must be based on a fundamental respect for the dignity of the individual. John H. Hallowell taught political science for forty years at Duke University and was chair of the department from 1964 to 1971. He died in 1991. In addition to this work, Hallowell also wrote The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology (1943) and Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (1950).

The Moral Foundation of Democracy

Hallowell, John H.

In this work William Henry Chamberlin offers his perspective as a seasoned journalist on the United States’ involvement in World War II. Written only five years after the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan, the book is a window into its time. William Henry Chamberlin (18971969) was an American journalist best known for his writings on the Cold War, Communism, and U.S. foreign policy.

America’s Second Crusade

Chamberlin, William Henry

Military

In The Representation of Business in English Literature, five scholars of different periods of English literature produce original essays on how business and businesspeople have been portrayed by novelists, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing to the end of the twentieth century. The contributors to Representation help readers understand the partiality of the various writers and, in so doing, explore the issue of what determines public opinion about business. Arthur Pollard (1922-2001) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hull in Hull, East Yorkshire, England. John Blundell is General Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

The Representation of Business in English Literature

Business & Money

Economics

Are morals always relative? Are private actions—among consenting adults— always beyond the law? Or are there some behaviors which so weaken a society that common beliefs about right and wrong must be enforced to protect the common good? In opposing the decriminalization of private acts of homosexuality in Britain, Patrick Devlin maintained that not only is it reasonable to allow popular morality to influence lawmaking, it is imperative: “ . . . For a society is not something that is kept together physically; it is held by the invisible bonds of common thought.” Today, as divisive issues such as same-sex marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” confront our legislative, judicial, and executive branches, the views expressed by Devlin in The Enforcement of Morals resonate and reverberate anew. Patrick Devlin (1905–1992) studied history and law at Cambridge University and became a successful lawyer.

The Enforcement of Morals

DEVLIN, Patrick

Respected author, scholar, and columnist Charles Murray has long challenged accepted notions of public and social policy issues. In this volume, originally published in 1988, Murray presents a persuasive and practical argument that reconsiders commonly held beliefs of what constitutes success in social policy by examining the scope of government and its role in people’s pursuit of happiness. In Pursuit begins by examining James Madison’s statement: “a good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can best be attained." Murray exhibits a thoughtful, accessible writing style as he considers such basic, important questions as whether individual efforts or government reform should be responsible for dealing with society's problems. Drawing from his minimalist-government viewpoint, Murray proposes that government not try to force happiness on the people with federal policies or programs but, rather, that it provide conditions that enable people to pursue happiness on their own. Murray also proposes that the pursuit of happiness be used as a framework for analyzing the efficacy of public policy, and he comes to the conclusion that Jeffersonian democracy is still the best way to run society, even in today's complex society. The author states, "Jefferson and his colleagues were right more universally than they knew. In particular, they understood that the vitality of communities and the freedom of individuals are intertwined, not competitive." Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has written numerous books, including Coming Apart, Losing Ground, and Real Education. He is perhaps best known for coauthoring the 1994 New York Times bestseller The Bell Curve with the late Richard J. Herrnstein.

In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

MURRAY, CHARLES

"Social philosophers, of all varieties, will find their preconceptions challenged here. Anthony de Jasay does, indeed, look at justice and its surroundings 'through a different window.' And his totally original arguments prompt urges to respond, even as frustration is anticipated. Can any of the several conventional wisdoms survive the provacative criticism that this book offers?"
James M. Buchanan, April 2002
Author of The State, Anthony de Jasay, has been described as one of the few genuinely original minds in modern political philosophy. He breaks new ground with Justice and Its Surroundings a new collection of trenchant essays that seek to redefine the concept of justice and to highlight the frontier between it and the surrounding issues that encroach upon it and are mistakenly associated with it.
Justice and Its Surroundings discusses rival notions which treat justice as something else” as fairness, equality, or moral intuition. Jasay states, Theories of justice inspired by the idea that its function is to rectify the way of the world by redistributing the good and bad things that happen to make up people’s lots tend to be intellectually weak and vulnerable to the weapon of logic.” Jasay’s chosen mission is to promote clear reasoning rather than plead for a good cause.
This straightforward and terse book analyzes the roles of collective choice, redistribution, and socialism and the claims that would enlist justice in their service. The issue of whether state authority is necessary, convenient, or neither, and the primacy of convention and contract are among the pivotal questions Jasay poses. He concludes by analyzing notions of freedom and making a clear distinction between freedoms and rights.
Anthony de Jasay is an independent theorist living in France. Jasay believes that philosophy should be mainly, if not exclusively, about clarifying conclusions that arise from the careless use of, or deliberate misuse of, language. There are echoes here of . . . Wittgenstein's later philosophy.” His books, translated into a half dozen languages, include The State and Social Contract, Free Ride.
[source/credit line] I. M. D. Little in Ordered Anarchy, 2007
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Justice and Its Surroundings (The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo)

JASAY, ANTHONY DE

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