A conflict of visions
Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts which endure for generations or for centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. This book maintains that the enduring political controversies of the past two centuries reflect radically different assumptions about the nature of man. The very meaning of such words as "freedom," "equality," "rights," and "power" is drastically different in the context of different visions of man. Issues as diverse as criminal justice, income distribution, or war and peace repeatedly show those with one vision lining up on one side and those with another lining up on the other. The varied writings of such landmark figures as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Milton Friedman show the clear mark of one vision, while the opposite vision is manifested in another tradition which extends from Thomas Paine and Condorcet to George Bernard Shaw, John Kenneth Galbraith, and John Rawls. At the heart of the conflict are questions about the moral and intellectual capabilities of human beings, and how these capabilities vary from one individual or group to another. The historical record shows these assumptions to be surprisingly different from what is commonly believed about the basic premises of the political left and the political right. The purpose of this book is not to choose between the two principal visions of the modern era, but to show the inherent logic of each.
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18recommend
34mentions
23people
2010–2024years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- After being indoctrinated to hate everything about the west and Christianity for most of my life — through school, university, news media, entertainment, and the administrative state — and after coming to hate the west and Christianity as a consequence of this indoctrination, I really found the following books to be the ultimate mindfucks:
- Heretics by GK Chesterton
- Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
- Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America by Mary Grabar
- A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
- Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
- A Conflict of Visions is a good one. Thomas Sowell is a true intellectual. Sure, he has strong biases, but I believe those developed out of his intense study of the facts, rather than being implanted in him before he started thinking for himself, which is sadly the case for many so-called intellectuals nowadays.
If you could recommend only one of the others, which would it be?
- That's not to do with the voting system. It's because political disagreement is almost always ideological disagreement, which is one dimensional. See Sowell's analysis in his book "Conflict of visions" for an explanation of why.
- I'm glad we had this productive exchange (and since this is the internet, I will explicitly state that I say this without sarcasm). I think you and I both agree with your point:
> I think the question should be how to improve the social mobility chances for those below the median
but we differ on the "how", as well as having a more (me) or less (you) optimistic view on the current state of things in the country.
Perhaps it's fair to say that you see income and wealth inequality as the proximate cause of what ails us, and an expanded role of government, funded through more progressive/redistributive taxation, as the best way to afford better chances for those most poorly off; whereas I see the worsening of the social fabric seen in the steep rise in single-parent households and increasing permissiveness towards behavior previously deemed sinful (such as drug use) as the proximate cause, and that bigger government will only ultimately hinder the ability of those most poorly off to help themselves.
You may be interested in Thomas Sowell's book, A Conflict of Visions, for a truly elegant analysis of this type of dichotomy.
- I think you might find Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions interesting; he argues that it’s only about half of society that has this view you describe (expecting people in authority to be somewhat saintly, self-sacrificing, or monk-like), and the other half has a very different view.
- A more rigorous version of this can be found in the book, Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. What you're calling a lens or worldview, he calls a "vision". He precisely defines two visions that are at opposite ends of an axis and which differ only in a single assumption: an intuition about the span of human nature. He then proceeds to show how this single intuition leads by logical extrapolation when combined with unambiguous facts to lead people to opposing policy preferences.
It's really a very powerful analysis, because it's Occam's Razor compliant. The theory is simple yet has great explanatory power.
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