In September 1989, AEI launched the Bradley Lectures, a series of public policy programs generously endowed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The AEI newsletter, Memorandum, described the Bradley Lectures as a series in which prominent scholars would “explore some of the ideas that have shaped Western civilization and modern American politics.” In a blockbuster inaugural season, Irving Kristol gave the first lecture titled “Adam Smith and the Invention of Capitalism.”  

Other lectures of note that academic year included an array of visionaries who spoke eloquently on issues impacting American society. A brief glance shows quite a few topics still considered “hot” today. 

• Economist Allan Meltzer, “What Keynes Really Said” 
• Theologian Michael Novak, “If Aquinas Were Alive Today” 
• Jurist Robert Bork, “Two Judicial Errors: Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade” 
• Philosopher Allan Bloom, “Madame Bovary and Bourgeois Freedom” 
• Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, “From Hegel to Marx to Lenin” 
• Constitutional scholar Walter Berns, “Tocqueville and American Democracy” 

Some lecturers used their talks to road test new ideas, others to present a new work or enlarge discussions of their work. Political scientist Frank Fukuyama gave a 1991 lecture, “The Beginning of History,” in which he discussed the arguments and public reaction to his 1989 essay titled The End of History (which later became a best-seller). In 1992, Samuel Huntington discussed ideas that would become his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In 2000, David Brooks lectured on how a new elite was changing American culture, an important theme in his best-seller Bobos in Paradise.

The eclectic series included Nobel Laureates such as University of Chicago’s Robert Fogel, “The Fourth Great Awakening and the Political Realignment of the 1990s,” and the physicist Robert Jastrow, “God and the Astronomers.” A 1995 lecture by Lynne Cheney called “Telling the Truth” hits particularly close to home as policymakers currently debate the role of parents in education. Cheney closes her lecture by stating, “So for me it is the schools, but I hope for each of you, you will find one area where you insist on truth-telling, and just not put up with the failure to tell the truth and seek the truth and pursue the truth that has become so common in our culture.”

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