Its funding helped lead to the publication of Charles Murray’s book on welfare reform, Dinesh D’Souza’s book on “Illiberal Education,” Samuel Huntington’s warning of “The Clash of Civilizations,” Allan Bloom’s book on “The Closing of the American Mind,” Anne Applebaum’s recent Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag. It backs magazines like Commentary and the New Criterion, institutions like the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation. It has supported the work of writers and thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Robert Bork.

There are other significant funders on the conservative intellectual scene, but few have been as generous over time or have amassed as impressive a record of accomplishments as the John M. Olin Foundation. The foundation has done all this while operating from a base in New York City. And it has done so while giving away at most $19 million a year — an amount that is tiny when compared with the vast sums allocated by bigger foundations to left-wing causes. All this will come to an end in October 2005, when the Olin Foundation closes its office and shuts down after having given away its last dime.

This is the end that was hoped for by Olin himself, an industrialist — rifles, ammunition, chemicals — who saw what happened at other foundations, like Henry Ford’s, where, over time, boards lost sight of the founder’s values.”Perpetuity is a long time,” the Olin Foundation’s executive director, James Piereson, told us the other day.

In a recent speech, Mr. Piereson suggested that in some sense, the mission that the Olin Foundation and some similar funders set out upon has been accomplished. He cited the end of the Cold War and “the collapse of socialism as an alternative to market capitalism.” Conservative foundations, Mr. Piereson said, “are not so badly needed today as they were in the past. Most of our institutions have broadened their bases of support so that they no longer depend so greatly on a handful of foundations.” The longtime president of the Olin Foundation, William Simon, who was treasury secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, died in 2000.

Yet the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the domestic policy battles still being fought on issues such as social security privatization, tort reform, and school vouchers, to name but a few, mean that there are still plenty of available opportunities for conservative philanthropists interested in investing in ideas.

Mr. Piereson, who has been with the foundation since 1981, told us that being based in New York City has been an advantage. “New York City is so big that a foundation with a controversial point of view can operate more or less anonymously,” he said. Had the foundation been based in a smaller city, it might have been the only deep pocket available and ended up underwriting the local orchestra or zoo.

Here’s hoping that that a new generation of conservative philanthropists arises to replace the Olin Foundation as investors in ideas and that some of the big donors are New Yorkers. Prompted by questions from a visiting newspaperman, Mr. Piereson offered potential successors some advice: “Get money to the best people, the most influential institutions. Don’t limit yourself to preaching to the choir. Don’t be afraid to be controversial.”

“It’s important that other philanthropists come along and do things like this,” he said. It’s not always an easy sell — the businessman “wants a practical result fairly soon,” while funding conservative intellectuals can be “highly ethereal and speculative,” Mr. Piereson acknowledges. Yet the results inspired by some of the thinkers funded by Olin — welfare reform, Cold War victory, less crime in New York, reduction of federal tax rates — couldn’t be more concrete. The city and the nation and the next generation of philanthropists themselves will be fortunate if the scholars and institutions they fund are even half as productive as those that have benefited from the foundation built by John M. Olin.