by Thomas Sowell (Author)



Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this broadside against the received wisdom of America's elite liberal
intelligentsia, noted conservative Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, offers some strenuous arguments as well as fuzzy
generalizations. Thus, his attacks on the war on poverty, sex education
and criminal justice policies forged in the 1960s counter some slippery
rhetoric by their defenders, yet his suggestion that these policies
exacerbated things is questionable. Sowell deconstructs how statistics can
be distorted to prove assumptions (that lack of prenatal care is the cause
of black infant mortality) and gleefully skewers "Teflon prophets" such as
John Kenneth Galbraith (who said that big companies are immune from the
market) and Paul Ehrlich (who said starvation loomed). While "the
anointed" favor explanations that exempt individuals from personal
responsibility and seek painless solutions, those with the "tragic vision"
see policies as trade-offs. Sowell scores his targets for disdaining their
opponents, but this book also invokes caricature-these days, many of "the
anointed" are less unreconstructed than he assumes. Conservative Book Club
and Laissez-Faire Book Club selections.

From Booklist
Ever the contrarian, this time Sowell targets the rhetorical methods
liberals use to support their views of social issues. Usually, they frame
a crisis to which the well-educated, articulate liberal, ruthlessly
disparaged by Sowell as the "anointed," offers a categorical solution. To
reach the solution, the liberal resorts to argumentative means that Sowell
regards as fallacious. Examples he cites are the "Aha!" statistic in which
condition A (say, infant mortality) is claimed to have cause B (inadequate
budgets for prenatal care); or the assertion of a policy preference as a
right, which is how a federal judge ordered a public library to allow an
odoriferous, boisterous vagrant to roam the stacks--so that he could
exercise his "right to receive ideas." These means defend a worldview of
perfectible man that Sowell contrasts with the "tragic" view, stemming
from human fallibility. Sowell's targets will find his criticisms irksome,
if even worthy of their notice, but avid conservatives, for whom Sowell is
a true-blue intellectual force, will certainly seize upon his analysis for
succor.

Product Details

Paperback: 305 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (June 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 046508995X