The Manhattan Institute, with which I’ve been happily associated for about twenty years now, has lately been celebrating its 25th anniversary, and has now commemorated the occasion with a slender (104 pp.) but impressive volume entitled “Turning Intellect Into Influence: The Manhattan Institute at 25“.
Edited by Brian Anderson (of the Institute’s magazine City Journal) and with a preface by past MI chairman Roger Hertog and MI president Larry Mone, the volume consists of contributions by a choice array of outstanding writers and thinkers:
* Tom Wolfe on the Institute’s general rise and in particular its first huge success, Charles Murray’s epoch-making critique of welfare policy, Losing Ground;
* David Brooks on the magazine City Journal;
* James Q. Wilson on the Institute’s books on race in America, by authors that include Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Tamar Jacoby, John McWhorter and Linda Chavez;
* The late Robert Bartley and Amity Shlaes on the Institute’s work on economics;
* Michael Barone on the Institute’s influence in policy discussions of urbanism, crime, and the revival of cities;
* L. Gordon Crovitz on the Institute’s work on the litigation system;
* Sam Tanenhaus on pragmatism and the Institute’s role in New York intellectual life;
* And David Frum on the annual Wriston Lecture, which has served as a showcase for speeches by public figures as diverse as V.S. Naipaul, Vaclav Klaus, and Condoleezza Rice.
The book can be ordered here (at an outstandingly reasonable price for a hardcover); David Boaz of the Cato Institute recently reviewed it here. It’s recommended to anyone who wants to understand how one outfit, starting in almost complete obscurity, could in a quarter century rack up accomplishments that rank as almost astounding in the often-sleepy world of nonprofit institutions. And it would be false modesty for me to deny that I appreciate the book for a second reason: its extremely favorable appraisal of my (and colleague Peter Huber’s) work on legal reform. Gordon Crovitz, an executive with Dow Jones who formerly wrote the Wall Street Journal’s “Rule of Law” column, assembles (almost for the first time) an overview of what Peter and I have been trying to do over the past two decades, and says some awfully kind things about us along the way. To order the volume, once again, follow this link.
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