Since his first published essay more than fifty years ago, Irving Kristol has written with rare insight and prescience on topics ranging from politics to literature and from economics to religion, while editing some of the most influential intellectual journals of our time and serving as mentor and career shaper to hundreds of journalists, intellectuals, and academics. The specialization of knowledge in the twenty-first century has made it virtually impossible for even the most gifted thinker to cut so broad a swath; those who try usually lose depth and influence in proportion to their breadth. What is most striking about Kristol, however, is not that he is an effective generalist in an age of specialists but that his wide-ranging work exhibits strong intellectual unity; he not only crosses but combines disparate fields of inquiry and does so in a way that deepens our understanding of each field.

Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI. He was the administrator for regulatory affairs at the Office of Management and Budget and executive director of the Task Force on Regulatory Relief during the Reagan adminstration. William Kristol is chairman of the Project for the Republican Future. During the Reagan and Bush adminstrations, Mr. Kristol served as chief of staff to Education Secretary William Bennett and to Vice President Dan Quayle.