The Future Field of Sowell Scholarship.

• Author: Carden, Art

Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell By Jason L. Riley

304 pp.; Basic Books, 2021

Someday, I'll be able to read just a few pages of a Thomas Sowell book and then put it down and get back to work. That usually doesn't happen now. Nor did it happen with the new book about Sowell, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley. Were it not for the ordinary business of life, I probably would have read it in a single sitting like I did Sowell's 2000 memoir, A Personal Odyssey.

People don't yet study Sowell the way they study John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, or Milton Friedman--yet. That day is coming, and Maverick will occupy a prominent place in scholars' efforts to grapple with one of the most profound, careful, and controversial thinkers of the last century and a half.

Lest the reader doubt Sowell's stature, Riley explains how Friedrich Hayek (Nobel economics prizewinner in 1974) and James M. Buchanan (1986) reacted to what is widely agreed to be Sowell's best purely scholarly contribution, Knowledge and Decisions., first published in 1980. Hayek found it revelatory and original even though it was largely an expansion of Hayek's core insights in his classic 1945 American Economic Review article "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Buchanan wrote of the book that "it invites comparisons with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations," and he wrote to Sowell specifically, "You have written a great book, and I do not recall ever having said that to anyone." It's high praise from a scholar who exhorted people to write for the ages.

Race and discrimination / Like too many great minds, Sowell is underappreciated in his own time. He has incurred the wrath and vituperation of those on the academic and activist left who have denounced him as a sellout, a race traitor, an "Uncle Tom," and worse. Though they have insulted him, they have not refuted him. To the extent that they claim they have, they have only refuted strawman claims that he never made.

Throughout his work on race and discrimination, Sowell never claims that discrimination is a thing of the past, that it wouldn't be good if people were less prejudiced, or that free markets completely eliminate discrimination. He is not interested in whether or not some discrimination exists or whether or not discrimination has some explanatory power for various social and economic problems. He is interested in whether or not discrimination is the main reason for disparities...