Last week’s conference in honor of Thomas Sowell was the culmination of a long year of anticipation, planning, reading, and thinking. I was honored to be asked to help organize the affair and to deliver a lecture on his writings about culture along with a shorter keynote tribute to Sowell. But with that honor came a lot of pressure. Sowell has been publishing actively since the early 1960s. “Actively” is an understatement—furiously would be more accurate. He’s written uncountable articles and columns and scores of books—more than a few of them epochal contributions to political economy. How can one do justice to that in an half-hour-long talk? How can one capture his breadth and depth of knowledge and reference? How, in short, could I measure up?
Luckily, it wasn’t all on me. The panels and events were stacked: Roland Fryer, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Kemi Badenoch all made appearances, along with many others. (If you want some of Roland’s thoughts on Sowell, check out his latest Wall Street Journal column.) In this long excerpt from my most recent livestream, I talk with my editor Mark Sussman about the conference events and my own contributions. I explain the importance of Friedrich Von Hayek to Sowell’s thought and work, and how Sowell extended Hayek’s work. The actor-writer Clifton Duncan drops in to talk about his experiences at the conference. And I recount a conversation that I sat in on between the former secretary of state and the Supreme Court justice that would leave their critics speechless. Legacies are about the resources—intellectual, material, and spiritual—the past leaves to the future. If what I saw over those two days is any indication, those of us who inherit Sowell’s legacy will be very rich indeed.
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