Reed Press, 2004

Reading these essays, one is brought to the heart of some of today's most pressing public policy debates: What is the proper role and responsibility of government? How does one define racial equality? How do economies—and cities—prosper? What measures are needed to ensure that every American child receives a good education?

Turning Intellect into Influence also includes a preface from Manhattan Institute chairman emeritus Roger Hertog and president Lawrence J. Mone, as well as a complete bibliography of institute-sponsored books and a list of Wriston Lectures.

For twenty five years, the Manhattan Institute has been one of America’s leading think tanks, providing an ongoing source of new ideas about how a society based on freedom and individual responsibility can flourish. In Turning Intellect into Influence, nine leading writers and commentators give in-depth assessments of the institute’s intellectual achievement over the last quarter century:

• "The Manhattan Institute at 25"
  Acclaimed novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe opens the book:

  "Manhattan Institute writers have been dynamiting the
  conventional wisdom of 'the intellectuals' with regularity."
  

• "A Walker in City Journal"
  New York Times columnist David Brooks looks at City Journal:

  "If you had to pick one phrase to summarize the cast of mind
  that informs City  Journal, it would be, 'We can still do it.'"
  

• "Race in America"
  The doyen of American political scientists, James Q. Wilson, considers the view of racial equality that animates the institute’s work:

  "Taken together, the Manhattan Institute's books on race and ethnicity raise a question for which, so far, we have no generally accepted answer: Can people live together decently without regard to skin color or ethnic background?"
  

• "The Supply-Side Revolution"
  The late Robert Bartley, longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, and Financial Times columnist Amity Shlaes explore the institute’s contribution to the doctrines of supply-side economics:

  "[By the mid-eighties] the formerly extreme tenets of low top tax rates, low rates overall, and simplicity had now become mainstream. And the Manhattan Institute worked to keep them there."
  

• "The Urban Renaissance"
  U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone writes about the institute’s efforts in urban policy: the crime-fighting innovations that have helped American cities regain control of their streets; welfare and education reform; and privatization:

  "Markets work, morality matters: the Manhattan Institute has spent a quarter-century restating these truths, wrongly cast aside as irrelevant
  in the 1960s and 1970s."
  

• "Restoring the Rule of Law"
  Dow Jones executive and legal expert L. Gordon Crovitz evaluates the ideas of institute legal theorists Peter Huber and Walter Olson:

  "Any list of the Manhattan Institute's accomplishments must put near the top the long-term sponsorship of two of the nation's leading legal minds: Peter Huber and Walter Olson. These two men have grappled with a problem—abuses of the U.S. civil justice system—even more deeply entrenched than
  welfare dependency and crime."
  

• "A Laboratory For Change"
  Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, discusses the role of think tanks in American political discourse:

  "When some future historian chronicles… New York City's intellectual life during the last two decades of the twentieth century, his first task will be to explain why the policies that helped transform the nation's greatest metropolis were hatched not by the professoriat… or in the editorial pages of the New York Times, but rather
  by the independent cadre of thinkers… associated "
  

• "The Wriston Lecture: A Venue "
  David Frum, former speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush, reflects on the institute’s prestigious annual Wriston Lecture:

  " The Wriston Lectures have hosted… two Nobel laureates, a billionaire businessman, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the National Security Advisor… Yet some of the most memorable lectures have come from people who have no authority other than the power of their arguments: writers, teachers, and
  the pastor of an inner-city church."

Reviews

New York's Big Think
By David Boaz
New York Post, December 5th, 2004

TWO years ago I spent a great deal of time pro ducing two publications celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Cato Institute. So I couldn't help but admire the wisdom of the Manhattan Institute's officers in getting other people to write about that organization's first 25 years. more >>>

Turning Intellect into Influence: The Manhattan Institute at 25 $6.50 (including $1.50 S&H) In Turning Intellect into Influence, nine leading writers and commentators give in-depth assessments of the intellectual achievement over the last quarter century of the Manhattan Institute, one of America's leading think tanks.