Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared

The American economy was built on the bedrock of family farms and family businesses, but the Industrial revolution replaced that with factories and businesses. Although it seems like history has moved on, there were men who said that the family could be the center of production again.

Look Inside the Book

Historian and activist Allan C. Carlson has shown that the decline of the productive household has been part of the reason for the decline of marriages and the family in modern America. The modern capitalist economy is eager to put women in the workforce and to put kids in day-care, and communism would like nothing better than to get rid of the family altogether. However, big business and big government were not the only two options in the twentieth century.

Third Ways tells many never-before-told stories about economists, politicians, and activists who wanted the productive family to be the center of the modern economy. If you are dismayed by the rise of divorce, fatherlessness, consumerism, and statism, then this book will show you how many men tried to imagine a different, better world. Carlson tells the stories of heroes like Chesterton and Belloc, the misunderstood Swedish socialist housewives, the peasant revolutionairies in Eastern Europe, and many more in this historical tour-de-force.

The world has not always been this opposed to the family. Read this book to find out how it could be different.

What People Are Saying: 

"Third Ways is a provocative and persuasive book.... Dr. Carlson is profoundly successful in making his case. Perhaps most of all, this book helps expand political imagination, and that is the most fundamental issue facing American politics now. We certainly do need a “Third Way,” and we can only hope this book serves as a signpost toward that road." -Steven Wedgeworth, The Calvinist International

"The breadth of Carlson’s book is impressive." -Humanum Review