Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.
His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the distinctive middle initial.
And I think a case can be made that that Q was a clue to the character of the man. To outward appearances Jim Wilson was an ordinary middle class American with middle class values and middle class tastes as unremarkable as those of thousands of other Jim Wilsons across the land.
But as a scholar, writer and human being he was one of a kind, with a probing mind, a capacity to sift and weigh evidence and an ability to reach conclusions that even the harshest of critics found hard to refute.
And one whose careful prose did not always manage to conceal a puckish sense of humor. A man as distinctive as the Q.
Read the rest of Michael Barone’s column HERE.
