A Conflict of Visions

For those who will read little more - Great Book! Read it. Thomas Sowell writes newspaper columns that are often characterized as "conservative" although he would probably characterize himself as a "pragmatist". This book cannot be characterized as being conservative or liberal. Dr. Sowell goes out of his way to not disclose his personal views. The book is an analysis of Western thought over the last 250 years regarding the proper roll of society, expressed principally through government, in achieving a successful society. I have read several of Dr. Sowell's books and have purchased several more to read. Here he truly achieves an objective restatement of the thoughts of prominent minds over the centuries and not his personal opinions on the same subject. He writes clearly and in a manner that is easy to read and yet he documents his work with so many footnotes that it is like reading a legal brief. The first thirty or forty pages were a slight struggle because he uses terms that were not familiar to me in their context. In particular it takes a while to understand what he means by the "constrained vision" and the "unconstrained vision". That is really what the book is about. He quotes Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stewart Mill, William Blackstone, Edmund Burke, Condorcet, Charles Darwin, Ronald Dworkin, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, William Godwin, Karl Marks, Friedrich Hayek, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Richard Posner and many other legal, economic and philosophical scholars all in an attempt to dissect their thinking. He explains how they often reach opposite conclusions from many undisputed premises. The philosophical, legal and political answer to the question of when "the end justifies the means" is a difficult one. It is easy to dogmatically answer the question but a few scenarios will quickly convince most sane people that there is really no universal answer. In describing the "constrained vision" Dr. Sowell quotes the writers who have emphasized the strict rule of law in achieving social stability. They tend to believe that the same rules should apply equally to all regardless of the outcome. Others have followed "an unconstrained vision" which he describes with their own words as being that the end result is more important than the route society takes to get there. They believe it is necessary to bend or modify rules to achieve what they view as a desirable outcome. This dichotomy in English and American common law resulted in both "Law Courts" and "Equity Courts" which administered law following the "constrained" vision in "Law" and "unconstrained" vision in "Equity" operating in parallel for hundreds of years although Dr. Sowell does not discuss this portion of our legal history. Although he uses the words of radicals like Karl Marks who clearly believed any means justified the end he sought for the world, Dr. Sowell tries to dwell more with prominent thinkers who were closer to the middle of political and economic thought and why they thought as they did. This book helped me better understand my own ambivalence about certain actions of our government, but it also convinced me that there are no universal answers to all of the problems that face society. It is unfortunate that Dr. Sowell's reputation as a conservative will probably keep many people who consider themselves liberals from reading this book. They would profit by understanding the perspective of those people with whom they are in an eternal debate. Similarly some conservatives will assume that they have little to learn from a book from someone they think they know and who could not surprise them. They might be quite surprised to find that Dr. Sowell is very non-judgmental in this book and does not side with either vision. I read this book after sending an email to Dr. Sowell to complement him on a newspaper article he had written about illegal immigration. His reply was that I had misunderstood his reasoning and that population was not the problem generating the migration of the poor from undeveloped areas. He suggested that I read portions of several of his books where he had elaborated on the issue. I have done so and still disagree with him on the population issue, but have found the writings on political philosophy of a writer whose work is woefully under appreciated. If you read "A conflict of Visions" or his book on the Economics and Politics of Race you will find it impossible to finish them without your opinions being forever altered in many respects. Jim Fuqua

In "A Conflict of Visions" Mr. Sowell sets out to explain why people tend to be on opposite sides of the fence, politically speaking, on so many non related issues. In this he succeeds brilliantly, in a work of elegant, convincing logic, and clearly laid out insights. There is no new information in this book, nor does it take sides in political differences, but it re-arranges what you already know and have seen in your life in a manner that decisively delivers new understanding of the world around you. Mr. Sowell's thesis is that most people fall into two idealized "visions" of human nature, what he calls the constrained (which also been called the Tragic and is generally linked with conservatives) and the unconstrained (which has also been called the Utopian and is generally linked with liberals) visions. These visions are basically intuitive (to the person who holds them, and usually anathema to the person that holds the opposing), and more or less "gut feelings" on the nature of humanity and human potential. In reality the visions individuals hold lie on a spectrum of level of constraint and although no one person would hold a 100% constrained or 100% unconstrained vision it is implicitly assumed that there is a double bump distribution of people along this spectrum, with about half holding mostly constrained visions, half holding mostly unconstrained visions, and not too many people holding a middle position. This is because the two visions are opposed and to hold equal belief in both would be logically contradictory. From his characterization of each vision the author clearly explains how the assumptions undergirding each lead to completely different conceptions in how each side even defines such issues as freedom, equality, justice and power, and why both sides argue past each other and have such a difficult time debating / convincing each other. The constrained visions basically sees man's nature as both fixed and as incapable of predicting the results of his actions in the complex world, and thus incapable of controlling those results. As such it relies on systemic measures to promote the general good of society, for example evolutionary developments of such things as free-markets, constitutional government with strict constructionist judicial interpretation, great intelligence inherited in social traditions, etc. The unconstrained vision on the other hand sees man's nature as changeable in response to articulated rationality, and sees man as not only capable of predicting the results of his actions but morally obligated to control the results of his actions for the greater good. Thus the unconstrained vision places emphasis on bodies of "surrogate" decision makers of the most intelligent to control economic and social policy for the greater good, activist judicial interpretation of law to provide the best outcome for the individual case at hand, social activism like recycling, and great intelligence inherited in the most intellectually and developed individuals of our society. The insights of the book are truly worthwhile and cover far more than I could here in a review. However, the book is not long and not too difficult to read, although it is written in a slightly dense intellectual manner which can take a few pages to get used to and is a bit repetitive. Nonetheless this is a book that will make you smarter, better able to understand where someone from an opposing political viewpoint is coming from as well as better able to understand your own viewpoint and its foundation in how you perceive, consciously or not, the character of human nature. The book is also extremely fair to each side, not trying to prove one or the other correct, but just trying to explain how each thinks and reaches the conclusions they do. Highly recommended!

At the beginning of his classic book, Sowell raises the question of why people tend to cluster on opposite sides of apparently unrelated issues. If we think of global warming, health insurance, military or social welfare spending, the same groups take opposite sides. How do we understand this consistent, systematic difference of outlook about politics and public policy? Sowell points out that the usual terms in which such differences are discussed - conflicting values or interests, fail to capture this more fundamental divide. Behind these patterned differences on policy and politics lies a conflict between "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions. A "vision" in Sowell's sense is a pre-analytic cognitive act, a sense of causation that precedes rational articulation. Visions set the agenda for both thought and action. For Sowell, the constrained vision recognizes the wisdom of the generations and of the many now living, as operating in a way somewhat analogous to language. Language develops best and most richly in its actual usage by the many who speak it daily. For the compilers of dictionaries, usage and not the opinions of experts determines meaning. The constrained vision recognizes the limits of any one person's wisdom, experience, and expertise as well as the intransigence of human nature in face of efforts to "improve" it. It sees knowledge as the social experience of the many, not the expertise of the intellectuals. So it is skeptical of grand schemes to improve the world, focusing on unintended consequences and trade-offs, as opposed to solutions. The constrained vision is naturally democratic, as Sowell describes it, relying on the decisions of the many over time rather than the brilliance of the elite. It sees utopian schemes as intrinsically authoritarian or totalitarian, in that they arise from the brains of individuals, who then impose their plan on the many, regardless of their own opinion. Those with the constrained vision want to make the best of the possibilities for improvement within the existing constraints and human limitations, alert to the unintended consequences, failures, and tyranny that beset most grand schemes of social engineering. They are inclined to agree with Dr. Johnson (1709-1784): How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. They do not expect or try to change human nature and they rely on systemic processes and results rather than intentions. In the unconstrained vision, which Sowell finds in especially pure form in William Godwin, the philosophical anarchist who wrote Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), intention is the essence of virtue. The unconstrained vision emphasizes the plasticity and perfectibility of man. Where those with the constrained vision see trade-offs, those with the unconstrained see solutions; where the first see results, they see purpose; where systemic processes, intentions. They discount the costs--all too evident in the last century--of attaining utopia. They discount tradition, the implicit knowledge and wisdom of the generations. "Nothing must be sustained because it is ancient, because we have been accustomed to regard it as sacred, or because it has been unusual to bring its validity into question," says Godwin. The unconstrained vision makes the sharpest distinction, the profoundest inequality between "persons of narrow views" (the masses) and the "cultivated." Wisdom without reflection is unthinkable and only the cultivated few are capable of either. As Marx argued in different terms, the unconstrained vision divides society into the active few and the passive many, the enlightened and the ignorant, those who are products of heredity and environment and those who (in their own estimation) rise above such determination. With its seemingly inherent elitism, the unconstrained vision readily ascribes a key role to intellectuals, activists, or experts, those who are ahead of the masses and must lead them, through coercion if necessary, to the point of knowledge and understanding at which they have already arrived. Sowell goes beyond identifying the clusters of beliefs and assumptions usually (but not always) associated with one or the other vision. He wants to operationalize the distinction to focus on those differences that define the two visions, the differences that systematically differentiate them. Both visions acknowledge that human life involves inherent limitations (e.g., death, need for food) but these limitations are seen as much more extensive and intractable in the constrained vision. "What distinguishes those with the constrained vision is that the inherent constraints of human beings are seen as sufficiently severe to preclude the kind of dependence on individual articulated rationality that is the heart of the unconstrained vision" (pp.106-107). Sowell recognizes that his organizing contrast of constrained and unconstrained does not account for all cases. There are hybrids and inconsistencies in the vision of individuals and movements. It is rather a continuum or spectrum. But it does have extraordinary explanatory power, in my view. It enables us to see old dichotomies in social philosophy and social policy in illuminating ways. It helps to explain why, when new issues arise, like national health insurance, global warming, or same-sex marriage, no matter how completely unrelated the topics seem, people divide on them into predicable clusters. In the second part of the book, Sowell applies his dichotomy to particular areas in which opposed visions conflict - equality, power, and justice. He offers illuminating discussions of legal justice, individual rights, and social justice, for example, showing how the two visions differ systematically. Sowell is a prolific polemicist, but this book is not one-sided or polemical in the manner of his opinion columns or even some of his books, like the provocatively titled The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy or The Quest for Cosmic Justice . I have used it in teaching doctoral students, who found it both enlightening and challenging. The challenge comes from the complexity of the argument and the range and depth of scholarship on which it draws, as well as its revealing critique of much received opinion in academia.

Excellent read

When I started reading this book, I was not familiar with the author at all. I found out about this book as a result of some interesting references to the work in another book, The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. After I started the book I began searching out information about the author whereby I was directed to his columns on political topics. Needless to say, I found his columns to be pure garbage. I often couldn't read past the first few paragraphs due to his obvious ability to lie and sham to serve his preordained opinion. Even people with much less intelligence than Mr Sowell could have shot down many of his points in these articles. Reading these articles almost made me put down the book. How could a man writing this much tripe put aside this dishonesty and idiocy on display and write something worth reading? Which brings me to the current work. This is actually an excellent book. While it suffers from repetition, and the writing style is a bit like that of a textbook, this was a good read. This man, who obviously has such a strong bias towards a "conservative" or "constrained" vision that his columns would reek of, 'lying for the cause', actually wrote an even-handed assessment of the two visions. While if I paid attention hard enough I could see a bias towards the constrained vision manifested as increased eloquence when his pet vision was discussed, this was quite small or perhaps my imagination. This book really allowed me to understand and even find common ground with people who are conservative or have a "constrained" vision. Often it appeared to me that these people were living in a completely ficticious reality, while it turns out that they just have a different vision of human nature. When conservatives say that allowing gay marriage would destroy traditional marriage, these words sound like a non-sequiter of the nature of the following, "not allowing prayer in schools will cause more mexican immigrants to sneak across the border". But this book actually helped me understand these strange comments and many more. Additionally, I found that it strengthened many of my own convictions by understanding the alternative. On some topics, I believe very strongly in the unconstrained vision as described here but in other ways my differences with those of the constrained vision is only a matter of degrees. I am still shocked that such an interesting and fair book could come out of a man like this. It would be like Rush Limbaugh giving a fair assessment of the differences between the presidencies of Clinton and G.W. Bush. The final chapter is the icing on the cake that is missing from our political discourse. He compares knowledge found in natural science to the lack of concrete knowledge found in social science and political discourse. There are answers to some of these political questions that can be deduced empirically, which are too often described as value judgements. Additionally, he describes how some people put up blinders towards changing their vision when new information comes to light. This book has left me open to many ideas and better able to understand the visions of both sides.

Excellent explanation of our current political divide.

This book should be standard reading for every college student. You have to wonder why people keep arguing over the same facts. It's objective, so it's not threatening to people of either vision to read, though in looking at it my conclusion is that the view opposite mine is a sort of mental disorder, but perhaps someone from the other view would see the opposite as true. Nearly every political position can be boiled down to either a constrained or unconstrained vision. Essentially, whether man is all knowing enough to make decisions to produce the desired results in society or whether man is limited and must rely on the mechanics of processes like the "Invisible Hand" of the free market. Things go deeper than just how to reach goals like fairness, freedom, and justice, as people with the differing views don't even assign the words the same meaning. Deep stuff, but mostly a very easy read. I'm going to be looking for other books from Sowell in the future. This is seriously my favorite book ever. I have a friend of differing ideology. As Sowell discusses, there times when visions cause someone to ignore or obfuscate fact to avoid it's risk to their psychological investment in a vision. Despite claiming to have an unusually "open mind", I failed to convince him of several issues that were not even "Republican vs Democrat" in any real sense. I make no exaggeration at all. Below was the result of our discussions. Things he won't take as evidence: -MSNBC -Fox -NPR -LA Times -SJ Mercury -Huffington Post -WA Times -WA Post -NY Times -NY Post -OC Register -S&P -Gov Numbers -Business Numbers -Congressmen -Mayors -Presidents -The Dictionary His examples of argument weakness: 1. "Hiding" behind facts. 2. Insisting on dictionary definitions. 3. Having "tidy" answers to any questions of belief. His "evidence" was literally limited to cliches and statements with no evidence provided. Now, you can't cure stupid, but perhaps if he'd been exposed to a book like this to realize that his "enemies" are not in fact bad people, but simply see the world differently he'd not be so petrified of "losing" and acknowledging another vision might be correct. Or more likely, as the book mentions, neither side will have the incontrovertible evidence it takes to win the day and we'll forever be repeating the same arguments, though hopefully with greater intellectual honesty than my friend did.

This is a superb book, but one that sets limits for itself. Its purpose is to delineate the visions which undergird the political impulses of the major political parties. It argues that the disparate visions are traceable to disparate beliefs regarding human nature. The 'constrained' vision can be traced to thinkers such as Hobbes, Burke and Adam Smith, the 'unconstrained' vision to thinkers such as Godwin, Condorcet and Rousseau. The consistency of the respective visions and the degree to which they cover a multiplicity of current issues is striking. It is almost as if some are born with one vision, others with another. Sowell acknowledges that some individuals have changed their visions, but often under 'road to Damascus' circumstances. Some have been persuaded by empirical evidence, though it is a truism (one reinforced here) that the respective visions are often resistant to evidence. The book is scrupulously objective in its goals. The book is analytic and descriptive, not polemical. Sowell goes out of his way to avoid choosing sides or offering compelling evidence for the inconsistency or absurdity of either of the visions. He is not recruiting readers to one side or the other. He is constructing two complex mirrors in which his readers can attempt to see themselves and the degree to which their individual views are part of a large, centuries-old pattern. My own sense is that he's got this right and he's used the best examples, though I might have added a touch more Rousseau to the mix. The objective analysis, however, comes with a price. In resisting the impulse to take sides and adduce evidence justifying the taking of sides he has written a book which is more theoretical/historical than historical/theoretical. In short, the want of copious examples is often felt. Also, the fact that Sowell is such an effective polemicist (when he is writing in that mode) makes one regret that he is here purposely confining and restraining himself. Nevertheless, the book is excellent and does exactly what it sets out to do--fairly, clearly and persuasively. For those with an interest in human nature (or its alleged nonexistence), one can also highly recommend Pinker's The Blank Slate, a nice companion volume to Sowell's and one that is less constrained in its arguments.

I found this book to be really helpfull to understand my own vision better. This is important because it permits me to attack it and test it to see if it relates to reality. It also enables me to take debates or thinking to another level as I can go to the heart of things instead of talking about supperficial issues. Great book, very well detailed and esay to read.

Helmut Schmidt sagte mal: "Wer Visionen hat, der soll zum Arzt gehen." Trotzdem haben wir alle Visionen und werden uns in den Aussagen wiederfinden können (nicht immer eine angenehme Erfahrung). Großartig wie immer, aber Vorsicht: Nur in englischer Sprache verfügbar.

Amazing argumentation, very well written. This book was very revealling for me and will open your eyes to a new world inside the philosofical universe.

Thomas Sowell discusses a topic that gets to the heart of political, social, psychological and other world view splits that are evident in the modern Western world. He defines a vision as a ‘pre-analytic cognitive act’ – a felt sense of something before applying reason or logic. A Vision is not the same as a wish or a dream. Instead, it incorporates the assumptions we often unconsciously hold when we think. Visions underpin our understanding of the world and Sowell compares the ‘constrained’ vision of the American revolution, with the ‘unconstrained’ vision of the French revolution. The difference centres on how one views human nature. The constrained vision sees man as essentially flawed, a mixture of good and bad. Therefore, society needs institutions that keep individuals from committing harm and institutions that are kept in check by a separation of powers. These checks and balances are essential if society values freedom. Hence, the conservatives favour ideas such as setting limits, freedom of speech, boundaries, law and order and constitution. In the ‘unconstrained vision, man is seen as an essentially malleable creature, with harm and pathology being largely social constructs. Institutions should exist to liberate the human spirit and help him aspire to his unflawed state. Socialist liberals see no need for institutions that curb one’s freedoms, only enhance them and promote equality. There is no need for separation of powers or check and balances, only leaders that are ‘philosopher kings’ or elites. The French revolution ended with the guillotine and Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet it keeps being reborn in socialist politics and the exuberance of youth. The American revolution gave rise to the American constitution, the conservation of independence and freedom, and the success of capitalism. Thomas Sowell is to be congratulated for his clarity of thought as well as his considered compassion. In ‘A conflict of visions’ he shows just how different the world views are, and how they lead to incompatible policies. As idealism clashes with realism, we have the conflict between Plato’s vision and that of Aristotle.

As usual, Thomas Sowell never fails to deliver. This book is even more relevant now in these highly polarized times. His insight allows us to be more empathetic to those who view the world differently.