Reed Press, 2004      

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:

• Acclaimed novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe opens the book with an overview of the Manhattan Institute’s history.
• New York Times columnist David Brooks looks at the institute’s quarterly magazine, City Journal.
• The doyen of American political scientists, James Q. Wilson, considers the view of racial equality that animates the institute’s work.
• 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.
• 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.
• Dow Jones executive and legal expert L. Gordon Crovitz evaluates the ideas of institute legal theorists Peter Huber and Walter Olson.
• Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, discusses the role of think tanks in American political discourse.
• David Frum, former speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush, reflects on the institute’s prestigious annual Wriston Lecture.

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.

Brian C. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal.

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. For special or bulk orders, please contact Dolores Garrigo, 212-599-7000, ext. 302.

ISBN: 1-59429-044-X

CONTACT: Lindsay Young Craig Executive Director, Communications, Manhattan Institute 212-599-7000 Ext.315 “ Manhattan Institute writers have been dynamiting the conventional wisdom of ‘the intellectuals’ with regularity.” Tom Wolfe, “The Manhattan Institute at 25” “ 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.’ ” David Brooks, “A Walker in City Journal” “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?” James Q. Wilson, “Race in America” “[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.” Robert L. Bartley and Amity Shlaes, “The Supply-Side Revolution” “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.” Michael Barone, “The Urban Renaissance” “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.” L. Gordon Crovitz, “Restoring the Rule of Law” “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 with the Manhattan Institute.”  Sam Tanenhaus, “A Laboratory For Change” “ 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.”  David Frum, “The Wriston Lecture: A Venue for Ideas”