The Irving Kristol Award is the highest honor conferred by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
The award is given for "notable intellectual or practical contributions to improved public policy and social welfare" and named in honor of Irving Kristol. It replaced the Francis Boyer Award in 2003. The award was named for Kristol as a tribute to his influence on public issues and as an intellectual mentor to several generations of conservatives. According to Christopher DeMuth, "In our sixty years of labors, no one has had a more profound influence on the work of the American Enterprise Institute, or on American political discourse, than Irving Kristol. Combining philosophical depth with intense practicality and constant good cheer, [Kristol] has, as President Bush has put it, 'transformed political debate on every subject he approached, from economics to religion, from social welfare to foreign policy.'" [1]
The Kristol Award is presented at AEI's Annual Dinner, a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., that is well-attended by conservative leaders and is a major event on the Washington social scene. [2] [3] President George W. Bush spoke at the first Kristol Award presentation in 2003. Bush's speech, only days before the commencement of the Iraq War, laid out his promise to launch military action even if the United Nations Security Council did not authorize it. [4] Former vice president Dick Cheney [5] and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar [6] have also presented the award.
Kristol Award recipients occasionally make news with their speeches. John Howard, who had a few months before been defeated in the Australian elections, criticized his successor as prime minister, Kevin Rudd, over industrial relations and the Iraq War. [7] [8]
All recipients are given a token of esteem engraved with a citation for their achievements.
Year | Recipient | Nationality | Citation | Lecture title |
---|---|---|---|---|
2003 | Allan H. Meltzer | American | "To Allan H. Meltzer | "Leadership and Progress" |
2004 | Charles Krauthammer | American | "To Charles Krauthammer | "Democratic Realism" |
2005 | Mario Vargas Llosa | Peruvian | "To Mario Vargas Llosa | "Confessions of a Liberal" |
2006 | David Hackett Fischer | American | "To David Hackett Fischer | |
2007 | Bernard Lewis | British American | "To Bernard Lewis | "Europe and Islam" |
2008 | John Howard | Australian | "To John Winston Howard | "Keeping Faith with Our Common Values" |
2009 | Charles Murray | American | "To Charles Murray | "The Happiness of the People" |
2010 | David Petraeus | American | "The Surge of Ideas: COINdinistas and Change in the U.S. Army in 2006" | |
2011 | Martin Feldstein | American | ||
2012 | Leon Kass | American | "The other war on poverty: Finding meaning in America" | |
2013 | Paul Ryan | American | "Conservatism and Community" | |
2014 | Eugene Fama | American | Eugene F. Fama presentation | |
2015 | Benjamin Netanyahu | Israeli | A conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu | |
2016 | Robert P. George | American | A conversation with Irving Kristol honoree Robby George | |
2017 | Jonathan Sacks | British | 2017 Annual Dinner speech | |
2018 | Boris Johnson | British | 2018 Annual Dinner speech | |
2019 | Nikki Haley | American | 2019 Annual Dinner speech | |
2020 | Nicholas Eberstadt | American | America after COVID-19: Which future? |
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, known simply as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is a center-right think tank based in Washington, D.C., that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. AEI is an independent nonprofit organization supported primarily by contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership". The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world", and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity".
William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark and has been the host of Conversations with Bill Kristol, an interview web program, since 2014.
Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1960s during the Vietnam War among foreign policy hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, grounded in a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength." They are known for espousing opposition to communism and political radicalism.
Irving William Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the century".
Nathan Glazer was an American sociologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and for several decades at Harvard University. He was a co-editor of the now-defunct policy journal The Public Interest.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.
Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Yuval Levin is an American conservative political analyst, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs (2009–present), the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (2019–present), and a contributing editor of National Review (2007–present) and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis (2003–present).
David Wurmser is an American foreign policy specialist. He served as Middle East Adviser to former US Vice President Dick Cheney, as special assistant to John R. Bolton at the State Department and as a research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer at the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
Richard Bruce Cheney is an American retired politician and businessman who served as the 46th vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush. Often cited as the most powerful vice president in American history, Cheney previously served as White House Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, the U.S. representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district from 1979 to 1989, and as the 17th United States secretary of defense in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. He is both the oldest living former U.S. vice president and earliest serving living former U.S. secretary of defense, following the deaths of Walter Mondale and Donald Rumsfeld in 2021 respectively.
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy is a 2006 book written by Francis Fukuyama.
Walter Karl Zinsmeister American journalist, researcher, and consultant. From 2006 to 2009, he served in the White House as President George W. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. In 2016 he created the Almanac of American Philanthropy—the definitive reference on America's use of private resources to solve public problems—and is now an adviser and national authority on the power of voluntary action and civil society to spur innovation and social refinement in the U.S.
John M. "Jack" Keane is a former American general who served as vice chief of staff of the United States Army from 1999 to 2003. He is a national security analyst, primarily on Fox News, and serves as chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and as chairman of AM General.
Allan H. Meltzer was an American economist and Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and Institute for Politics and Strategy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Meltzer specialized on studying monetary policy and the US Federal Reserve System, and authored several academic papers and books on the development and applications of monetary policy, and about the history of central banking in the US. Together with Karl Brunner, he created the Shadow Open Market Committee: a monetarist council that deeply criticized the Federal Open Market Committee.
Christopher C. DeMuth is an American lawyer and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, as well as director of the National Conservatism conference organized by the Edmund Burke Society. He was the president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, from 1986 to 2008. DeMuth is widely credited with reviving AEI's fortunes after its near-bankruptcy in 1986 and leading the institute to new levels of influence and growth. Before joining AEI, DeMuth worked on regulatory issues in the Ronald Reagan administration.
The Francis Boyer Award was the highest honor conferred by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. It was named for Francis Boyer, a chief executive at Smith, Kline & French in the mid-twentieth century and a strong supporter of AEI who died in 1972. The Boyer Award was replaced in 2003 by the Irving Kristol Award.
Nicholas Nash Eberstadt is an American political economist. He holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a political think tank. He is also a Senior Adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), a member of the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of the Global Leadership Council at the World Economic Forum.
Robert Allen Goldwin was an American political scientist specializing in the study of the Constitution, who left academia to enter government at the invitation of his friend Donald Rumsfeld, serving as adviser and "intellectual-in-residence" for the presidential administration of Gerald Ford. He was subsequently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.