What My Teacher James Q. Wilson Missed

His Achievements Were Huge-But So Were His Blind Spots

Around 1962, I took James Q. Wilson’s undergraduate course on urban politics and learned a lot about cities, classes, political machines, and reformers. He was an untenured professor just starting out, not yet the prophet of broken windows, long-term incarceration, or genetic determination in human affairs.

Wilson was a fine teacher who demonstrated in lavish detail that corruption had social functions and reformers had human limits. I was fresh to liberal-radical thought, fascinated by human contradiction, and as yet unaware that the perverse consequences of transformative ideals and the futility of …