Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has emerged as one of America's leading advocates for free enterprise and the moral conditions of prosperity. ConservativeHome's Ryan Streeter recently put 10 questions to him.
RS: In your recent book, The Battle, you have redefined the culture struggle in America away from the social issues, to free enterprise. Why?
Brooks: Yes, the book identifies a culture struggle—but not one as people have typically understood it. Americans are not just arguing over this or that economic policy. They’re really arguing over cultural imperatives. Do we want to become more of a European-style social democracy, or do we truly want to embrace free enterprise?
Data show that Americans are emotionally invested in the idea that we are a free enterprise country – not because of economics, but because of who we are as a people and what we value. What’s central to America – going back to the founders – is liberty and how we exercise it in our daily lives. Today, as I show in The Battle, we primarily do that through our system of free enterprise.
RS: Who is your intellectual hero and why?
Brooks: Well, I have a few. First, Milton Friedman. He was one of the first economists to lay the cultural groundwork for what we now so commonly refer to as the free enterprise system. He wrote his books as economic works, but they became cultural phenomena, because he wrote in aspirational terms that people could understand and identify with. He saw free enterprise as not just one economic philosophy among many but a core element of who we are as Americans, how we operate, how we live out the freedom we all cherish.
Another hero is Irving Kristol. His main contribution wasn’t in showing why one must be a conservative, but in helping us appreciate why “liberalism” (as we have come to define it in the U.S.) was so deeply unsatisfactory for happy lives and healthy societies.
Of course, I would cite James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray as intellectual heroes. They are the most influential social scientists of the past 50 years. Their work has addressed the essential questions of society and culture, and shown an entire generation of social scientist how to think about big, difficult issues. They were especially influential among social scientists in think tanks rather than in the academy, among those who most influence public policy. I’m a social scientist because of Wilson and Murray. It’s as if they provided a manual on how to work through tough issues in social science.
RS: Which two or three books (besides your own!) have been especially influential on your overall outlook on public policy?
Brooks: Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been more influential than anything else. I know it’s a bit of a cliché (and I should probably come up with something under the radar that seems deeply original). But let’s be honest—the book is truly great and everyone should read it, or re-read it. Contemporary books include Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense.
