Bøker av Yuval Levin

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. In honor of this significant anniversary, the American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the second volume of this series, leading historians, political scientists, and economists analyze the role that the market economy played in the creation of the United States. Alongside the American Declaration of Independence, 1776 marked the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. This work shaped the political and economic thought of many leaders in the American Revolution, including those who would go on to join rival political parties, such as Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. At the same time, the founders evinced concerns over what economic inequality might mean for political freedom in the fledgling republic.Understanding how the founding generation viewed the promises and perils of capitalism in securing the future of the United States can shed light on modern debates over capitalism's role in American society.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.In the inaugural volume of an eight-book series, renowned historians and political scientists explore what the contested idea of democracy meant to those who participated in the American Revolution. For some, democracy represented a particular way to order government, while others understood democracy to be a transformative principle that would serve as the philosophical bedrock of not just the new republic's political institutions but its social and cultural ones as well.Examining the democratic culture that was born out of the American Revolution can help us understand the framework within which we continue to debate the structure and purpose of the system of government that binds us together today.

A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation.As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.

Religion and the American Future is a lively, learned dialogue on the role of religion in American society. The contributors raise their voices in opposition to the tide of cynicism and constraint that often overwhelms religion in public life and argue that tolerance, respect, and free expression must define the future of religion in America.

The astonishing success of the natural sciences in the modern era has led many thinkers to assume that similar feats of knowledge and power should be achievable in human affairs. That assumption, and the accompanying notion that the methods of modern science ought to be applied to social and political questions, have been at the heart of a number of prominent philosophical schools in the modern age, and much of the politics of the past century. Is the application of scientific logic to the study of human affairs philosophically defensible? Does it aid or hinder our efforts at a genuine understanding of the human world? Why have so many modern ideologies, including those responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, advanced themselves under the banner of science? Why, in other words, do we assume that modern science holds the key to an understanding of human affairs? Are we right to make this assumption? And what does the assumption mean for contemporary society and politics? Tyranny of Reason, which is designed for the interested lay reader and for undergraduate or beginning graduate students in the social sciences, attempts to answer these important questions in the context of the history of philosophy.

"In a Burkean manner, Mr. Levin enriches through wisdom rather than prescription. He gives us something more than a manual of past lessons-namely, the historical framework to achieve greater understanding."-Wall Street Journal