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Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell
Download Ebook Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell
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Review
"It's a scandal that economist Thomas Sowell has not been awarded the Nobel Prize. No one alive has turned out so many insightful, richly researched books."―Steve Forbes"America's best writer on economics, particularly when that discipline intersects with politics."―World"Thomas Sowell is, in my opinion, the most interesting philosopher at work in America."―Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times
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About the Author
Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of dozens of books and the recipient of various awards, including the National Humanities Medal, presented by the President of the United States in 2003.
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Product details
Paperback: 680 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; Revised, Enlarged ed. edition (March 6, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465025226
ISBN-13: 978-0465025220
Product Dimensions:
6.2 x 1.9 x 9.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
221 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#37,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I have read most of Sowell's books, and I think this is his best. In this book, his various strands of thought and wisdom, which are many indeed, come together as a coherent philosophical statement. It is difficult to review a Sowell book, as the very act of reducing his text to a few sentences squeezes out of it most of the hard-won insight. So, I should just say that this is a solid 5-star one-of-a-kind required-reading book, and leave it at that. But I can't..."Intellectuals and Society" offers a fascinating tour into the worldview of today's leftist intellectuals: how they think, why they think what they think, and where their elitist, anti-Western, pro-government-meddling ideas came from. The book basically boils down to two core themes.First, intellectuals (that is, people whose job output is ideas, as opposed to engineers, doctors, and scientists) are, as opposed to other professions (where people are directly accountable to patients, customers, etc.) answerable only to themselves. That is, tenured professors, elite media professionals and the like publish and then comment on each others' work, feeding off this internally-generated feedback for career success and personal gratification, answering to and conversing with few outside their credentialed circle, and in the process divorcing themselves further and further from the common sense ideas and traditions of society at large that are usually rooted in "what works". Intellectuals disdain "what works" because it originates in the mundane, everyday activities of the uncredentialed masses and offers no opportunities for advancement through idea generation or feelings of intellectual superiority. As journalists, teachers, and others on the outer rim of the intellectual class propagate the ideas of the idea-generators and get rewarded for it with grants, promotions, and self-esteem, the ideology developed and advanced in a vacuum by intellectuals trudges on, century after century. All of this would be irrelevant if public intellectuals were doing no harm. But as Sowell points out, intellectuals cannot exist at room temperature. They must constantly challenge the "conventional wisdom", that is, everything that works and has been tested, because they have no root canals to perform, bridges to design, or businesses to run; their only path to fame and status is the shocking new idea that gets people upset or outraged. There is thus a constant drive within the intellectual class to challenge, prod, change, redesign, and in the end, overturn and oversee the lives of the common folk, whom they disdain for their simplicity and adherence to traditions. Intellectuals are the quintessential people who cannot leave well enough alone, because to do so would be to put their entire cohort out of a purpose and out of a job.Second, intellectuals' lack of tangible output other than words leads them to have a huge need for recognition for being intellectually superior to the masses. A doctor can see patients and do what thousands of doctors have done for hundreds of years, and feel pretty good about it, without being "better" than anyone else. An engineer can do what engineers do, and be satisfied in doing it about as well as other engineers. An intellectual, in contrast, has no prestige or status aside from the public recognition that the intellectual knows more than other people and is better able to solve big societal problems. This leads to a continual search for new social mega-problems to solve, with new untested mega-solutions that exist only in the realm of ideas and usually fail upon implementation. Sowell explores this basic idea from roughly 1900 to the present, detailing how lefty intellectuals have pretty much blown it every time, from misguided belligerence leading up to WW1, to misguided support of communism as millions died of starvation and in labor camps in Russia, to misguided pacifism in the 20's that led to overconfidence and belligerence on Hitler's part and thus WW2, to misguided defeatism in the cold war and Vietnam, to the present misguided defeatist, pacifistic self-loathing we see all around us. Sowell's argument is, ultimately, that intellectuals' separation from the society for which they feel contempt, and their boundless belief in their own superior ability to solve problems solely within the realm of logic and separated from practical experience is, in fact, very dangerous.Sowell's book is so thoughtful, insightful, and well thought out that it really left me wondering: what would someone from the left think of this book? Not some DailyKos type who reflexively responds to conservatism with aggressive, ill-considered platitudes, but a thoughtful person of the left who actually reads and ponders Sowell's work? I just don't know. I don't actually know many people on the left, because I find them too irritating. I found the book extremely interesting and compelling, and highly recommend it.
Sowell's thesis is simple and clearly stated: intellectual elites and experts are not to be blindly trusted. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has said much the same thing in his works while avoiding the blunt and politically incorrect implications. That an intellectual can criticize other intellectuals without offering a prescriptive way out of an imagined "impasse," as one perplexed reviewer opined, is hardly a disqualifying conundrum. No one criticized Aristophanes for lampooning Socrates and the intellectual class of ancient Athens when he wrote The Clouds 2,500 years ago. The question Sowell poses can be summarized by reference to Sidney Hook who allegedly asked Albert Einstein: "I don't lecture you about physics; why to you lecture me about politics?"That's the point of Intellectuals and Society. Sowell takes the pronunciamentos of the high and mighty, the great and gifted, and scrutinizes them against outcomes. In chapter after chapter on issues ranging from inner city crime to economics, to international security, he uses this method to measure stated goals with actual results. This method is hardly unusual in scholarly circles. Although trained as a quantitative economist, Sowell uses well-established ethnographic and comparative interpretations to arrive at his conclusions. In the end, he makes a convincing case that his theory (borrowed from Hayek) of expert knowledge (deep and narrow) versus accumulated common knowledge (broad, and nuanced) has validity.Given that social action is inherently complex, dynamic, and virtually limitless in its permutations, the book demonstrates the risks of expert knowledge. Where Sowell, in my opinion, slips is in his analysis of war and international security situations. Here, the role of deception and misperception often influence outcomes and even copious amounts of post hoc research may only produce more questions and uncover more enigmas. Thus, Sowell's narrative of Germany after World War I is conventional and predictable while scholars such as Gerhard Weinberg have themselves challenged this view for years by, among other things, claiming that Germany got off relatively lightly at Versailles and not, as received opinion holds, that Versailles punitive terms played a significant role in the run-up to World War Two.These minor demurrals aside, I still recommend the work if only for the description of the characterization of social knowledge and its impact on society.
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