The Sexual Revolution, which has been underway since the 1950s, is a rolling revolution-a set of unfinishable ambitions, all affecting marriage and family life. Feminists want to "liberate" women from childrearing as well as the home and build a world "beyond gender"; progressives aspire to build a society where human beings can choose their natures; and sexual liberation theorists would take human beings "beyond repression." These ideologies have sunk deeply into our culture and our political regime. It is well past time to ask the uncomfortable questions about whether these ideologies betray human nature and undermine human happiness. The Recovery of Family Life defends marriage and family life while exposing the limits and blind spots in these powerful revolutionary ideologies. After suggesting a general framework within which to understand the ends and means of family policy, Scott Yenor explores what a liberal society should seek to accomplish in marriage and family policy. The framework is applied to some of today's most important public policy debates on such controversial topics as gay rights, pornography, population decline, women's equality, rape law, the age of consent, and welfare state politics. Those advocating for the rolling revolution often point toward necessary reforms, but they offer an incomplete picture of human flourishing. In an attempt to recover a healthier vision of life, Yenor asks that those already resisting the rolling revolution evaluate their own assumptions and aims anew: advocates on both sides of the partisan aisle stand at risk of operating with truncated narratives. Public policy can be an important tool to help the resistance, but only if informed by a deeper vision in which marriage and family fit into the broader political regime. The Recovery of Family Life combines a focus on first principles with practical advice for lawmakers about how to undo the damage our policies have done.

With crisp prose and intellectual fairness, Family Politics traces the treatment of the family in the philosophies of leading political thinkers of the modern world. What is family? What is marriage? In an effort to address contemporary society's disputes over the meanings of these human social institutions, Scott Yenor carefully examines a roster of major and unexpected modern political philosophers--from Locke and Rousseau to Hegel and Marx to Freud and Beauvoir. He lucidly presents how these individuals developed an understanding of family in order to advance their goals of political and social reform. Through this exploration, Yenor unveils the effect of modern liberty on this foundational institution and argues that the quest to pursue individual autonomy has undermined the nature of marriage and jeopardizes its future.

In The Presidency Then and Now, leading political scientists and historians assess the development of the presidency and its role in today's political landscape. The questions addressed in this wide-ranging volume include: How has the doctrine of separation of powers evolved? How have presidential campaigns and presidential oratory influenced the constitutional character of the institution? How does the scandal-driven press coverage of the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate presidency compare with the partisan press of the early republic? Among other topics, the contributors examine the early precedents and modern manifestations of the executive veto, executive privilege, and presidential use of force doctrine, and chart the shift from a constitutionally circumspect and constrained chief executive toward the modern notion of a plebiscitary presidency. The Presidency Then and Now assesses several key trends in presidential leadership including the recent movement toward a policy-centered presidency in which detailed policy development has at times supplanted broad vision and historically informed judgment. Other essays address such topics as the transformation of the Cabinet from a body whose members possessed stature equal to the president to a largely symbolic group that has been replaced in its advisory capacity by the White House staff. The Presidency Then and Now makes a case for returning to constitutional, reasoned deliberation and replacing modern fixation on 'celebrity' status with the founders' notion of 'stature.' By drawing comparisons between the old and the new, The Presidency Then and Now offers timely and incisive insights that will appeal not only to scholars of the presidency but to historians and general readers interested in the constitutional foundations, philosophical debates, and key political developments that have affected the presidential office over time.