To Empower People: The Debate That Is Changing America and the World

Nearly twenty years ago in the first edition of this path-breaking book, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus anticipated the major world-wide project of the 1990s: the renewal of civil society. They showed that such "mediating structures" as family, neighborhood, church, voluntary associations, and civic organizations are crucial institutions, whose weakening spells disaster.

They warned public policy experts, then mesmerized by promising new government programs, that these were likely to...