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