This succinct but illuminating book defends the free market, while criticizing a narrowly economistic understanding of man and society. Baldacchino argues that a sound economy has ethical and cultural prerequisites that are integral to its survival. Includes an introduction by Russell Kirk.

Joseph Baldacchino is the President of the National Humanities Institute and Editor of the academic journal Humanitas. For many years he was a Washington reporter and editor, in which capacity he addressed most aspects of national policy and politics but with particular emphasis on ethical and cultural issues. Baldacchino is editor of Educating for Virtue and, with others, the author of Irving Babbitt in Our Time. His present writing project, with others, is a constitutional history of the United States entitled Who We Are: The Story of America’s Constitution.

From the Introduction:

“Any society’s moral order develops from its religion, its philosophy, its humane literature. The discipline of political economy, little understood until the latter half of the eighteenth century, is no independent creation: what economic views one holds must depend upon one’s apprehension of human nature. An economic system indifferent to morality will not long endure. For proof of these theses, read with attention Baldacchino’s succinct study, the work of a sound scholar endowed with a philosophical habit of mind.”–Russell Kirk

What They Are Saying:

“Baldacchino has raised many of the important issues on which we economists and historians of economic thought need to get busy”–William F. Campbell, Jr., Louisiana State University

In Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village economist Jennifer Roback Morse explains how the economy, which appears to a series of impersonal exchanges, is actually based upon love. Morse also shows how the political order—Hillary Clinton’s “village”—depends upon the prior existence of loving families.

Drawing on the experience of neglected orphans, Morse argues that mothers create the basic attachments that lay the groundwork for the development of conscience. Furthermore, only the family can socialize children to use their freedom responsibly. No social program can take the place of mothers and fathers working together as a team. Unfortunately, stay-at-home mothers are often denigrated by feminists and always squeezed by the economy. Love and Economics defends the economic value of motherhood and outlines a better economic way forward.

Jennifer Roback Morse is a renowned marriage and family scholar. She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-up World and of numerous major academic and public policy articles for journals ranging from the Journal of Economic History to Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.