Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals

The sound and the fury

Thomas Sowell is one of a handful of esteemed economists who are also globally renowned public intellectuals. Sowell is a National Humanities Medal winner. On Twitter alone, he has a fan profile that regurgitates quotes from his books totaling nearly 700,000 followers.

Less impressively, Sowell’s critical book on intellectuals is so tedious that savvy entrepreneurs could recommend it as an effective, all-natural sedative. Intellectuals and Society runs well over 600 pages, though if you took out the tantric repetition of statements and insults you might have a longform essay left over.

That’s not to say there aren’t genuinely important insights buried in the book. They would resonate a whole lot more, however, if Sowell applied them with consistency.

“At the heart of the social vision prevalent among contemporary intellectuals is the belief that there are ‘problems’ created by existing institutions and that ‘solutions’ to these problems can be excogitated by intellectuals. This vision is both a vision of society and a vision of the role of intellectuals within society. In short, intellectuals have seen themselves not simply as an elite — in the passive sense in which large landowners, rentiers, or holders of various sinecures might qualify as elites — but as an anointed elite, people with a mission to lead others in one way or another towards better lives.”

— Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

The first thing to note about Sowell’s book on intellectuals is that it is only loosely about intellectuals.

This is somewhat understandable — Sowell does acknowledge that he will not be discussing the work of researchers in the hard sciences and technological fields. But it doesn’t explain why hundreds (!) of pages are taken up criticizing political…