Irving Louis Horowitz, longtime NAS friend and advisor, passed away last week. Steve Balch has written a tribute to this "giant of twentieth-century American social science." Balch recalls that Horowitz was there at the beginning with the National Association of Scholars and helped to launch our journal Academic Questions:
When the small band of co-conspirators behind the fledgling NAS first met with Irving he patiently explained to us how little we knew of the journal business and how difficult it would be for us to break into the academic marketplace. Time is the great limiting resource, he instructed, a precious commodity that you have to tempt, sorely tempt, potential readers to surrender. If you forgot or took this for granted you’d be professionally doomed. Looking at us, novices all, he couldn’t have been particularly optimistic about Academic Questions' prospects, typical lifetimes for newborn journals being less than five years. But Irving never gave up on us, ever ready with advice, subject and author tips, as well as contributions to our pages that graced them with the distinction of his thought and name. And we never forgot his warnings about that old devil time. Twenty-five years later, having beaten its odds, Academic Questions is still very much alive and kicking. Irving was proud of having helped make that happen, and we were proud to have had him so long at our side.
We are pleased that in the current, spring 2012 issue of Academic Questions is one last article by Dr. Horowitz. You can read his piece, "The Wealth of Nations and the Poverty of Analysts" in the print version of the journal or online (subscription required) if you are an NAS member (click here to learn how to get full online access).
His article deals with the journalistic treatment of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and “his forty-two years as despotic ruler of Libya.”
