I am an early riser, and I had finished my breakfast, brushed my teeth, and was on the way out the door of my Fairfax townhouse, when the telephone call from Stockholm came at 6:32 a.m. on 16 October 1986. My schedule called for a half-day's work at George Mason University before driving down the Shenandoah Valley in October's colorful splendor to my country place, tucked deep in Virginia's Applachians. My wife, Ann, had been at the country place all summer; we had not yet made the semi-annual, quasi-move from the country place to Washington's suburbia, a move that we delay each year as long as possible.
[ . . . ]
My aims are limited. My tools are words that enter arguments presented in books, essays, and lectures-arguments that develop quasi-abstract ideas which challenge the minds of those who are members of the academies. My own experience, both pre- and post-Nobel, tells me that ideas do have consequences. But far too many of my peers in the social sciences and philosophy concern themselves too much with normatively defined consequences while neglecting the task of reinforcing, maintaining, and sometimes originating, the ideas without which consequences lose all moorings.
Read more of his notes on Nobelity, here. He was magnificent!
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