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Soc (2010) 47:560564DOI 10.1007/s12115-010-9378-3
REVIEW
Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society
New York: Basic Books, 2009. 398 pp. $29.95. ISBN-10: 046501948X; ISBN-13: 978-0465019489
Will Morrisey
Published online: 8 September 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
The respected conservative economist Thomas Sowell writes too gracefully and, well, economically to offer a more precise title for this book, such as Modern Intellectuals and Modern Democratic Regimes. But thats his topic.
By intellect Sowell means the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas. Intellect forms only part of intelligence, a term encompassing judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory facts and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. A bright college sophomores intellect ought to metamorphose into intelligence by the time he starts his doctoral dissertation. He probably has a way to go before he achieves wisdomthe rarest quality of all, combining intelligence with experience and self-discipline. With wisdom he will understand the limitations of his own experience and of reason itself. If, however, our sophomore goes wrong he may come to use his capacity to manipulate ideas cynically, in which case he will turn out a sophist or, if gifted with oratorical flair, a demagogue. Quite as likely he may let his wishes be horses, in which case he will be a fairly typical specimen of the intellectual in modern democracy.
Intellectuals grasp and manipulate complex ideas. Their work begins and ends with ideas; they produce ideas instead of material goods (an economist would usually say widgets) or actions (services in econo-speak). Being intellectuals, Adam Smith never ran a business, and Karl Marx never administered a gulag. The
concrete objects intellectuals do producemanuscripts serve merely as vehicles for their primary products.
The penumbra surrounding intellectuals consists of purveyors of the ideas intellectuals produce: teachers, journalists, social activists, political aides, judges clerks. Along with intellectuals themselves, these comprise the intelligentsia. Although Sowell claims that the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by themselves, this strikes me as improbable. Human beings have wanted explanations of the world for a long time. (The Bible will serve as empirical evidence in this, and I can see social-scientific heads nodding in nearly universal agreement with my methodology.) What is more, rulers have usually wanted justifications of their rule. Intellectuals aspire...