Intellectuals and Society.

• Author: Gordon, David
• Position: Book review

* Intellectuals and Society

By Thomas Sowell

New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Pp. ix, 398. $29.95 cloth.

Thomas Sowell has written an insightful book, but Intellectuals and Society is riven by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, intellectuals wrongly view the free market as a zero-sum game. "Among the consequences of the economic illiteracy of most intellectuals is the zero-sum vision of the economy ... in which the gains of one individual or one group represent a corresponding loss to another individual or another group.... [T]he widespread notion, coalescing into a doctrine, that one must 'take sides' in making public policy or even in rendering judicial decisions, ignores the fact that economic transactions would not continue to take place unless both sides find these transactions preferable to not making such transactions" (pp. 56-57).

Intellectuals fail to grasp a point that Ludwig von Mises made again and again: the market is the principal means by which people benefit from social cooperation. But who are these intellectuals who are so lacking in insight? Sowell draws a sharp distinction between people who produce goods and services and those who deal only with ideas: "At the core of the notion of an intellectual is the dealer in ideas, as such--not the personal application of ideas, as engineers apply complex scientific principles to create physical structures or mechanisms.... [A]n intellectual's work begins and ends with ideas, however influential those ideas may be on concrete things--in the hands of others. Adam Smith never ran a business and Karl Marx never administered a Gulag" (p. 3, emphasis in original).

Because intellectuals work with ideas, they often overestimate the importance of conscious planning. They believe that just as they are able to devise solutions to their intellectual conundrums, so should society be guided by rational design. This view leads them to underestimate the potential of the free market, which relies on the dispersed intelligence of millions of people, coordinated through prices. Sowell, with characteristic skill at apt quotation, cites a number of remarks that show this attitude toward planning: "John Dewey, for example, spelled it out: 'Having the knowledge we may set hopefully at work upon a course of social invention and experimental engineering.' But the ignored question is: Who--if anybody--has that kind of knowledge?" (p. 18).

Intellectuals, then, underestimate the free market because its...