Intellectuals and Society

I think one of these days I am going to publish a list of the top 10 books that every single thinking person has to read. For a conservative like myself, there are books that have played a formative role in developing, defining, and defending an ideology. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Kirk's The Roots of American Order come to mind - classic works that no serious conservative reader would dare miss. The list has grown by one this year thanks to Thomas Sowell, and I do not make such a claim easily. While his much earlier masterpiece, Conflict of Visions (1987), could arguably be on the list as well, I believe that his newest book, Intellectuals and Society, is not just Sowell at his finest but is perhaps the very essence of conservative thinking at its finest. The book is remarkably readable, extremely practical, and most of all, is such a lethal combination of head shots and body blows to the parasite of modern intellectualism that one finishes the book feeling splattered by the damage Sowell has done. At its core, the book seeks to explore the phenomena of public intellectuals who Sowell carefully defines as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas". There are extremely intelligent people in our society who we do not deem to be "intellectuals" - specialists who possess a particular expertise in a particular field. Sowell provides the important distinction that engineers and scientists and financiers, for example, while not considered to be "public intellectuals", are judged by external standards - by empirical notions of verifiability. Intellectuals, on the other hand, face no such external test. Rather, it is the mere acceptance their own peers provide them that defines their success. They are judged exclusively by internal criteria, devoid of methods of validation. Yet their ideas have consequences, and as Sowell demonstrates in every page of this 317-page delight, the ideas of the intelligentsia over the last century have largely been an unmitigated disaster. Often lethal and frequently incoherent, intellectuals have survived in the last 100 years despite the fruits of their labors. Sowell laments this development, questions its causes, and demonstrates its truth in crystal clear fashion. Intellectuals lack accountability for their disastrous ideas, aided and abetted by non-intellectual accomplices within the intelligentsia that share their unconstrained vision for humanity. Sowell does not target the flaws of public intellectuals that may or may not exist within their particular field of specialization. The book calls these public intellectuals to the carpet for their espousing of ideas and policies to a wider audience than their field of study called for, carrying the same "air of authority" in the wider field that was outside of their field of expertise as they do within the more narrow field to which they claim some degree of knowledge. Sowell points out that "most non-intellectuals achieve public recognition or acclaim by their achievements within their respective areas of specialization, while many intellectuals could achieve comparable public recognition only by going outside their own expertise or competence." Public intellectuals feed off of a demand that is almost entirely self-manufactured. As Sowell has laid out in his aforementioned work, Conflict of Visions, the unconstrained vision of the left is one of an arrogant, elite, anointed - a vision that makes claim to the moral responsibility and intellectual ability to cure the world of its ills. The testing of this unconstrained vision through conventional and empirical validation methods has been devastating in its conclusiveness that the unconstrained vision has been a disaster. The challenge, though, is the lack of accountability that exists for these public intellectuals. Sowell makes clear that their vision is not only one for the world "as it exists and a vision of what it ought to be like, but it is also a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world." For Sowell, "the role that they aspire to play in society at large can only be achieved by them to the extent that the rest of society accepts what they say uncritically and fails to examine their track record." The real target of Sowell's book are those members of the "intelligentsia" who either make up these public intellectual frauds, or worse, serve as their willing accomplices. Judges in the legal system, politicians in government, journalists in media, and worst of all, academic charlatans in the academy, have all served as the support system for this age of public intellectuals promulgating their anointed vision to the world. Sowell meticulously walks through the effects intellectuals have had in 20th century economics, law, foreign policy, and media. He laments the attack on the very concept of truth itself that the intellectuals have launched, and again points out the self-serving nature of their vision. Sowell is a brilliant thinker himself - an idea man - a scholar. But unlike the targets of Sowell's attacks, he does not claim that his expertise in socio-political thoughts exempts him from external validation tests should he branch out into other arenas of thought. Sowell invites external criticism. He holds himself to the standards that public intellectuals refuse to hold themselves to. And while Sowell is an ideologue, he is keenly aware that the repudiation of the unconstrained vision of the anointed - public intellectual leftism - is unlikely to take place as long as this vision maintains its dominance in our school system and modern media. The arrogance of collectivism and surrogate decision-making can be rebuffed in print (as Sowell does in decisive fashion), but the battle must be won where the battle is being fought. Sowell's book is a treasure for those who want to be armed when they engage this fight. The future of our civilization depends on those who hold to the constrained vision - the vision of the founders - taking this fight to the public square. The fight will not be won without Sowell's decimation of the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Paul Ehrlich, and dozens of other blowhards whose ideas have represented indescribable agony for citizens of the 20th and now 21st centuries. But as Sowell makes painfully clear, the vision of the anointed is now the property of the teacher's unions and the New York Times. Conservatives have a lot of work to do. I do not recommend doing anything else when you are done reading this review besides buying Sowell's book. Intellectuals and Society is the magnum opus of this man's life and career, and I have barely scratched the surface of what he accomplishes in this book. Read it. Encourage your kids to read it. And engage the fight. The arrogance of the self-anointed elites will not be defeated until we do. See [...] for more

Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Thomas Sowell so it's very possible that my review is biased. Truly, Thomas Sowell is an American gem and one of the greatest thinkers, philosophers, economists, authors, speakers, etc of our time. He always gives me something to think about and manages to make subjects that could easily turn boring, into something interesting. I do recommend this book and I recommend reading it multiple times.

Thomas Sowell is, hands down, one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and talented writers of the last century when it comes to analyzing ideas and trends around the world. I myself was introduced to Dr. Sowell a few years ago. His common-sense insight, interesting writing style, and occasional humor have done a lot to help me inform my own world-view. Sowell's book, Intellectuals in Society, is a crowning achievement that everyone should read, regardless of creed, or ideology. In such a tumultuous time politically, it feels easy to let our own emotions, or the words of those we see as on a higher intellectual plane, dictate how we see the world. Dr. Sowell does an exceptional job of looking at and dissecting the Intellectuals words throughout the history of America and the western world in general. When Sowell says "Intellectual," he specifically means those whose final products are ideas. The most damning point that Dr. Sowell makes is that unlike other careers who work or think on a high intellectual plane, such as doctors, engineers, or architects, the "Intellectuals" who's end products are ideas rarely, if ever, end up being held accountable for when said ideas don't work in practice. In fact, these ideas have in fact had devastating effects around the world, and caused millions upon millions of lives to be wrecked or downright destroyed. It is worth noting that Sowell himself may be considered an "Intellectual," but I believe that he is able to practice far more restraint and acknowledge the intellectual limitation far more than many, if not most, of his peers are won't to do. Sowell spends a good chunk of the book looking at empirical, historical data which shows the folly and utter fallacies of intellectuals throughout history. Many totalitarian regimes, specifically in the early to mid twentieth century, have been found to have been supported quite fervently among many intellectuals of the time, specifically many on the left such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, among others. Other examples of the folly among intellectuals include many of the prevalent views they had surrounding making piece treaties with totalitarian leaders, such as Adolf Hitler, as a means to avoid war. This was particularly evident among Neville Chamberlain. When future prime minister Winston Churchill expressed (in hindsight) very reasonable criticism of this piece treaty, he was scorned, and mocked, rather than actually challenged or debated. Ultimately, the refusal to hear out those like Churchille led not to piece, but to the most bloody war in human history in the form of World War II. The most interesting and worthwhile fallacy that Sowell points out is how real, flesh and blood individuals have been described by Intellectuals. The most notable hear is none other than chief justice Clarence Thomas. Sowell points out that while Thomas is accused of being a recluse, due to the fact that he doesn't like to attend political gatherings (and isn't too keen on self-promotion.) In actuality, Clarence Thomas enjoys speaking with regular people, and loves going on road trips around the country. he often likes to strike up a chat with regular people without so much as mentioning his role on the Supreme Court. This is yet another example of how the ideas of Intellectuals matter more to them and their ilk than actual, flesh and blood people. Dr. Sowell's book is dense, and is written in a way that may come off as somewhat inaccessible to some, though that isn't really a fault of the books, or of Dr. Sowell's writing style. As a matter of fact, it is a testimony to the craft with which Dr. Sowell wields his pen that the book remains as intriguing and informative as it does from start to finish. Thomas Sowell is a man who has done extensive and thorough research in every topic in which he covers, whether it be the economic fallacies of many Intellectuals, to law and order, to geopolitical issues, to more besides. Regardless of where one stands on any of these issues, I would highly recommend that you rent, or even purchase a copy of Thomas Sowell's brilliant, insightful, and meticulously well-written book. While Sowell himself thinks on a high intellectual level, he never condescends to the reader or his audience. This book will surely be of use if you're someone with a desire to think for yourself and have a desire to filter out the "spin" that it seems like we see all too often from those in politics, academia, the media, entertainment industry, and so forth. With that said, I highly encourage you to give this book a read.

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As usual, Sowell makes his point with clarity and a preponderance of references and data. It can be a long read at times, but this is simply due to his attention to ensuring that his arguments are soundly supported. I wish that the people who need to read this would…..

“Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them” George Orwell is said to have remarked. Thomas Sowell analyses intellectuals’ self-confident promotion of their empirically challenged ideas via media, aides and activists, the influence of those ideas on governments and societies in place of experience or evidence, and the damage caused. Sowell defines intellectuals as people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas, in particular that they deal in the ideas and do not apply them. Scientists and engineers are not intellectuals. Mathematicians are not, so that Bertrand Russell as a mathematician was not an intellectual, however when suggesting in 1937 that Britain should completely disarm, he was. George Bernard Shaw, one of the great playwrights, felt confident in saying in 1939, just one week before war broke out, “Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming. And everyone except myself is frightened out of his or her wits!” – he was a professional as a playwright but an intellectual in geopolitics. What does it mean when someone we regard as brilliant, a genius, a mind so superior to ours, says or writes things so silly? One’s own intelligence seems so complex, but so changeable, puny, prone to error – we expect individuals of generally accepted great intellect somehow not to suffer these problems. Yet these demonstrably silly writings belie that confidence. Sowell separates thinkers into intellectuals, for whom far more knowledge and intelligence are available to some people than others, from those who emphasise specialization and social processes whose economic and social transactions draw upon the varied knowledge and experience of millions, past and present. Apart from the “no skin in the game” aspect of an intellectual, Sowell identifies the moralising element, describing an “anointed intelligentsia, on the side of angels against the forces of evil” while ordinary unintellectuals have a “tragic vision [which] is a vision of trade-offs, rather than solutions, and a vision of wisdom distilled from the experiences of the many, rather than the brilliance of the few”. For example, payday loans, where Sowell bravely argues against e.g. the New York Times’ attractive and furious argument against them (denouncing payday loan providers’ “triple-digit annual interest rates, milking people’s desperation” and “profiteering with the cloak of capitalist virtue” and describing a 36 percent interest rate ceiling as something needed to prevent “the egregious exploitation of payday loans”.) How could anyone decent argue against such obvious moral rightness? Sowell writes: “The sums of money lent are usually a few hundred dollars, lent for a few weeks, with interest charges of about $15 per $100 lent. That works out to annual interest rates in the hundreds - the kind of statistics that produce sensations in the media and in politics. The costs behind such charges are seldom if ever investigated by the intelligentsia, by so-called ‘consumer advocates’ or by others in the business of creating sensations and denouncing businesses that they know little or nothing about. The economic consequences of government intervention to limit the annual interest rate can be seen in a number of states where such limits have been imposed. After Oregon imposed a limit of 36 percent annual interest, three quarters of its ‘payday loan’ businesses closed down. Nor is it hard to see why - if one bothers to look at facts. At a 36 percent limit on the annual interest rate, the $15 in interest charged for every $100 lent would be reduced to less than $1.50 for a loan payable in two weeks - an amount not likely to cover even the cost of processing the loan, much less the risks of making the loan. As for the low-income borrower, supposedly the reason for the concern of the moral elites, denying the borrower the $100 needed to meet some exigency must be weighed against the $15 paid for getting the money to meet that exigency. Why that trade-off decision should be forcibly removed by law from the person most knowledgeable about the situation, as well as most affected by it, and transferred to third parties far removed in specific knowledge and general circumstances, is a question that is seldom answered or even asked.” The NYT’s “milking people’s desperation”, “profiteering with the cloak of capitalist virtue” and “egregious exploitation of payday loans” are examples of what Sowell calls “verbal virtuosity .. obscuring, rather than clarifying, rational analysis”. Would that analysis be so very difficult, in plainer words? If borrowers are assumed to have their wits, then laws or regulations would only be needed that prevented lenders using confusion (rather than outright fraud, which is already illegal) to hide loan costs or make them seem cheap. Given that one in ten of of us does not understand percentages, intellectuals’ focus on interest rates is probably misplaced, and borrowers must know more: the cost of the loan as well as its rate. If we wish something that protects borrowers too confused or incapable not to harm themselves with unrepayable loans, then legal, regulated lenders that cannot pursue defaulters with knuckle-crushers (and so have to accept defaults and factor them into loan interest, like any lender) are better than the loan sharks that Oregon-style restraints empower. Where do these intellectuals come from and why are they there, advising, lecturing, haranguing? As one might perhaps expect from an economist, Sowell discusses Supply and Demand… of intellectuals. Why is there a supply? People in utilitarian fields’ results are their own fame – cars, medicine, smartphones, etc.) whereas: “for intellectuals in general, where the primary constraint is peer response, rather than empirical criteria, currently prevailing attitudes among peers may carry more weight than enduring principles or the weight of evidence. This can produce patterns much like those found among another group heavily influenced by their peers - namely adolescents, among whom particular fashions or fads can become virtually obligatory for a given time, and later become completely rejected as passé, without in either period having been subjected to serious examination, either empirically or analytically.” Among the hundred public intellectuals mentioned most often in the media, only eighteen are also among the hundred intellectuals mentioned most often in scholarly literature. Furthermore, most public intellectuals speak outside their expertise (for example Noam Chomsky, the brilliant linguist, whose LALR grammars are much less known to the public than his extravagant political utterances, or John Maynard Keynes, whose biographer wrote “he held forth on a great range of topics, on some of which he was thoroughly expert, but on others of which he may have derived his views from the few pages of a book at which he had happened to glance; the air of authority was the same in both cases”,) or else their expertise is something that can only be tested by other intellectuals, and not empirically. The demand for intellectuals on the other hand is to an extent manufactured, due to an over-supply, by intellectuals, who put themselves endlessly forward, offering “solutions” to social “problems” or by raising alarms over some dire dangers which they claim to have discovered. Don’t forget that the demand for the output of non-intellectuals (cars, planes, medicine, etc.) is spontaneous in the public, whereas the demand for intellectuals has to be stimulated by this endless promotion. How can a few intellectuals have such an effect on governments, public policy and the public at large? Sowell describes the “penumbra” of journalists, teachers, staffers to legislators or clerks to judges and other members of the intelligentsia, whose influence on the course of social evolution can be crucial. In the case of teachers: “who lack either the inclination or the talent to become public intellectuals can instead vent their opinions in the classroom to a captive audience of students, operating in a smaller arena but in a setting with little chance of serious challenge. In such settings, their aggregate influence on the mindset of a generation may be out of all proportion to their competence—not simply in what they directly impart, but more fundamentally in habituating their students to reaching sweeping conclusions after hearing only one side of an issue and then either venting their emotions or springing into action, whether by writing letters to public officials as part of classroom assignments or taking part in other, more direct, activism” That problem has become entrenched in that this learnt activism is often tested in university interviews; in Sowell’s robust words: “As early as elementary school, students have been encouraged or recruited to take stands on complex policy issues ranging up to and including policies concerning nuclear weapons, on which whole classes have been assigned to write to members of Congress or to the President of the United States. College admissions committees can give weight to various forms of environmentalism or other activism in considering which applicants to admit, and it is common for colleges to require “community service” as a prerequisite for applicants to be considered at all—with the admissions committee arbitrarily defining what is to be considered a “community service,” as if, for example, it is unambiguously clear that aiding and abetting vagrancy (“the homeless”) is a service rather than a disservice to a community.” Should schools teach views of complex issues a lot, a little, or not at all? In any measure proselytising must cut into teaching basics accurately, and undermine the difficult business for the pupil of learning and understanding basics and outside classes evaluating complex issues in the world, trying to apply the basics correctly rather than falling for the much easier and more pleasurable route of following our instincts or prejudices, or the urgings of furious and righteous public intellectuals, at which point the process becomes self-sustaining and fact-free. What are the costs of all this intellectualism? How does one begin to calculate the costs of all the mistaken policy, the needlessly state-employed advisors, the subsidies, the deadweight loss of the mistaken interventions, etc. Intellectuals and Society is an attractively written book, but more so a very well informed work, with strong arguments against the expensive, sanctimonious intellectual.

One of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Wonderfully written and wildly relevant concepts.

Intellectuals and Society est un livre brillant qui pousse à réfléchir au rôle et à l’influence des intellectuels dans nos sociétés. Thomas Sowell offre une analyse percutante, documentée et souvent provocante, qui invite le lecteur à remettre en question les idées reçues. C’est un ouvrage pour ceux qui veulent penser par eux-mêmes, sans se laisser emporter par les dogmes ou l’effet de groupe. Chaque chapitre est une opportunité de se poser les bonnes questions et de cultiver une vision critique. En résumé, un livre incontournable pour les esprits curieux et indépendants. Un vrai régal intellectuel !