The Conversion of Thomas Sowell: IT WASN'T UNTIL HIS THIRTIES THAT THE ECONOMIST STARTED TO TURN FROM MARXISM.

• Author: Riley, Jason L.

WHEN THOMAS SOWELL arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1959 to begin his Ph.D. studies, Milton Friedman had been on the faculty for more than a decade. But Sowell hadn't gone there to study under Friedman, and the University of Chicago hadn't been his first choice. The original plan was to pursue his doctorate at Columbia University, where he had just earned his master's degree, and study under another future Nobel economist, George Stigler.

As an undergraduate at Harvard in a course on the history of economic thought, Sowell had read an academic article by Stigler on the theories of the classical economist David Ricardo. Sowell was so taken by the subject matter, and so impressed by Stigler's command of it, that he turned his own focus toward the history of ideas and resolved to do his graduate work at Columbia under Stigler's guidance. After Stigler left Columbia in 1958 to join the faculty of the University of Chicago, Sowell followed him there.

Sowell hadn't been a big fan of the intellectual atmosphere at Columbia or at Harvard, his undergraduate school, and he was looking forward to a change of scenery. At Harvard, "smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic," he recalled. There was a tendency "to assume that certain things were so because we bright, good fellows all agreed that it was so." Sowell had little patience for such elitism. His classmates seemed to think they "could rise above reasons, and that to me," Sowell said, "was the difference between pride and arrogance, and between the rational and irrational." Nor did he ever quite adjust to the social atmosphere in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I resented attempts by some thoughtless Harvardians to assimilate me, based on the assumption that the supreme honor they could bestow was to allow me to become like them," he said. "I readily accepted all aspects of what Harvard had to offer that seemed worthwhile, and readily rejected all that struck me as nonsense. The fact that I was avidly reading W.E.B. Du Bois did not keep me from Shakespeare or Beethoven. Indeed, I noticed that Du Bois liked Shakespeare and Beethoven--and had attended Harvard."

IT WOULD BE difficult to exaggerate the severity of the learning curve Sowell had faced when he entered college. It's not just that he hadn't been a full-time student in almost a decade. He also was unfamiliar with the basics of the academy to a degree that was startling but perhaps not unusual for someone who was the first in his family to reach seventh grade.

Before transferring to Harvard, he had attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C. "As an example of my academic naivete at this point, when I heard professors referred to as 'doctor' I thought they were physicians and marveled at their versatility in mastering both medicine and history or medicine and math," he later wrote. "It came as a revelation to...