More than one hundred well-wishers from the AEI family, including several former members of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and current Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, gathered at AEI to celebrate Senior Fellow Herbert Stein's eightieth birthday with a surprise party on August 26. The occasion also marked Mr. Stein's nineteenth year at AEI.
Michael Novak, AEI's George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy, was awarded Slovakia's Double White Cross Order II, the highest honor given to a foreigner, by President Michal Kovac in Bratislava on August 31. After receiving the award, Novak embarked on a weeklong series of lectures throughout Slovakia focusing on the application of American ideas in formerly Communist countries.
Leading sociologist and former AEI resident scholar Robert A. Nisbet, 82, died of cancer on September 9 at his Washington home. Beginning in 1953 with The Quest for Community, Dr. Nisbet laid the intellectual foundation for the current national debate over civil society, mediating structures, and the meaning of community. More recently, Dr. Nisbet warned of the increasing abuse of the concept of community in political discourse. At his notable 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, Dr. Nisbet described how the rhetoric of "national community" has been used in this century to justify the expansion of federal power, which, in turn, has diminished communities. The lecture was later expanded into his book, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (1989).
Dr. Nisbet joined the American Enterprise Institute as a resident scholar in 1978. He had been a member of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers from 1973 to 1979. He was the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Columbia University from 1974 to 1978. Dr. Nisbet also taught at the University of Arizona and at the University of California, Berkeley and Riverside, where he was the dean of the College of Letters and Sciences and vice-chancellor. He was a visiting professor at the University of Bologna, Princeton University, and Smith College
"For better or worse, the United States is a very rich nation, and is likely to grow richer still in the decades ahead. Rich nations obviously have more options and greater margins for error than poorer ones. One of our options, at least for the moment, is a calm and orderly transition to a more sustainable social insurance system, a system with a smaller role for government and a larger role for private savings and personal responsibility than is the case with our existing arrangements." So argued visiting scholar Nicholas Eberstadt in his review of The Return of Thrift by Philip Longman (New York Times Book Review, August 4). The book warns of the impending collapse of the middle-class welfare state under the weight of unfinanced social programs.
"It is time for both [Japan and the United States] to rethink their trade negotiating strategies," AEI Resident Scholar Claude E. Barfield wrote in the September 5 Journal of Commerce ("Principles Needed in U.S.-Japan Trade"). "Their national economic goals and the international economic welfare will be better served if they stand firm against both market-distorting interventions and attempts to destroy real competition under the guise of deregulation."
"The economics of the welfare state," AEI Distinguished Fellow Irving Kristol argued in the Wall Street Journal ("The Feminization of the Democrats," September 9), "is no longer a simple matter of arguments about balancing receipts and expenditures, though many conservatives still see it that way. The economics is now being integrated into the culture wars' we are living through, so the issue of what kind of welfare state we shall have is now but an aspect of a profound division over what kind of country we are, and what kind of people we are, and what we mean by the American way of life.'"
