Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
A passionate warning of the danger of converting the welfare state into the therapeutic state. Professor Szasz presents a subtle, learned and exhaustive analysis of the difference between medical illness and mental illness and of the harm from confounding the one with the other.
Richard E. Vatz
Richard E. Vatz, Towson University Associate Psychology Editor, USA Today Magazine
To those who wonder what is Thomas Szasz's response to biological psychiatry, this book provides a devastating response. Pharmacracy will expand Szasz's reputation, as it includes a clear analysis of the definition and strategic rhetoric of the concepts of 'diagnosis,' 'disease,' and 'disability.' Finally, Szasz's examination of the 'certifying' of authenticating role of physicians and non-physicians throws a critically fresh light on a professional function of immense importance in our society.
Alvan R. Feinstein
Alvan R. Feinstein Sterling Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology Yale University School of Medicine
Dr. Thomas Szasz is at it again, continuing his long quest (a la Joseph Pulitzer) to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This time Szasz is attacking 'pharmacracy' as a totalitarian, politics-ridden, individual-responsibility-shunning 'Therapeutic State' in which health care professionals act as 'certifying agents' and treatment providers for self indulgence, disability, and other socially undesirable behavior that are now diagnosed as diseases. Whether you agree or disagree, and whether you are pleased or enraged, Szasz will provoke you into an increasingly rare modern activity: critical thought.
David J. Theroux
David J. Theroux Founder and President, The Independent Institute
In Pharmacracy, Thomas Szasz has produced an excellent and seminal book on the pervasive, intrusive, and dangerous power of government officials over our health. Comprehensive, lucid, and provocative, Pharmacracy shows why such power must be ended so that people can control their own lives and benefit from the competitive health-care process only possible when the rights of individuals are fully respected. This book is must reading.
Robert Higgs
No development of the past 30 years threatens the liberty of Americans so much as the growth and the growing acceptance of the therapeutic state....No one has done more than Thomas Szasz to alert us to the menace of a government that regards all human conduct, no matter how private, as a matter of public health, and treats the citizenry as afflicted sheep in need of a coercive shepherd to provide for their rehabilitation. In Pharmacracy, Szasz illuminates an issue of critical importance for all Americans.
—(Robert Higgs, Author of Crisis and Leviathan:Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government)
George Englebretsen
George Englebretsen,Professor of Philosophy, Bishop's University
One expects Thomas Szasz's work to exhibit not only a high level of common sense (a la Mencken or Twain), but a careful philosophical, analytic approach (a la Ryle or Russell), to the foundations of the problems addressed. Pharmacracy meets and far exceeds that expectation: It is a very fine piece of work both enlightening and frightening. I hope it enjoys a wide readership, but fear that few of those who should read it, will.
