I’m writing my Sunday Examiner column on James Q. Wilson, the great political scientist who died today. I’ve followed Jim’s work since I was at Harvard in the 1960s (though I foolishly did not take any of his classes) and have known him since the 1980s. He wrote one of the two most generous reviews (the other was from the veteran journalist Max Lerner) of my 1990 book Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan and, when he was president of the American Political Science Association, arranged for me to be awarded its Carey McWilliams prize for political journalism. I’ve cherished the opportunity to keep in touch with him at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was on the board and I have been a resident fellow since 2007.
For three good appreciations of Jim Wilson and a taste of the man himself, you can do no better than to read these remarks by Arthur Brooks, George Will, Charles Murray and Wilson himself at AEI’s 2011 Irving Kristol dinner, at which Arthur announced the creation of an endowed chair at AEI named for Jim. And here is Jim’s amazon.com page.
