A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)
Knowledge And Decisions (1980)
Discrimination And Disparities (2018)
Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)
Marxism: Philosophy And Economics (1985)
The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1996)
I find much of Thomas Sowell’s writing to be difficult to read (particularly denser, older works like Knowledge and Decisions), but I don’t think there is anything that has so informed how I look at politics and the World as his writings. Sowell is often characterized as a “conservative,” which I think he inherits a bit from Edmund Burke, from whom he frequently likes to quote. During his recent 2018 interview with Dave Rubin, Sowell characterized himself as a small-l libertarian, minus defense policy, on which he is a bit hawk-ish (pro-big military). Sowell sees a nuclear deterrent defense policy (having a lot of nukes) as a “great bargain” because we never have to go to war --- thus, an excellent value per life saved.
Whatever your misgivings about whatever “conservatism” even is in 2021, you cannot dispute Sowell’s intellectual genius. One GoodReads reviewer put it best; “Thomas Sowell is a God.” Other online pundits disparage Sowell as a defender of the status quo, someone who pens anesthetics to alleviate the populace’s white guilt. Influencing the political thinking of numerous centrist and center-leftist thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, Sowell skillfully explains how the left-right divide works in his 1987 A Conflict of Visions. There is no secret which side of the aisle Sowell roots for as he outlines the two visions of vaguely left and right. But he presents both sides mostly objectively, save for a smarmy remark or two for the likes of leftist intellectuals who disdain the masses and want their violent eradication (such as George Bernard Shaw, an observation shared by George Orwell). Sowell turned me onto some other great books, including multiple by Tuft’s Lawrence E. Harrison (Underdevelopment Is A State of Mind, Culture Matters), Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher” (The Ordeal of Change, The True Believer), Austrian texts (Envy), and seminal American texts (The Federalist Papers), though I can’t say I endorse his endorsement of mega-Trump supporter Victor Davis Hanson’s books.
Sowell follows the tradition of the Enlightenment by trying to seek the truth, wherever that leads you. This can mean that you have to, in the words of George Packer’s book about George Orwell, “Face Unpleasant Facts.” Sowell is the first to acknowledge the wrongs and harms of slavery and discrimination, but also does the politically unpopular, looking beyond for other, potentially internal causes of varying economic results across different societal groups. You won’t find any Thomas Sowell books hanging out next to Ibram X. Kendi at the local library, and that’s a shame. Sowell takes the position that sometimes the best way to help someone is to tell them the truth, however much the truth might hurt. Kendi takes the position that to try to help people adjust to the constraints of how reality exists is racism, flat out. Sowell rages against these leftist intellectuals who accuse him of things such as “cultural imperialism.” He has even been called racist by Caucasian intellectuals, and there is no lost love for him amongst the likes of folks like Cornel West, who characterize him as “angry” (probably because he is trying to help people, and no one is listening).
While I appreciate Sowell’s search for truth, I think Michael J. Sandel illustrates the disconnect between the average human thinking process and someone like Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell was once a Marxist, and in this tradition, he learned to study systems and processes by evaluating their results; what Engels called “what emerges.” Sowell looks at something like price gouging on items during a shortage as a good thing. I generally agree with Sowell on things like this, and thus find myself in a minority. These prices reward people who try to fix said product shortages, and also controls hoarding of said short-supplied product. Michael J. Sandel holds that this is one of the “moral limits of markets” – that price gouging is morally wrong. And, if you look at the response to articles from the Coronavirus pandemic about folks who tried to sell hand sanitizer online to people across the nation who badly wanted it on e-commerce platforms, you will find no shortage of vitriol for “evil” people such as this. So, whatever the shortcomings of various political policies to achieve their purported outcomes, they at least alleviate some of the anger which stems from how many humans actually think, which can often be flawed. In the words of Mark Blyth in his Angrynomics, “people get angry.” But, as Christopher Caldwell (a somewhat crotchety conservative) points out, taking aim at behavioral economics, if there is no homo economicus, there is no democracy.
I have read six Thomas Sowell books, and I am probably done with him for a while. I still want to read his trilogy on World cultures, which he travelled extensively to author; these are cited by Steven Pinker. I think Sowell’s two densest works I have read, and also the most influential in my thinking, are Knowledge and Decisions and the aforementioned A Conflict of Visions. The former outlines how people gain and economize knowledge through the course of living their lives; just because you can write a book about how you think a cow should be milked, doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to milk a cow. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics gives a fairly even-handed overview of Marxism (it seems to me), saving backhanded-Marx-slaps for the last chapter (spoiler: Marx wasn’t very good at managing his own life). I have tried unsuccessfully to read the nearly-impenetrable Das Kapital, so I am grateful for this summary of Marx from Sowell’s time as a non-conservative. Sowell pens Black Rednecks and White Liberals and the Quest for Cosmic Justice as less even-handed works, trying to explain the visions of self-anointed leftists who do not appreciate all of the things that has gotten the World to where it is today. Finally, Discrimination and Disparities is a more recent work (2018), fairly short, and does a good job outlining why it is there are no simple answers for causation to social ails, and similarly, why “solutions” are just as complicated.
I would like to think that the current state of American political affairs can evolve to function a little better for all Americans. Sowell himself asserts that societies need to change with the times to avoid extinction. In his interview with David Rubin, he puts forth that he takes a much more pessimistic view of the future than the enthusiastic Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now, a book disparaged by progressives as an ode to “Neoliberalism”). Sowell thinks that people operate mostly on their “default settings,” which means political opinions are rooted in “what people think,” not in having done in-depth research on various subjects, nor seeking the opinions of those who really have. Thus, I think Sowell worries about the potential for a Stalin/Hitler type throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater type of event happening. I am sure Thomas Sowell would look on my own personal life with horror; while I do not share a social conservative vision, I see the great utility that Sowell points out in these things for society, particularly where raising children is concerned. Whether or not you agree with all of Sowell’s findings, he will challenge you to entertain the possibility that this, that, or the other politically unpopular opinion could, in fact, be a reality.
On the biggest and most costly lie in modern history, Thomas Sowell flagrantly ignored irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty: https://youtu.be/X9Si5T2EmZA
For a guy who’s worshipped for “following the facts”—how do you reconcile that?
Just once, I’d like to see one of his followers follow the principles they praise. But invariably, this is what I’m used to: “Water is Not Wet — And I Stand by That”: https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2022/04/09/water-is-not-wet-and-i-stand-by-that/