Book Review – "Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell

I finally read Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society.  This is the second Sowell book I’ve read and reviewed, along with reading his syndicated columns.  I’m reviewing the original version here, not the recently expanded version.

The central themes of the book are two-fold.  First is how the intellectuals and intelligentsia have shifted their tactics.  Instead of trying to directly influence the leaders directly, which has historically been the way to go until the rise of mass media, they aim to influence the people themselves, who put pressure on the leaders because of the election process.  Sowell also demonstrates repeatedly that, not only do intellectuals and the intelligentsia often get it wrong, but the costs of them doing so enormous and much larger than one might think.

Sowell starts in Chapter 1 by defining what he means by ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘intelligentsia’.  Intellectuals as a profession, which is his focus here, deal in the generation and cultivation of ideas (the ideas need not be original) while the intelligentsia helps to spread and refine them.  In other words, intellectuals are a subset of the intelligentsia.  Intellectuals can be found in think tanks, academia, education, and the media, among other places.  Their work starts and ends with ideas, while validation comes from peers.  This is in direct contrast to people like engineers, doctors, and scientists whose work is intellectually demanding, but produces tangible products/services that are validated by real-world results   The irony that Sowell himself is an intellectual writing about intellectuals and the intelligentsia is not lost on me.

Chapter 2 is built around one key point, namely the importance of grasping the limitations of an individual’s knowledge base.  It explores notions versus knowledge and the value and perception of knowledge, as well as incentive structures, using experts to help make a decision versus helping to justify a decision already made, reasons as often a poor substitute for knowledge, and isolated incidents versus the bigger picture.  We also face the question of whether individuals or central planners are better suited to make decisions.

In Chapter 3, Sowell explores income, economic systems, businesses, and the economic cycle.  Some key themes that emerge in this chapter highlight the importance of looking at people as individuals, not as merely statistics or aggregates or groups and the intelligentsia’s tendency to transform an opposing argument rather than address it with logic and/or evidence.  He also spends some time discussing the Great Depression and how government intervention in the economy via central planning was a failure.

I suspect Sowell’s focus in the next chapter is what he spent a whole other book on, namely A Conflict of Visions.  Here, he details two core ways of looking at the world.  The vision of the anointed, as he calls it, is that the world is full of problems that intellectual elites alone are qualified to solve.  The tragic vision, on the other hand, sees civilization as something that needs strong and constant effort to preserve based on experience rather than theory.  Also in this chapter is discussion of more tactics intellectuals use, namely arguments without arguments, simplification of an answer by expansion of a question, and dismissal of an opponent’s worth.  He also rejects the left-right dichotomy in US politics and discusses change versus the current state, rhetoric and preferences, age, and notions versus principles.  The conclusion of this chapter, with its focus on real human beings in the real world versus abstract people in an abstract world, is also some excellent commentary.

Now, Sowell really gets into the intelligentsia’s tactics.  He talks about how they filter reality via selective sampling, suppression of information, making up characters, and shifting words (swamps become wetlands, for instance).  Objectivity versus impartiality pops up again.  He also mentions subjective versus absolute truth and multiculturalism.

Sowell then takes us into legal matters, focusing on property rights, judicial activism versus restraint, and gun control.  The latter is particularly important, as the issues of whether weapons or people kill people and whether being armed encourages or discourages violence will come up in the next two chapters. 

Next up are two chapters on war.  The first of these focuses on the two Great Wars, how the intelligentsia got it wrong both times, and how their error the first time directly contributed to their error the second time.  This is an extremely insightful chapter.  Anybody who wants to learn about what was really going in these decades should read it because there’s truth here that has been largely whitewashed out of history.

The second war chapter looks at the Cold War, Vietnam War, and the two Iraq wars.  This chapter disappointed me in two ways.  First, I would have liked to have seen some discussion about the Korean War.  I think the Korean War needed to be presented here, even if only because it provided some additional rhetorical fuel for the intelligentsia to use during the Vietnam War.  Second, Sowell pretty much glossed over the reasons behind the US entering the second Iraq war and instead focused almost entirely on the surge and whether it worked.  Don’t get me wrong, the section on the surge was very well done and I agree with his argument that the surge clearly worked despite the intelligentsia’s portrayals to the contrary.  I just feel like he missed an opportunity here because the intelligentsia was a very significant driver in getting the US back into Iraq in the first place.

And we come to the conclusion, where Sowell ties everything up quite nicely and drives home the point that intellectuals and the intelligentsia have done great harm to the modern world.

Here’s the bottom line.  I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in 20^th and 21^st century US and European history, members of the intelligentsia and intellectuals, those who fall outside those spheres, and anybody interested in concrete examples of and effective counters to the logical trickery so often employed by intellectuals and the intelligentsia.