Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A Conflict of Visions Thomas Sowell

Anybody else read it?

I brought it on vacation and found it extraordinarily clarifying.

Discuss...

Anyone read this book?

He does an outstanding job of getting to the foundational issue between those with what he calls the Constrained & Unconstrained Visions, pointing to differences in anthropology.

That is, those with the constrained vision see men as flawed and therefore recognize that governance involves limited trade offs but never complete solutions. Those with the Unconstrained vision, however, see man as significantly improveable (yes, some would call him perfectable) and therefore attempt to find definitive solutions to problems that face society, giving enormous power to a select few as a worthwhile investment.

He gives a great deal of historical examples including the American vs French revolutions among many others.

Great stuff; highly recommended. Had hoped more here had already read it as I found it a very clarifying way to look at contemporary political divisions that gets under the common rhetoric.

Yeah, he’s a bright guy. He also is a former left-winger.

Hobbes vs. Locke viewpoints of mankind.

He's black, so according to a bunch of guys here he must necessarily be nothing but a neegger and have nothing worthwhile to say.

Thomas Sowell: “if a government is given enough power to create social justice it has enough power to create despotism.”

Me: “and it will.”

I referenced TS in my July 14 blog on the American Thinker.

Yep I found his grasp of the historical traditions and the anthropological underpinnings of the positions powerful.

I’ve always wondered how the Calvinists of the NE became so Liberal; seems like an oxymoron.



Exactly right brother.

Have it in my library. I remember very much enjoying reading it back in the 1980s.