Intellectuals and Society [Hardcover]

Thomas Sowell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 5, 2010

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals.

Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Editorial Reviews

Review

National Review Online
“Sowell takes aim at the class of people who influence our public debate, institutions, and policy. Few of Sowell’s targets are left standing at the end, and those who are stagger back to their corner, bloody and bruised.”

Washington Times
“Mr. Sowell builds a devastating case against the leftist antiwar political and intellectual establishment."

About the Author

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst, and other academic institutions, and his Basic Economics has been translated into six languages. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has published in both academic journals and in such popular media as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine, and Fortune, and he writes a syndicated column that appears in newspapers across the country.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Second Impression edition (January 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 046501948X
• ISBN-13: 978-0465019489
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst and other academic institutions, and his Basic Economics has been translated into six languages. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has published in both academic journals in such popular media as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine and Fortune, and writes a syndicated column that appears in newspapers across the country.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

389 of 416 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectuals and Society is a Great Book by HowTheWorldWorks January 17, 2010

By Devil's Advocate

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Length: 4:46 Mins

This is a book review by the YouTube channel [...]

299 of 329 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Outsmarting the Intellectuals January 3, 2010

By Ira E. Stoll VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

A book with the title Intellectuals and Society can be expected to range widely, and Thomas Sowell's latest does not disappoint, covering ground from economics to criminology and foreign policy.

In each area, Mr. Sowell's complaint is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects. And, maddeningly, these intellectuals are "unaccountable to the external world," immune from sanction, insulated even from the loss of reputation that those in other fields suffer after having been proven wrong.

The reputation of certain intellectuals may not be quite so immune after Mr. Sowell has finished with them, because he is withering in assessing and recording their failures.

The newspapers take it particularly hard from Mr. Sowell, and not just the American ones. There was the Daily Telegraph's prediction that Hitler would be gone before the end of 1932, and the Times of London's description of the Nazi dictator as a "moderate." Add to this a New York Times column issued by Tom Wicker on the collapse of the Communist bloc, cautioning, "that Communism has failed does not make the Western alternative perfect, or even satisfying for millions of those who live under it."

This book does a wonderful job at marshalling facts to puncture commonly held notions of intellectuals and others who tend to be political liberals. It'd be hard to think the same way about income inequality ever again after reading Mr. Sowell's tremendously clear explanation of confusion between income and wealth and "confusion between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings." By the time Mr. Sowell is done, the confusion is gone....

He does the same job on gun control, on the supposed epidemic of arson fires at black churches in 1996, and on various topics related to crime and punishment. Mr. Sowell can turn phrases back around at left-wing intellectuals like boomerangs. "What is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan," he writes. "Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing."

Even those already steeped in free-market economic thinking will find new facts and perspectives here. Who knew, for example, that restrictions on land use have so artificially inflated housing prices in San Francisco that "the black population has been cut in half since 1970"?

"The power of arbitrary regulation is the power to extort," Mr. Sowell writes, giving as an example a San Mateo, Calif., housing development whose approval was contingent on the builders turning over to local authorities 12 acres for a park, contributing $350,000 for public art, and selling about 15% of the homes below their market value.

Some of these historical facts may be relevant to our own times, such as Mr. Sowell's observation that, "As President, Hoover responded to a growing federal deficit during the depression by proposing, and later signing into law, a large increase in tax rates - from the existing rate of between 20 and 30 percent for people in the top income brackets to new rates of more than 60 percent in those brackets."

Mr. Sowell does sometime tilts his facts to favor his thesis. For example, there's a whole scathing section about intellectuals who opposed President Bush's "surge" in Iraq, but there's no mention of the fact that the idea for the surge came from a right-of-center policy intellectual, Frederick Kagan. While Mr. Sowell faults "intellectuals" for all kinds of bad thinking, in so doing he relies on and cites approvingly a string of other intellectuals -- Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, Robert Bartley, James Q. Wilson, Victor Davis Hanson. Mr. Sowell himself, by his own definition, qualifies as an intellectual.

If Mr. Sowell is angry at intellectuals, one reason is for covering up the progress and prosperity of his own country and the open-mindedness of its people. "Data showing the poverty rate among black married couples in America to have been in single digits for every year since 1994 are unlikely to get much, if any, attention in most of the media. Still less is it likely to lead to any consideration of the implications of such data for the view that the high poverty rate among blacks reflects the larger society's racism, even though married blacks are of the same race as unmarried mothers living in the ghetto on welfare, and would therefore be just as subject to racism, if that was the main reason for poverty," he writes.

Intellectuals and Society seems to have been written by Mr. Sowell out of a belief, or a hope, that the society will ultimately outsmart the intellectuals. Armed with Mr. Sowell's book, readers will be in a better position to help do that. Read more ›

209 of 240 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars One Intellectual Discredits Others December 31, 2009

By D. W. MacKenzie

Format:Hardcover

Intellectuals and Society is the latest in a series of books on Western `intellectuals', by Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals deal with ideas, but may not do so intelligently. Sowell is mainly concerned with the verifiability of ideas. The social visions of intellectuals like Rousseau, Marx and Engels, Galbraith, and Keynes have had dire consequences.

This book contains a plethora of examples of how many high profile intellectuals in the media and academia have been proven wrong- but without losing credibility among their peers or target audience. This is a serious problem because intellectuals affect public opinion, and with it public policy. Intellectuals of the past successfully agitated for defective policies: for so-called protectionism, living wages, and social justice has hindered economic progress. The naďve attitude that some intellectuals have had towards totalitarian movements proved disastrous. Yet many of the same defective arguments from earlier periods are still in use by today's intellectuals.

Sowell does a good job of illustrating the pernicious influence of leftist intellectuals. What is less clear is why opposing intellectuals, like Sowell himself, have not been more successful. Is there a simple lack of data among certain people? Does ideology cause a lack of cognitive dissonance? Are there self-serving reasons for spreading faulty theories, visions, or data? These are an important question, the answers to which will tell us if we need better education or a better vision (or maybe both). The fact of the matter is that this book does help to discredit certain intellectuals, and this is an important next step.... Unfortunately, it will be read least by those who need to most urgently: those who are routinely swayed by defective ideas need to read this book, but how many of them will? Read more ›

47 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Quick! Somebody get a copy of this book to the White House! January 18, 2010

By Couts A. Moseley

Format:Hardcover

Let me start by first taking issue with the reviewer that gave this book a single star review. I suspect that the author of that review either didn't read the book or simply shut his mind off during the first chapter, where Mr. Thomas Sowell clearly defines what he means by Intellectuals. We could postulate that all intelligent people that effectively use their minds in the pursuit of their professions, be them scientists, engineers, doctors, or newspaper columnists, are intellectuals. However, Mr. Sowell is very careful to narrow the definition to those "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas--writers, academics, and the like." He is not talking about people whose end products or services are tangible, such as inventors and doctors. That this person (the one-star reviewer) so misunderstood the definition leads me to believe that his post here is solely to attack a man whose logic is a clear and present danger to his own ideological leanings.

Mr. Sowell is further very careful to credit intellectuals who have made a mark in their specific core knowledge or field and only faults them when (believing themselves intellectually superior and apparently all-knowing) they opine on things over which they have no expertise (in some cases) or on which they are wholy ignorant (in others). Therefore, scientists that have created or discovered cures for previously deadly diseases are to be commended; similarly, writers whose "verbal virtuosity" separates them from the rest ought to be commended for their cleverness. When they apply that cleverness to mistaken notions is when they become dangerous.

It is precisely those notions that this book sets out to examine.* In the process, undeniably, Mr. Sowell slaughters many of the Left's sacred cows.... Nowhere is he more effective at that than in Chapter 3 (Intellectuals and Economics) where he not only manages to slay some of the left's most sacred cows--the notions surrounding "Income Distribution"--but also grounds them, cooks them, and makes juicy hamburgers out of them. After several well-substantiated examples of intellectuals disregarding and/or ignoring proven (even basic) economic principles, Sowell concludes that many of the intellectuals who have sincerely and passionately supported economic re-distribution are simply economically illiterate!

Mr. Obama would definitely benefit (and the country along with him) from an earnest reading of this book.

*(In the interest of truth, let me state the obvious. Dr. Sowell himself fits the definition of an Intellectual as he defines them in his book--except when he is talking about Economics, as he is an expert in that field. But this is beside the point. There are (were) intellectuals (from the left, the middle, and the right) whose ideas may be valid, whose input does benefit society, and whose influence is still inspiring others to generate beneficent ideas. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln (to name just three), come to mind. The whole point of the book is not to deny that some intellectuals are brilliant. The point is to examine those ideas that did not work, and why even though they did not work, they're still permeating society). Read more ›