BOOKS New york spring 2016 ENCOUNTER BOOK S new york · spring 2016 Contents New Releases · 4 Frontlist Titles · 24 Backlist Titles · 36 Indexes · 70 Distribution · 72 Dear Reader, Welcome to the latest cornucopia from Encounter Books! While every season has its stand-out titles, we are particularly excited by our offer- ings this time around. The pages that follow have complete details on all our new books. Let me take just a moment to mention a few that you will not want to miss: The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left, by the Heritage Foundation's Kim Holmes. At a moment when college campuses across the country have succumbed to the virus of political correctness, Holmes provides a searing analysis of the illiberal smugness and infantilization that have crippled so many American institutions. Who Needs the Fed? What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us about Money, Credit and Why We Should Abolish America’s Central Bank by John Tamny. For years, observers across the country have anxiously watched the Federal Reserve wondering what the central bank would do about interest rates. But why should we the people surrender the wisdom of the free market to the manipulations of an unaccountable government bureaucracy? This spritely and pro-market book makes an impassioned case for entrepreneurial spirit and individual liberty. In The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald brings no-nonsense analysis to the racially charged debate over crime and the breakdown of civility that has disfigured life in America over the past several years. Recalling the success that Rudy Guiliani had in bringing New York back from the brink of anarchy, she calls for a return to the policies of proactive policing and community awareness that brought homicide rates, drug use, and welfare abuse to their lowest levels in decades. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocquiville lamented the unfortunate plight of the American Indian. That was in the 1830s. Today, American Indians, are captive of a reservation system that perpetuates their second-class citizen- ship. In The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians, Naomi Schafer Riley shows how government policy toward the American Indian has not only condemned an entire population to being wards of the state, but also to what extent government treatment of the Indians forms a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. Encounter is fast approaching its 20th anniversary of publishing serious books for serious readers. We are extremely grateful to our readers for helping to make Encounter an indispensable voice for democratic capitalism, free markets, and ordered liberty. Excelsior! Roger Kimball Publisher Ryszard Legutko The Demon in Democracy Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies yszard Legutko lived and suffered under commu- R nism for decades – and he fought alongside the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. But, having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, he has discov- ered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept simi- lar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture and human nature. In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals, albeit without the Soviet style’s brutal measures. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man who is led to believe himself liber- ated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideo- logical prejudices. Ryszard Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagello- nian University in Krakow, Poland. He is currently a Member of the European Parliament 4 New Hardcover March 2016 Political Science encounter books 1-59403-863-5 2016 978-1-59403-863-1 6 × 9˝ / 296 pages cloth / $25.99 Excerpt t the beginning of the nineties I discovered something that was not particu- A larly difficult to discover at the time; namely, that the nascent liberal democracy significantly narrows the area of what is permissible. Incredible as it may seem, the final year of the decline of communism had more of the spirit of freedom than the period after the establishment of the new order which immediately put a stop to what many had felt strongly at that time and what despite its elusiveness is known to everybody who had an experience of freedom – a sense of having many doors open and many pos- sibilities to pursue. Soon this sense evaporated, subdued by the new rhetoric of neces- sity that the liberal democratic system brought with itself. It did not take me long to make another discovery, and more depressing one, namely that this unifying tendency was not limited to the post-communist world, and did not result from its peculiarities. The adverse effects one could see throughout the western civilization. My subsequent experience of working in the European Parliament only endorsed my diagnosis. While there, I saw up close what – from the distance – escapes the attention of many observers. If the European Parliament is supposed to be the emanation of the spirit of today’s liberal democracy, then this spirit is certainly neither good nor beauti- ful: it has many features – both bad and ugly – some of which, unfortunately, it shares with the spirit of communism. Even a preliminary contact with the EU institutions allows one to feel a stifling atmosphere typical of a political monopoly, to see the destruction of language turning into a new form of newspeak, to observe the creation of a surreality, mostly ideological, that obfuscates the real world, to be a witness of an uncompromising hostility against all dissidents, and to perceive many other things only too familiar to anyone who remembers the world governed by the Communist Party. Interestingly this association with communism can be quite often heard in private conversations conducted in the EP corridors even among the loyal EU devotees. While annoyed with this system, they still do not challenge its fundamental rightness, prob- ably hanging to the belief that its disagreeable qualities are superficial and will hope- fully disappear with time. And they do not ask themselves, at least not openly, whether by any chance what annoys them is not the core of the system and consequently whether all these bad things half-jokingly referred to as Soviet-like will not intensify rather than disappear. Similar thoughts are being disqualified by a seemingly irrefutable argument. How can one possibly compare the two systems, one of which was criminal, while the other, in spite of all the objections, gives people a lot of freedom and institutional protec- tion? Surely, the difference between the people’s republic and the democratic republic of today is so vast that only an insane person would deny it. 5 David Horowitz Progressive Racism ow did the civil rights movement transform from a H cause opposing racism into a movement endorsing racial preferences and privileges for select groups based on their skin color? David Horowitz was a participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and a witness to the events and betrayals that turned a noble movement on its head. In Progressive Racism, Horowitz tells the story of how racial extortionists on the Left hijacked the civil rights movement and gave it a mob mentality in which white Americans are regarded as guilty before the fact and Afri- can Americans are regarded as innocent even when facts prove them guilty, even when their crimes are committed against other African Americans. Progressive Racism examines how the term “racism” itself has been robbed of its meaning and turned into a political weapon to bludgeon opponents into silence. It exposes how the so-called civil rights movement became an oppressor of African Americans by bolstering disastrous social policies that have destroyed the black family, blighted the lives of millions of African American children, and created a permanent black “underclass” dependent on government aid. Above all, it is an indictment of the hypoc- risy that today governs the public discourse on race, so that an angry mob in Ferguson Missouri seeking to execute a police officer because he was white can be described as a legitimate civil rights protest and be supported by the pres- ident of the United States. David Horowitz is president of the David Horowitz Free- dom Center and founder of the online news magazine Front- PageMag.com. 6 New Hardcover March 2016 Politics / Social Science encounter books 1-59403-859-7 2016 978-1-59403-859-4 6 × 9˝ / 320 pages cloth / $25.99 The Black Book David Horowitz of the American Left An Anatomy of Leftist Illusions, 1974–2012 avid Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the THE COLLECTED CONSERVATIVE WRITINGS OF D world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the DAVID HOROWITZ New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid- 1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.” When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ genera- tion and his own had been confined.