“Carlson, our most important historian of the family, has written a masterful study of American self-understanding…. Brilliant and disturbing, this book [The ‘American Way’] is a ‘must read’ for anyone worried about the state of our private and social institutions.” 

Prof. Bruce Frohnen, Ave Maria School of Law

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“Allan Carlson knows more about the history of the American family than any other person, and he is particularly acute in showing the impact of public policy on family life.”

Prof. James Hitchcock, St. Louis University

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“Allan Carlson is a real treasure: an independent thinker, the genuine article. [From Cottage to Work Station] is a brave and powerful book: a gimlet-eyed analysis with the force of a jeremiad.” 

Bill Kauffman, author of Every Man a King

“Allan Carlson is the most perceptive writer on the American family today.”  Prof. Charles Rice, University of Notre Dame Law School

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“Allan Carlson is one of America’s most thoughtful social historians.” 

Prof. Paul Gottfried, Elizabethtown College

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“The New Agrarian Mind [by Allan Carlson] is splendidly detailed, a definitive work on its subject, clear and coherent, a well-digested mass of source material…. Let me recommend it as a vast storehouse of sources, of detailed research and exploration of its subject.”

Prof. Peter Hunt, in The Chesterton Review

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“Allan Carlson is a master at uncovering long-forgotten thinkers and obscure crusaders who offer bright insights into the dilemmas of our own time.” 

Phillip Longman, Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation

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”In this remarkable and important book, Allan Carlson provides an immensely valuable reminder that there is a true ‘third way’ beyond the false dichotomy of free-market liberalism and collectivist socialism.” 

Prof. Patrick Deneen, University of Notre Dame

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“[Allan Carlson’s] Family Questions is a tour de force in defense of real families. It is the sort of genuinely profound book that one comes across only rarely in contemporary publishing.”

E. Calvin Beisner in The University Bookman

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“[Allan Carlson] is our most persuasive advocate for the natural family, one of the few scholars willing to approach the subject with an unapologetically normative view.”

Prof. Wilfred M. McClay, University of Oklahoma

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“Allan Carlson is the best writer and thinker on family and society. His essays are always a ‘must read’ for anyone concerned about the family, be they liberal (to know the strength of their opposition) or conservative (to be led deeper and deeper in an always enjoyable way).” 

Patrick Fagan, the MARRI project, Catholic University of America

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The Natural Family: A Manifesto by Allan Carlson and Paul Mero is “perhaps the most succinct, thorough, and impressive pro-family argument yet made.”

BOOKLIST (American Library Association)

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“Although located in the small Midwestern city of Rockford, Illinois, and under the savvy leadership of its President, Allan Carlson, [the Howard Center] is at the center of an emerging conservative religious and political world strategy on families.”

Prof. Don S. Browning, The University of Chicago, in the book Marriage and Modernization

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“[Allan Carlson is] a leading Christian Right intellectual light.”

Profs. Doris Buss and Didi Herman in their book, Globalizing Family Values

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“Until recently, the forces who uphold the traditional family…have been splintered…. What has changed all of that is basically one man, with the help of God and lots of colleagues. His name is Allan Carlson, the soft-spoken but powerfully effective intellectual who now has successfully put together two World Congress of Families.” 

Paul Weyrich, founder of both The Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation

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“Allan Carlson offers readers a brilliant history and analysis of the most important building blocks of civilization: marriage and family…. In a time obsessed with the possibility of redefining both…, Carlson’s work is simply indispensable. Summing Up: Essential.” 

J.R. Edwards, CHOICE (American Library Association)

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“Refreshing in its intellectual candor, to say nothing of its political audacity, Allan Carlson’s The Natural Family Where It Belongs has renewed the vitality of an important, but languishing conversation…. His book may turn out to be the first call for husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, grandparents and children to unite, reminding them that they have nothing to lose but their chains and that there may yet be a world to win.”

Prof. Mark Malvasi in Modern Age

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" Your essay ['Foreign Policy and the American Way'] is, frankly, one of the finest historical essays I have ever read. I compose this letter under its spell; my head reels at the felicity which you tie the course of postwar American culture all together with a single thread, and the power of the insights you deliver along the way. The piece is scrupulously fair, impressively learned, and thoroughly humane.... You may take some satisfaction in learning that this praise comes from a certified secular liberal...."  --Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and other histories