A Conflict of Visions

What It Is

A work of intellectual history, first published in 1987 and revised in 2007. It is the calmest book Thomas Sowell wrote and, by some distance, the best.

The argument is a single idea pursued through two centuries of political thought. Behind the surface disputes of politics, Sowell says, lie two incompatible assumptions about human nature. He names the two, traces each back through two centuries of thinkers who held them without ever saying so, and shows what each one commits you to. Everything else, he argues, follows.

It is short, around three hundred pages, and it is expository rather than polemical. Sowell is genuinely trying to state each vision at its strongest, and for most of the book he succeeds.

Why It Matters

Because it hands you an instrument, and once you have it you cannot put it down. Judicial restraint against judicial activism. Equality of process against equality of result. Crime as a choice against crime as a symptom. Deterrence against negotiation. In each case the same fault line, and once you see it, the sensation of the two sides arguing past each other stops being mysterious.

It also explains something that ordinary political commentary cannot: why opponents so often believe each other to be not merely wrong but wicked. Sowell shows exactly how each vision, followed honestly, produces that suspicion in the people who hold it. Neither is being stupid. They are working from different premises about what a human being is.

The weaknesses matter too. Two boxes cannot hold two centuries of thought, and the thinkers who will not fit are pushed into a hybrid category that does a lot of quiet work. Sowell plainly holds one of the two himself, and though the exposition is fair, his examples are not always. And a theory that explains everything explains a little less than it appears to. Use it as a lens, not a filing system.

Before You Read

Seven or eight hours. Nothing technical, but it is dense in argument and thin in anecdote, and it repays reading at half your usual speed.

The best way to read it is adversarially. Take three positions you hold firmly and see which vision they imply. Most readers discover they are not consistent, which is the most useful thing the book can do for you.

No section needs skipping. It is too short for that.

Which Edition to Read

• The revised edition (Basic Books, 2007) — recommended. The one in print and the one to buy. Sowell revisited the argument after twenty years of political change and tightened it; the examples reach into the modern debates, and the structure is cleaner than in 1987. Cheap, portable, and about as good as this kind of book gets. The cost: the revisions are light. If you own the original you are not missing a great deal, and the 2007 edition is now itself old enough that its most recent examples are dated. View on Amazon →
• The 1987 first edition (William Morrow). The original, secondhand, with the argument in its first and slightly leaner form. The cost: no updates, and the hardback is not worth hunting for unless you collect.
• The audiobook (Blackstone, narrated by Michael Edwards). Clear and well paced, and Sowell's plain sentences survive being read aloud better than most. The cost: this is a book you argue with in the margins, and you cannot do that at the gym.

Buy the 2007 paperback. If you find yourself convinced by it, read The Vision of the Anointed next, but go in knowing that it is a much angrier book and that the fair-mindedness on display here is not on display there.

Getting the Most From This Book

Keep a running list of your own positions as you read, and mark which vision each one implies. The book is an argument about you.

Then look for where it breaks. Try to place a thinker Sowell does not discuss, and watch how hard you have to push to make them fit. That resistance tells you where the theory ends.

Read at least one primary source from each side afterwards. Burke's Reflections and Rousseau on inequality will take a weekend between them and will show you how much Sowell's summary is doing.

The mistake is to use this book to score points. It was written to explain your opponents to you, not to dismiss them, and readers who leave it feeling smug have got the argument exactly backwards.