Intellectuals and Society

Great read for people who have a distrust of central planning and it's role in their lives, that in turn leds to a sense that their freedom is waning. Intellectuals and Society is a comprehensive and common sense look, and understanding, of the people whose decisions have led to those feelings.

Gets real life into perspective (the "right" perspective). Enjoyed taking stock of real issues. Sobering and thought provoking. Having a number of societal issues woven together kind of makes sense. An enjoyable read.

Five stars for content and two for the pros. Holy cow... I find myself having to read the same sentence over and over, rephrasing certain bits in my head, in order to extract the meaning from what he's saying. Example: "But only by assuming that everything that has not been done could have been done, disregarding costs and risks, can individuals or societies be blamed because the real world does not match some vision of an ideal society." Couldn't he have said "But only by assuming everything else has been tried, can we blame people for their failings." In other words, he's saying we livin a meritocracy, and that intellectuals look for every cause but the main one - that is, the failings of the person to succeed - for why a person isn't rich or successful. Talk about not written for the common man!

Ever wonder what drives your 'liberal' friends? Here's the book with the answers. Sowell is amazing, of course, and this book shows his keen grasp of the motivations of the 'liberal establishment' with uncanny clarity. If only they would read this, and change their minds.

There is a difference between an intellectual and those that think that being self-righteous is the same as intellect. Some are so wrapped up in the notion of being smart means having the intellect to manage society as a chessboard. They purposely substitute their ill benevolence for righteousness, and then are bewildered over the conservative masses' objection. This book clarifies what it means to be an intellectual and being smart.

Ever wonder what drives your 'liberal' friends? Here's the book with the answers. Sowell is amazing, of course, and this book shows his keen grasp of the motivations of the 'liberal establishment' with uncanny clarity. If only they would read this, and change their minds.

Sowell cleanly and comprehensively demonstrates the flaws and assumptions in the paradigm of those labelled intellectuals, revealing how subjectivity has infiltrated the objective realm of idea production and exploration.

Thomas Sowell captures the mind and soul of all concerned Americans. His analysis is concise and sometimes tells us what we don't want to hear or choose to ignore. This man has the best wisdom of any American. Liberals and Conservatives should listen to him and use his wisdom to become a better society

Another great book by Thomas Sowell. I couldn't put it down and I look forward to reading it again. I found the analysis of pre-WWII France to be especially interesting.

As companions I also recommend "A Conflict of Visions" and "Black Rednecks, White Liberals."

This is another great work by Dr. Sowell. The information contained will enlighten the common individual to the scope and depth of the currrent problems and unrealistic solutions being dictated by the "intellectuals" of our society. He explores the attitudes, thought patterns, and results of the "solutions" pressed upon others by these "intellectuals". Don't take my word for it, read the book. I know you'll like the read.

Intellectuals head for teaching, academia, journalism or govenment, like turtles hatching and instinctively heading for the sea...the intelligentsia of "ideas" avoid the private economy where their ideas would have to compete with success or failure. They never admit failures or mistakes or lose tenure when wrong. Myths are forever, to them. Facts are inconvenient.

Sowell first defines "Intellectual" and then begins his analysis of the reciprocal dialectic of the shapers of culture. This is not so much the explication of the process of dissemination but rather theses regarding motivation by both promulgator and receiver given our cultural milieu.

The research that went into this book is extensive. Care was taken to cite that research, making this book an excellent starting point for anyone who might wish to fact check or verify the author's conclusions.

Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society is about the intellectuals, their pursuit of their vision, and how pervasive their vision was in society. This book analyzes the attitudes, behaviors, and the vision of the intellectuals. It is somewhat a historical book on the intellectuals and the direction they have taken for society.

I was going give a 4-star rating because it was a tough read. However, I was so ticked-off after reading this book, I gave it a 5-star. The first 100 pages were tough reading but the rest of the book got a little easier. It was sickening reading the devastations and failures society incurred by following the visions of the intellectuals. If you're a previous reader of Sowell's book, the intellectuals and the anointed are pretty much the same.

Here are the highlights and my takeaway:
- The distinction between the tragic vision and the anointed vision.
- The intelligentsia had put society in very precarious situations.
- Unlike those from hard sciences, the intelligentsia lives and breathes on unconstrained ideas without accountability. The intelligentsia places a lot of weight on their ideas regardless of the efficacy of those ideas: vision first, everything else second. Hence, the history of intellectualism is wrought with failure. Unfortunate for society: the invalidated ideas are cheap.
- Since WWI, one could say that dictators' best friends have been intellectuals.
- Members of the intelligentsia might be knowledgeable in their fields of expertise, but by no means experts in all fields. Yet, the intelligentsia is driven to chart the destinies of the populace by means of government regulation and directives.
- Intelligence is a subset of wisdom.
- Intellectuals are very good with verbal virtuosity. So much so that the intellectuals are wowed by their own brilliance and take their own verbal virtuosity as faith without having to validate their arguments. As a result, they believe in unproven and unsubstantiated notions.
- Intellectualism and free markets do not go together.
- Disagree with the right, the right might you are on left-base. Disagree with the left and the left might think you're sub-human. The intellectuals take their beliefs quite personally and their egos can be provoked by questioning the beliefs. Intellectuals seem to have a lot of skin in their beliefs. Competing ideas must fall within acceptable parameters of the collective vision, otherwise it will be dismissed regardless if the idea was beneficial to society or not.

In simple terms, the distinction between the right (conservatives) and the left (the intellectuals) is the difference between living based on individual interests, goals, and pursuits (the right) and living based on limits imposed by a small collective (the left). Attaining individual pursuits, by definition, does not require collective imposition.

This is probably why the right and the left are so polarizing. The fundamentals behind the visions of the left and right are polar opposites. It is like comparing apples and oranges. It is like trying to get polar bears and penguins to get along.

Intellectuals have little faith on the self-reliance of society; probably because of the perceived view that society lacks the cognitive faculties to appreciate intellectualism that the intellectuals endear. Thinking that there is a better world than what the unsophisticated society is currently living and believing that they know more than society, intellectuals try to steer society towards that better world.

Unfortunately, intellectuals mistake intellect for knowledge, and as a result intellectuals try to piece together a solution given the limited scope of their knowledge. This mistake leads intellectuals and society to dangerous times.

I used to think that having intellect requires logic and reason; hence intellectual thought would be full of logic and reason. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. The intellectual thought is a vision based on notions that are derived from a limited scope of knowledge.

After reading this book, I think I know why Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News have made an indelible mark on modern American society. It is because they are the antithesis of intellectualism, which have pervaded the media for about 80 years. They provide an alternative view which is without the intellectual vision and makes the point about flaws in the intellectual vision.

There was a lot more details that I could have added to this review, but I decided to limit the size of the review. I would recommend this book to anyone want to understand the history of intellectualism, their influence on global societies, and how pervasive intellectualism is and was. In a strange way, it is a good antithesis of conservatism.

So called intellectuals really fools destroying the work ethic, family life, balance between government and self-reliance for life improvement. Doing their best to create a dependent, hands out for a hand out society. Shame on them. Happy camper. Arrived in good condition and playable. Delivered in good time. Pleased with the transaction. Thanks for the sale.

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.

Whenever a book, article, essay uses the word "intellectual" in its title, is really is aiming at liberals and progressive and their relationship to government. . Sowell is nested at Stanford University and the Hoover Institute, the bastion of right-wing ideology and politics in California. I wonder why Sowell never mentioned in this book. the right-wing intellectuals, like Friedrich Hayek, an émigré from the Austrian School of Economics which embraced laissez faire economic, Social Darwinism, and also help birth the Libertarian Movement in America which advocates the destruction of democracy and democratic institution and the absolute rule of the super rich. Check out a recent publication by historian, Nancy MacLean titled "Democracy in Chains" which carefully traces the evolution of Libertarianism since late 1950's which was generously funded by Charles Koch who assisted in setting up a network of think tanks, political associations and propaganda machines to promote the goals of this ideology which he also fervently supports. So before readers praise this so-called "public intellectual", they should consider the source of his ideology, benefactors, and long history of right-wing politics represented by the Hoover Institute.

With a gift for explaining complex ideas, Thomas Sowell illuminates the influence that intellectuals have in our society. He explains the difference between intellectuals whose ideas bring about a tangible result (engineers, scientists, etc) and those whose ideas result in theories about how to remake society. Sowell demonstrates how the latter class of intellectuals most often are doing great damage in that their ideas are not subject to systematic constraints and testing. Rather, they go into a self-confirmation loop supporting their presupposed vision. Sowell shows how there are basically two opposing visions, one in which human nature is flawed and imperfect. In this vision, society and its institutions are also imperfect but act as constraints on flawed humanity. With tweaking and small changes over time and experience, things can be made better albeit not perfect. The other vision believes that human nature is not flawed, but is being held back by society and its institutions which are in need of massive overhaul and change to make things right. Intellectuals mostly operate within the framework of the latter vision and so they do not consider competing ideas or theories which would fall outside of their vision. In fact, much of their ideas are assumed and believed to be axiomatic so are not even argued. As Sowell terms it, they often use "arguments without arguments." Therefore, the ideas proposed by intellectuals on things such as criminal justice, war, economic policy, and more fall within a narrow scope and are not subject to verification, testing, or criticism. Unlike engineers and scientists, when the ideas of intellectuals produce bad results, there is no self-correcting mechanism. Intellectuals also operate within a much different incentive structure. They are rewarded for pushing the envelope and challenging anything an everything, in order to get attention and monetary support. There is no incentive for producing ideas which result in net benefit for society, but instead there is incentive for producing ideas which buttress their prevailing vision for a major overhaul of society--in which case many intellectuals are needed in order to make those major societal changes.

Sowell is a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer. Each of his books is a gem, including this one. If you are new to Thomas Sowell, don't stop with this book--read everything he has written.

In this book, Thomas Sowell repeats arguments he made in previous books about why markets are the most efficient and democratic mechanism for allocating human and material resources, why rule of law is superior to rule by judges, etc. This is not a criticism. These arguments are important and, in my opinion, correct. My question is why he, like nearly all members of the Right (whether social conservatives or champions of the free-market), single out intellectuals as the main enemies of these ideas. In fact, the large majority of socialists and Communists have been manual workers in Europe and peasants in the Third World. The Italian Communist Party got 34.4 percent of the vote in the election of 1976; the French Communist Party regularly got over a fifth of the vote in the four decades after World War II; the Finnish People's Democratic League (i.e., Communist Party) won between 17 and 24 percent of the votes in elections between 1944 and 1979. Surely, most of their voters were not intellectuals. Nor could Communists have gained and held control of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc., if they relied on mostly intellectuals for support.
Moreover, it is socialism that appeals to the human heart and mind. There have been innumerable political parties called socialist. There has never, anywhere, been a political party called capitalist. Socialism is commonsensical. Why shouldn't people get together and allocate resources where they think they are necessary? Why should so many highly intelligent, ambitious people be engaged in advertising, finance, insurance (when the government owns all capital assets and employs everyone, insurance is unnecessary) or in studying and speculating on the future prices of stocks, bonds, call options, future contracts, etc? (The Soviet Union had four times more scientists and engineers than the United States because intelligent people in the Soviet Union became scientists and engineers). If anyone can answer these questions, it is intellectuals.
Why, then, does the Right constantly attack intellectuals? My explanation is the powerful feeling, which seems to be innate in human nature, that morality and justice consist of supporting the poor and unsuccessful against the rich and successful. In the prologue to the earliest extant law code, the Code of Hammurabi (from about 1790 BC), Hammurabi says that among its purposes is, "so that the strong should not harm the weak." He then lists his accomplishments, among which is that he is "the shepherd of the oppressed and of slaves." He ends the prologue with, "I did right and righteousness ... and brought about the well-being of the oppressed." In the eighth century BC, the prophet Amos castigated the Israelites because the wealthy (especially wealthy merchants) oppressed and stole from the poor. In his Julius Caesar, Shakespeare had Mark Antony defend Caesar from the accusation of being ambitious with the argument, "When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept." (This tendency is also evident in the fact that in political discourse, the adjective "big" is invariably an accusation: "Big Business," Big Government," Big Labor," "Big Tobacco," etc.)
The Left keeps making proposals that obviously help the poor at the expense of the rich. The Right could object that in the long run these proposals harm everyone. But that requires arguments so complex that only intellectuals could understand them. (They would have to defend an economic system in which, enter alia, 3 billion dollars of currencies are traded every day.) So, the Right must seek out its own elite to attack. Since the Left attacks a real elite - the rich - the Right must make up phony, ersatz elites - intellectuals, the media, etc. - from whose contempt, arrogance, and tyranny it defends the masses.
One question for the anti-intellectuals: What do they think of the only country in history that was created and run for its first thirty years nearly completely by intellectuals: the United States?
I must also point out that on the first page, Sowell makes two mistakes that are unworthy of his usual accuracy. Contrary to what he says, Karl Marx constantly attacked Luddites and emphasized the wonderful increase in productivity that technology had brought; and John Rawls wrote in his A Theory of Justice that his concept of justice should not be applied when it harms the least successful.

I had no prior familiarity with Thomas Sowell or his writings or philosophy. He advances an interesting concept when dividing intellectuals into one of two opposing camps: either "the anointed," who perceive social problems as a result of some imbalance or impropriety that with insight--their own, to be sure--can be corrected (or engineered), or those with a "tragic vision" of humanity who believe our social problems stem not from an imposed mishandling of relationships, institutions, etc. but are the natural result of the inherent flaws of humanity, of the human condition, and that solutions, as conceived of by the anointed, are unlikely to provide positive benefit and, in many cases, have a profoundly negative affect. While the construct is interesting it also seems self-limiting. Surely there are innumerable variations of thought on the causes of social ills, and even if Sowell's characterizations are correct, do they not exist on a continuum? Sowell seems to think not and repeatedly tars members of the intelligentsia with one brush or the other.

That said, his complaints regarding the over-reaching "preciousness" of the anointed and the paralysis of those with the tragic vision, i.e., the "in loco parentis" philosophy of society vs. the non-interventionist or "laissez-faire" approach are thought-provoking and often on target. There is much that makes sense in his thesis: members of neither group of the intelligentsia have skin in the game, neither suffers the consequences of accountability, and both tend to view people in the abstract. The lessons of history are too often lost because there is no measured or concrete accounting of the outcomes that result from the influence of either extreme.

While it seems throughout the book that the author favors the school of tragic vision, he maintains a rather objective and informative perspective... for the first 480 pages. It is in the final section, An Overview, that his voice unravels and his arguments become strident and partisan. One feels him screeching into the reader's ear and his suppositions and arguments become simplistic, indeed in some instances detached from the world we see around us, and frequently run counter to his own prior pronouncements or observations. Still, the book is worth a read; just prepare for the attack of the summation.

An excellent work by economist Thomas Sowell. This is the second book I’ve read by Sowell and he doesn’t disappoint. This book is about intellectuals, which he define as those whose occupation is chiefly dealing with ideas as the product that they market. Here Sowell makes a good distinction between intellect and wisdom; and just because intellectuals deal with ideas do not necessarily mean they are wise or correct. Nor does that mean they are smarter than others (such as doctors, chess masters, etc). In fact, as Sowell goes on to argue in the book, typically intellectuals are those with specialized knowledge (versus ‘mundane’ knowledge) who seeks the approval of peers which can immune them from the typical tests of removing good and bad ideas through the market such as other job sector. This in turn allows intellectuals’ bad ideas to go on for a long time and often intellectuals get away from the responsibility of their bad ideas with little or no consequences. The book has a wonderful chapter on specialized knowledge that has led some intellectuals to think they thus have authority to speak on other areas outside of their specialty (think of Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, etc). I enjoyed Sowell’s example of this in the case of how some liberal intellectuals criticize police officers’ for firing too much rounds in officer related shooting. The criticism often is without the consideration of studies on gunfire under stress, where a NYPD study shows the low accuracy of shooting under pressure (such as shooting a target 16-25 yards away in life-risking scenario results in 14 percent hit, etc). At times intellectuals can be down right misleading with their twisted worldview such as the uncritically accepted notion in history that president Herbert Hoover did nothing during the Great Depression or how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is nothing more than a loner and a follower of Anthony Scalia, etc. Readers will enjoy Sowell’s examination of the axioms intellectuals take for granted such as the “One day at a time mentality” of the elite versus long haul consequences of action. I was surprise that the book devoted two chapters on intellectuals view on war. I highly recommend this book and wish to read more like it.

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 naïve 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?

Thomas Sowell is a gifted applied economist with much of importance to say about the larger issues in social policy and government regulation of economic affairs. I have reviewed several of his books and recommend them to the reader.

Sowell, however, has two failings. First, he has no heart for the plight of the poor, so his work in this area is illuminating for the false ideas he debunks, but does not contribute in any way to dealing with the problem of poverty. Second, he is a thorough-going right-wing ideologue, who is often cogent in his critique of liberal ideas, but is blind to similar, indeed often parallel, problems with conservative ideas. This book suffers especially from the second of these weaknesses. The book endlessly repeats the errors of left-wing intellectuals (especially in the Cold War era, when many embraced some form of socialism, with totalitarian forms of Communism heavily represented), but says nothing about the errors of right-wing intellectuals (many of whom embraced fascism and even Nazism, and argued in favor of tolerating racial segregation and gender discrimination, as well as the abolition of government regulation of food and drug quality).

Sowell's book adds fuel to a right vs. left dialog that is petty, vituperative, Manichean, and unilluminating. The social division between left and right persists throughout democratic societies and will doubtless continue to do so. The reason is that both types of political world-views have strong positive contributions to make, but both are deadly and destructive when pushed too far. Sowell encourages pushing the right too far by his lack of insight into the virtues of liberalism.

Sowell knows applied economic theory quite well, but he never presents the balanced model of government-market interaction that has been taught to graduate students of economics for half a century, and has no serious critiques in the professional literature. This is because this model of "public economics" does not fit the conservative free market ideology. This ideology has no scientific validity and cannot even be formulated in an intellectually rigorous form. It is simply wrong.
Sowell has no understanding of information economics. He follows Hayek on the distributed nature of information, but he never confronts the literature that deals with the transformation of private information into public information. The importance of public information, central for instance to Durkheim and Aumann, is completely ignored in his treatment of government regulation.

This book preachs to a right-wing choir, a wordy version of the radio talk-show hucksters I so regularly avoid. There are many factual gems and cogent insights in this book, but they are smothered in invective. If you want to be preached to, this is the book for you. If you want insight, look elsewhere.

Thomas Sowell is obviously a brilliant and insightful thinker or he could not have produced this magnificent work. This book is the epitome of big picture thinking. In it Sowell examines the influence and impact of "public intellectuals" throughout the last 100 years or so and produces amazing insights. As always his writing is very clear and his arguments and examples are incredibly persuasive. It is all very well done.

This book is simply a must read and whether you agree with everything or not you can help but appreciate the effort and accomplishment.

"...a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive without at least the will to resist." 317.

I have several hundred books and really needed only one - Intellectuals and Society - but I needed it for the last ten years!
Sowell finds the split in human culture and exposes intellectuals as pompous, perpetual, public, mutual masturbators. (We usually know them as social scientists, journalists, movie-makers, and liberal Dems. Captive squirrel monkeys do similar things.) And Sowell's best kicks and punches are in his two chapters on war and in his final J'Accuse....three pages of charges against the rulers who steal from us and want us helpless while tigers hunt in the night. Make a poster!
Our culture has a "will to resist" - perhaps the gift from a rowdy Scot, a gene that wriggled down his kilt, out some jail in the highlands, and into the women of our South and Middle America. My own bent is for diners, waitresses, motorcycles, and doing what I want to do. This oppositional, impulsive streak was a gift and curse from my hyperactive Polish mother. It was also a gift from nature and whatever God may be: every living creature makes a world consistent with its personal nature. Thus, it's fine that I hate libs and their hives and enjoy the comradeship that I find with Tom Sowell and his allies.
Spain and Arabia meet again but in North America and do to us what we once did to ignoble savages who already battled each other, killed game, raped women from the next tribe, and smoked weeds! Our modern lib customs beckon invaders from Central America and the Mideast. Obviously, Madonna needs a burka and a strong man!
Thank you, Dr. Sowell...

This book is a must have for undergrad and graduate students. It will give insight into your own professors biases and help you understand where they are coming from. From there you can start to take what they tell you, weigh it, and come to your own conclusions. Word of advice to students, especially undergrads: as a graduate student and former teaching assistant, always remember that your professors are only human and they have their own biases, formed by their experiences and what they have been exposed to during their own lives. DO NOT TAKE EVERYTHING THEY SAY AS FACT AND LITERAL. Even if you do not question them in class, analyze what you already know with what they say, maybe even do your own research. Most of all form your own opinion. This book really helps give you invaluable insight into how intellectuals see themselves, their biases, and beliefs. It will also help you to understand the "ivory tower." I too have struggled in the "ivory tower" because I fear that not having the "correct" opinion or a "politically correct" thesis will keep me from getting a job later in my career. Like Sowell explains, the "Ivory Tower" does not allow for outside opinions or opinions that differ from the status quo. Being conservative is something you keep to your yourself and I have met quite a few conservative professors who have told me they fear being found out as conservatives. The book helps you see all this. Even conservative scholars have to tow the line or face not getting a job at a college in a very competitive line of work. Only 40% of those who graduate with a PhD get hired and your dissertation can make or break your career. It almost forces you to write as a liberal to get a job meaning scholarship always trends liberal. In my department even the older conservative liberals on the faculty hate conservative leaning historian Amity Shlaes and her book, "The Forgotten Man" and it may be why she does not work at a college.

Thinkers rarely end up in the lead because societies look for a new Nixon who could leave the gold standard even further behind in the ditch of finiteness. Intellectuals look bad when events make it likely that the wipe out of the bottom will be noticed by the kind of people who thought Stalin or the Nazi Party were heartless and cruel. Time is the factor that is most considered when thinking about warfare. Thinkers who would like to jump the gun are faulted for not being able to prevent many wars which already turned out badly, as history turns around to point out how much we remember the salt which stings more than Lot's wife.

Big trouble can be a fiction designed to scare people into obedience or the collapse of a fiction like the gold standard which was fake as political economy became the invisible hand that needed to wipe out the bottom when discontent rose like a fever. Medicine has been a balancing act that is like considering intellectuals the personification of ideas that never worked and aren't going to work this time around. We were lucky to live in a climate that has so many factors nobody can blame a particular disaster on the wings of a butterfly, but intellectuals have been dreaming of catching the butterfly that only flutters by if you are a flower instead of a book.

This is a wonderful book about a very serious topic that too many people will misread. Sowell is very clear about his topic and what he means by the word "intellectual" in his title. No, it is not just about people who use their brains for a living. For the purposes of this book he is examining the practices, claims, and effects of those whose main output is ideas and whose criteria of success rests in the approval and acclaim of their peers. So, scientists who are measured against the data their experiments produce, doctors who are measured against their ability to objectively treat patients, and engineers who are judged by the success of their structures, machines, and the devices they create are not intellectuals for the purposes of this book. They are very intelligent, to be sure, but their tie to objective measures is what is important. So many professors, politicians, and media types make claim to intellectual brilliance, but their only measure is that others agree with their claim. And, too often, the more outlandish their ideas the more the draw the attention and applause of their peers. There is no objective measure to back up those claims. And when they do make objective claims and those outcomes are measured, the sad realities are explained away. These kinds of intellectuals are almost never, in their own eyes, wrong no matter how much disaster follows in their wake.

Sowell lays out his argument carefully and with detailed evidence for each of his claims. Of course, this will not stop his critics from making emotional non-argument arguments in condemning him and this book. He begins by examining what knowledge is and some strange ways intellectuals tend to use it. As just one example, intellectuals often do have great knowledge and expertise in specialized areas. However, their assumption that this makes them more expert in mundane areas of life than the average person is false. Regular everyday folks are not abstractions and know a great deal more about the realities of their specific circumstances than teams of intellectuals in government bureaucracies or analysts in the many redundant "studies" departments at our many universities.

He then takes us through how intellectuals misuse economics and how they hold onto old notions that have been long disproved. We then follow him into a discovery of how these mistaken notions in economics feed into social visions that make convenient theories but break down quickly in reality. This leads Sowell to explain the way intellectuals handle reality when it contradicts their theories. Do they abandon the theory and the false principles on which it stood? No. They create an optional reality and use propaganda in classrooms, media, and politics to enforce it and punish anyone who points out their nakedness. For after all, the important thing for many of these intellectuals is how their positions allow them to feel their own intellectual and moral superiority. And to challenge their beliefs is to challenge their personal integrity, so we challengers must be swept away.

Sowell then shows us the damage this divorce from reality has caused to hundreds of millions of lives through ridiculous notions about the law. In fact, we now see criminals protected when their would be victims defend themselves and injure the predator. The more elaborate the social theories behind the implementation of the laws the greater the financial and social disaster that follows. Yet actual experience demonstrates that simple laws with a surer the connection between bad acts and punishment result in a lower crime rate.

War is such an important topic that Sowell spends two chapter examining the roles intellectuals played leading into and during World War I, including American Progressives and intellectuals Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The second chapter looks at the way intellectuals flipped to pacifism and how France taught its next generation to view all soldiers as victims. Then Sowell examines how this led to France's failure to stop Hitler in the Rhineland and later led to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world. Neville Chamberlain's famous "Peace in Our Time" negotiation with Hitler also receives a detailed examination of its roots and consequences. This is fascinating material and should be read very carefully. I have friends who are pacifists and they have a very hard time dealing with the real world consequences of their sweet natures in the face of people who do not reciprocate their kindnesses.

The concluding chapter is worth the price of the whole book. But it helps to have read all the preceding material because you will better see and understand the conclusions Sowell draws. He has shown us their use of verbal virtuosity in shaping debates rather than in clarifying issues. He demonstrates their non-argument arguments. We see the use of abstract people and countries standing in for real people and nations and statistical categories than how real lives are experienced. Sowell shows how the vision of the (self) anointed imposes itself on our lives and notes "Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist."

May we wake up and resist. Reading this book will help us. And after you have read it, please share it with others (or buy them their own copy).

You might also be interested in Sowell's:
Dismantling America: and other controversial essays

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Saline, MI

This is an important book, but one that will probably be ignored or attacked
by those that need it most.

Intellectuals, in this book, are people whose output is ideas and whose
success is measured by the approval of those ideas, rather than by objective
results. Thus, a chess grandmaster is not an intellectual. Engineers,
scientists, surgeons are not intellectuals. They are judged by games won,
lives saved, inventions made, and similar objective results. Einstein was
not an intellectual when doing physics, but he was one when expounding
about society. Intellectuals are smart. Put one in a large group and he
might know more than anyone in the group, but it is certain that he
knows far less then everyone in the group. Intellectuals frequently make
mistakes when they stray outside their areas of expertise.

Intellectuals typically believe they should be in charge, an idea at least
as old as Plato's ideal of a Philosopher King. This partly explains their
support of planned economies and regulations of many kinds.

Intellectuals deal in the currency of ideas, so the bigger the idea, the better.
Really big ideas are visions, and details are ignored in visions. Examples of the
details that are often ignored are facts. When confronted with facts that
challenge their vision, intellectuals use their "verbal virtuosity" ( a phrase
that Sowell overuses) to sidestep the challenge. They have some common tools
based on fallacies. Sowell adds two more. The argument without argument is to
restate the issue in such bland terms that no one can oppose it. The other is to
demand a solution to a larger problem before an objection will be considered.

Here, I thought of global warming, where an objection to CO2 as the primary
driver of climate is met by a demand to fully explain and successfully predict
climate trends. Sowell does not even mention the AGW issue. None of
the players are even mentioned.

So what areas or issues are covered? The table of contents tells us the areas.

1: Intellect and Intellectuals
2: Knowledge and Notions
3: Intellectuals and Economics
4: Intellectuals and Social Visions
5: Optional Reality in the Media and Academia
6: Intellectuals and the Law
7: Intellectuals and War
8: Intellectuals and War: Repeating History
9: Intellectuals and Society

Most of the ideas Sowell debunks and most of the proponents of those ideas are
on the political left, but this is not a right wing attack book. There is
more emphasis on the weakness and errors in the presentation and defense of
the ideas than on the ideas themselves. Along the way, Sowell berates Hoover
and praises Truman.

The book has almost 60 pages of notes, more than 100 for most chapters,
many with multiple sources, and a 22 page index. Both are in normal size type,
perhaps an invitation to check for yourself.

Sowell once again demonstrates his incisive and uncanny ability to cut right through to the core of every issue, not sparing anyone for their part in the state of our society.
From exposing the "unintended consequences" of government programs, to debunking even the most ingrained gems of "conventional wisdom", he shows us just how insidious it has been to follow and implement the policies advocated by so-called intellectual experts.
Here we see first-hand and with ample empirical evidence the grave mistakes we have made in implementing and believing in un-tested, un-proven theories that always remain but theories, rather than sticking to the tried and true laws of economics, society and culture which have been shown to work time and time again.
A great contribution to the growing movement of rejection of the "experts" who have led us astray time and time again. The recent "global warming" scam being but the latest in a successive and unending string of failed policies, programs and social manipulations which have only diminished us and our society.
While some have argued that this is just one intellectual criticizing others with whom he does not agree, the reality is that this is an intellectual who bases his ideas on reality and empirical evidence, and those he criticizes here are those who hold to their theories as if they were demonstrated and provable, when in fact they are not. And that is the difference between one type of intellectual and the other.

Thomas Sowell is a national treasure whose insights and understanding of society's intellectual currents and trends are invaluable for anyone who wants to make sense of the potential and problems of the world.

His basic premise here, backed up by numerous facts and a hundred pages of footnotes, is that today's Liberal Public Intellectuals are the modern day version of the metaphysicians and Scholastics of the Middle Age who occupied themselves with the number of angels who could dance on a pin; that is, people who reside in a mental landscape with no empirical or practical underpinnings, and who, through the need for celebrity and public recognition, espouse an unrealistic, indeed impossible, agenda predicated on the perfectibility of mankind through the exercise of their considerable mental capabilities.

The ramifications and harm done as a result of this solipsistic belief system is wonderfully documented in the areas of law, social programs and foreign affairs among others, and the book manages to be informative, interesting and frightening all at the same time, demonstrating Sowell's mastery and ability to distill the essence of what the Intellectuals would have you believe is their amazingly complex and nuanced thought processes and philosophy down to its true nature: the conceited and selfish navel gazing of a bunch of people who seek to create a self importance for themselves which is totally unjustified and overwhelmingly hubristic. You can almost hear the air deflating from their artificially inflated egos with each point Sowell makes.

For those who agree with Sowell, this is an energizing and fun journey which ends too soon. Those who disagree with him, unless they are totally oblivious, should find themselves forced to defend their beliefs, and perhaps even beginning to doubt some of their most tightly held convictions. And for anyone just looking to understand the dogma of Intellectual Liberalism and it's effects in the modern world as presented by someone not tainted by the biases of the Main Stream Media or academia, this will be like a breath of fresh air wafting through the musty old structure of conventional wisdom. Breathe deeply!

Intellectuals--by which Sowell means the chattering classes, not scientists--have been like a plague unleashed on the 20th century.

It is painful, now, to recall what joyous hopes the intellectuals had for the 20th century. Marx envisioned his communist paradise. And all of academia envisioned the same thing, until that pesky problem that it didn't work and the whole thing collapsed like a balloon.

And let's not forget the one hundred and fifty million slaughtered.

Oh yes, and then there's the "pacifism and internationalism" Anatole France and his pals insisted be taught by teachers. "The teacher must make the child love peace and his works" (p 221) he declared.

Until, of course, reality mugged the west in the form of Hitler.

The harm caused by intellectuals in the last half of the 20th century may prove to be even greater than in the first half of the century.

"One of the things intellectuals have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society together...Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia" (p 303).

Is there nothing that can be done to make these pests shut up??

So much for thinking for yourself. Intellectuals are educated thinkers with no end product except ideas and they use these ideas to twist reality to their vision. The author describes in detail how this is accomplished. A "climate of opinion" is shaped by various kinds of methods, techniques and processes including selecting and withholding of facts by intellectual in the media. You may think for yourself in this climate but the conclusions you reach, are they really your own? The intellectuals in this country are mostly liberal (left-wing or at least leaning in that direction) and they thus have the ability to distort thinking on a mass scale. And distorted thinking on a mass scale can lose a war and things like that.

Dr. Sowell has written a very interesting and informative book about intellectuals and their role and effect in society. Sowell defines an intellectual as someone who works in ideas. According to Dr. Sowell persons in such mentally demanding occupations as medicine and engineering are not intellectuals because these occupations are result driven. The fault line is that such occupations are subject to external criteria of success or failure. For example a complex medical operation either succeeds or fails regardless of how the surgeon states his ideas or how nuanced the language the surgeon uses. Intellectuals operate in a difference situation. Their ideas are only internally verified. Intellectuals are not subject to penalty or loss of credibility for the failure of their ideas. Intellectuals are most often judged by their "verbal virtuosity".

Dr. Sowell then describes the effect of the ideas of leading intellectuals in economics, law, social issues, and matters of war and peace. In most cases the ideas of the intellectuals turned out to be disasters. Yet the intellectuals suffered no consequences. In essence the intellectuals are sealed off from feedback of the negative outcomes of their ideas.

Dr. Sowell points out that the work of scientists, medical doctors, engineers and other mentally demanding occupations have added vastly to human health and well being. He questions whether the impact of intellectuals in toto is in its net effect is positive at all, or whether the intellectuals in general caused much more hurt than benefit.

I do have some quibbles with the book. For example I do not think Herbert Hoover, even if a decent man otherwise, was anything but an abject failure as President. Hoover did not go off the gold standard when such a move was a matter of necessity. However this work is still excellent. The book is one of the better treatment of the intellectual class and is very well written in the bargain. The book should be read by everyone with a interest in the modern world.

Tom is a brilliant writer. He backs up his positions and statements with a large amount of "evidence" from current times and relevant history. The book flows very well and is easy to read. It is long, but well worth the time.

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 naïve 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?

Everyone has personal biases and prejudices, including teachers, professors, theologians, and intellectuals. But their prejudices however, affect a greater number of people and therefore can be more corrosive to public discourse. Thomas Sowell is an intellectual and clear thinker. But unlike many intellectuals, Professor Sowell uses plain language that makes his ideas and thoughts accessible and interesting to readers. Anything written by Thomas Sowell is worth reading and thinking about, whether you agree with him or not.

This book is like peaking behind the curtain and discovering the man controlling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. Thomas Sowell has exposed the force driving the chaos within our society! An amazing eye-opening experience. If you are seeking the roots and reasons for upside down and out of control societies, this book is worth your time.