James Q. Wilson Dies at 80

I recollect reading the work of James Quinn Wilson back in the 1960s, when many political scientists were enamored of theoretical or methodological fancies far removed from the rough and tumble of everyday life. In those days my intellectual heroes--Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Jane Jacobs, among others--were, by contrast, scholars committed to solving practical problems. That's what I admired about James Q. Wilson. When Wilson died this week at the age of 80, I was taken aback to realize that he would have been only in his early 30s when he published City Politics (co-authored with Edward C. Banfield, 1963) and The Amateur Democrat (1967). Later, he was to earn fame as one of the leading students of police administration, to which he contributed the influential "broken window" theory that transformed the culture many a big-city police department. Wilson's Wikipedia entry lists seventeen books in all. To judge from the obituaries, he was a prince of a fellow as well. Here is the Huffington Post obit. And here is George Will's tribute in today's Washington Post.