The American Enterprise Institute has named its highest award and lectureship for Irving Kristol. The Kristol Award will be presented at the Institute's annual dinner to an individual, selected by the AEI Council of Academic Advisers, who has made exceptional intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.

AEI has named its award for Mr. Kristol to mark his singular achievements as thinker, writer, editor, and intellectual godfather to several generations of writers and policy activists, and to recognize his many contributions to the Institute's work as an AEI senior fellow since 1976. The Kristol Award is intended to recognize individuals who have aspired to the standards he has set for lucidity, insight, detachment, and practical influence.

The founder and chief expositor of the neoconservative intellectual movement, Mr. Kristol has been coeditor of The Public Interest, America's leading policy journal, since he founded it in 1965, and was publisher of The National Interest from its founding in 1985 until last year. His essays, published in these journals and in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere, are generally regarded as among the most influential contributions to social and political thought of the past half century. He is the author of On the Democratic Idea in America (1972); Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978); Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983); and Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995). A collection of essays about his work and influence and a bibliography of his writings may be found in The Neoconservative Imagination (C. DeMuth and W. Kristol, eds., 1995).

The Irving Kristol Award replaces the Francis Boyer Award, AEI’s highest annual award for the past twenty-five years. Named for a distinguished chief executive of SmithKline in the 1940s and 1950s, the Boyer Award was first conferred in 1977, on former president Gerald R. Ford. Boyer Award recipients have included prominent statesmen, intellectuals, jurists, educators, and executives--among them, in 1991, Irving Kristol.

A brilliant writer of remarkable insight and wit,
he profoundly improved public discourse on the ideas he championed.
Always original, provocative, and practical, Irving Kristol transformed political debate on
every subject he approached, from economics to religion, from social welfare to foreign policy.

--from the citation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to Irving Kristol by President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002