ABSTRACT
As often, literature comes before social science, chronologically and in producing insight—as in Balzac, Dickens and Melville before Max Weber, and in our own day, James Q. Wilson. For, as in other areas of city life, literature makes us experience the pervasive and even destructive penetration of bureaucracies throughout modern urban existence. James Q. Wilson is an influential conservative social scientist, known to the public, public officials and politicians for his claims about the decay of traditional moral values and his writing on crime, police, and tactics of prevention and incarceration (particularly, though not exclusively, in Thinking About Crime, first published in 1975 and revised in 1983). He is even more highly regarded by fellow social scientists, of whatever political tendency, for his closely related but more wide-ranging Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, originally published in 1989 and reissued in 2000 with a preface asserting its continuing accuracy. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Democratic Senior Senator from New York State and in earlier careers himself an important and controversial social scientist and policy planner, in a blurb described Wilson and his book this way: "Wilson is our Weber and this is his summa .... A sprightly, irreverent and profoundly serious inquiry as to how you make a nation work."
