Of the many wonderful liberals who inhabit New York — and many are our friends — the one who most effectively skewered us in conversation was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who died Wednesday. We always enjoyed his columns in the Wall Street Journal, and two years after we launched the Sun, we happened to be at his sun-lit apartment on the far East Side for a reception in honor of Philip Howard, when we happened to find ourselves in a conversation with the host about the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Dinner, then emerging as one of the great annual galas in the city. Well, wait a minute, Schlesinger said, or something to that effect, he would have been a liberal. And he proceeded to offer a brilliant, puckish disquisition on the ironies of Hamilton being celebrated by the conservative intelligentsia that would be gathering a few evenings hence.

So we invited the great historian to put it down in writing, which resulted in the publication, under Schlesinger’s byline, of one of the oped pieces we’ve enjoyed the most in the Sun. It ran under the headline “Hold On There, He’s Ours.” The piece said that Hamilton’s hero was not Adam Smith but Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who, Schlesinger wrote, invented the French commitment to statism and was a mercantilist who believed in state planning and regulation. “The idea that the free market could regulate itself Hamilton called ‘a wild speculative paradox,'” Schlesinger wrote. And he ended his piece by calling on New Yorkers to applaud the Manhattan Institute for celebrating “the father of big government in America.”

We’ve often thought, since that piece, that it would have been a great evening to get Schlesinger on a stage with Ron Chernow, whose book on Hamilton gives a more nuanced and complex view than Schlesinger was able to give in that short piece in the Sun. One of the things we liked about Schlesinger was his iconoclastic side and his ability to puncture views not only on the right but the left. He did this in, say, his book “The Disuniting of America.” The New York Times yesterday characterized it as an “attack on the emergent ‘multicultural society.'” The Times reminded us that it brought down on Schlesinger the anger of many leading lights of the left. The Times described the historian as “nonplussed.” He had a quality of cheerfulness and self-confidence that we and thousands of other New Yorkers will miss.