Thomas Sowell's Signature Work

with John McWhorter and Jason Riley

If you’re a TGS regular, you’ve probably heard John and I talk about the economist and political theorist Thomas Sowell and his work, though we haven’t had a full, in-depth conversation about it. That’s changed now that Jason Riley, author of a biography of Sowell, has come on to discuss the man’s life and work.

For those glancing through Sowell’s immense bibliography and wondering where to start, Jason, John, and I all recommend his 1987 masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle. In the excerpt below, we discuss the book, outline the “visions” the title alludes to, and address what current debates about race and social justice could learn from Sowell.

Sowell’s work has been absolutely essential to my own intellectual development, so I hope you enjoy this conversation. And, as always, I’m interested in what you think. Comment below!

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GLENN LOURY: Let's talk about the books. Why is A Conflict of Visions important? What's the argument and why is it important?

JASON RILEY: Well, the argument is that, as I was saying before, a lot of our political disputes over social issues and so forth, Tom argues, come out of two fundamentally different ways of [thinking about] how the world works. And the two visions he described are the “constrained vision” and “the unconstrained vision.”

The constrained vision is a view of human nature that says there are limits to human betterment. He also calls it the tragic vision, this constrained vision. We may want to solve poverty or get rid of racism or get rid of war, but that's not likely to happen. And so the best we can do is to set up institutions and processes that help us deal with problems that we're probably never going to solve entirely. We may want to eliminate crime, but that's probably not going to happen. So you need a rule of law and you need a court system to adjudicate various disputes that people will inevitably have.

You may want to get rid of war and have world peace, but again, that's probably not going to happen. So you do need a military defense to deal with what might arise. And he contrasts this vision of the world with what he calls this unconstrained or more utopian vision that says, “No, we can not only manage these problems, we can solve them. We can eliminate poverty and racism. It's just a matter of reason and willpower. And moreover, there will be no trade-offs in doing so.”

And Sowell says, depending on which of these views you hold, it's going to tell us a lot about where you come down on anything from defense spending to tax rates to rent control. A lot can be learned about someone's thinking in that it is a logical extension of this ultimate view of the world that they have. And he traces this thinking, as I said earlier, back to writers in the late 1700s, like William Godwin and on through Burke and Adam Smith and on down through John Rawls. I think we're still having these disputes today. This is what the social justice movements have always been about, this sort of more utopian view, of us being able to solve problems versus others who think that's wishful thinking. These problems will never be entirely solved or eliminated.

That's a conservative vision, no?

JASON: I guess, yeah. In the crudest terms possible, you could call it a conservative vision.

I mean, one side of me reacts as an economist. No free lunch, opportunity costs. And I get it. I get it completely. Resources are limited, choices have to be made. There are constraints. You can wish that the constraints weren't there, but the constraints are nevertheless going to be there. And if you try to act as if they aren't there, those costs are going to be borne someplace else in the system. We could go, minimum wage, rent control, things of this kind.

The utopian vision is also a hopeful vision and it's a moral vision. So are these people who embrace the unconstrained vision fools to want to make a better world, to want to try to appeal to their fellow citizens, to care about the poor, to be disturbed by homeless?

JASON: They're not fools, Glenn. And, and in fact, A Conflict of Visions is part of an informal trilogy that Sowell wrote. The second book in the trilogy is called The Vision of the Annointed, and the third is called The Quest for Cosmic Justice. And in the second and third book, Sowell sort of gets into critiques of the various visions, so the two visions. In the first book, he's really just laying this out.

Two things. One of the reasons, I think, it's his favorite of all his books, A Conflict of Visions — and a lot of others agree, along with Knowledge and Decisions, that those are probably his two best books. But the reason A Conflict of Visions is so important, if you want to get inside Sowell's head is because it is through this framework that he's writing about everything that he writes about, whether it's race, whether it's immigration, whether it's culture, whether it's economic history. Tom believes in that more limited view of the betterment of humanity, that tragic view he accepts, that constrained view he accepts.

And so if you want to understand where Tom coming from in almost anything he's writing, A Conflict of Visions is the book to read. Because he does get into more critiques of the visions themselves, the latter two books are a little more tendentious, but it's not in the sense of calling people with an unconstrained vision “fools.” It's pointing out why this is unrealistic and what the track record of this thinking is.

I mean, just to give you an example, if you nail down someone like Kendi and say, okay, when will you be satisfied that enough people are anti-racist, that racism is no longer a problem, or that we've arrived at where you want us to be as a society, he will point to no more disparities in outcomes. Now, if you're Tom Sowell or someone else who has studied societies down through history, not only here in America but around the world, you will understand that there has never been a society where group disparities did not exist. It's an entirely utopian view, which means Kendi will never be satisfied!

JOHN MCWHORTER Or what it means is that—and I'm sorry, I'm fighting with a lawn mower who will not go away, and I can't get away from him. Sorry about the noise. But the issue is that, if you put that kind of question to people with that kind of ideology, in a better American discourse they would realize that it's on them to explain how you would have this complete absence of disparities, despite the realities that somebody like Sowell has put forth.

And so the idea is that people like that would realize just how radical they are. And really maybe some of them could come up with some strategy. They could say yes, that is the way things look. It looks like there isn't a free lunch, but here is my construct where I think that we should look towards this kind of vision rather than the more conservative one. Instead, we have a debate where books like Sowell's … that trilogy should be key reading. It should be like the Bible. But instead, a certain kind of person thinks that the "liberal" version is the only way to think and that there could never be any coherent or moral argument against it. That's what the culture ends up missing in ignoring the teachings of somebody like Sowell.