The Making of a Neocon

Abstract

James Q. Wilson (1931–2012) ranks among the most influential political scientists and policy intellectuals of the past fifty years. This new account of Wilson's journey from liberal to conservative highlights his time at Harvard University in the 1960s, during the height of liberal authority and the emergence of the New Left, and draws from archival materials and records at MIT, Harvard, and RAND, and from a range of Wilson's writings on administration, urban affairs, and crime. It situates Wilson in the organizational nexus in which he worked, analyzing his thinking as it shifted from a preoccupation with incentives and running organizations (“organizational maintenance”) to disincentives and punishing people (“order maintenance”). Wilson, the nation's leading institutionalist, formed his conservative ideas in the praxis of university administration—a venue typically ignored by scholars but one that influenced his understanding of organizations and crime.