The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

• Author: Silber, Kenneth

By Thomas Sowell, New York: Basic Books, 305 pages, $25.00

What is the point of the ideological crusades of the left? To make the world better? Not primarily, according to Thomas Sowell. The main purpose is to make members of the left feel good, and to do so by placing them in a position of apparent intellectual and moral superiority to the rest of humanity Leftists, in this book's terminology, are "the anointed," and their overriding goal is to distinguish themselves from "the benighted," which includes everybody else.

The "vision" of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benighted--and thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwise--to view social conditions as largely outside of anyone's control and subject to innumerable tradeoffs and constraints--is repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.

Sowell's exploration of this world view ranges broadly across social and economic topics, uncovering hidden assumptions, statistical fallacies, and verbal sleights of hand in the arguments of the left. The Vision of the Anointed moves from the War on Poverty, the Warren Supreme Court, and other elements of 1960s liberalism to the political correctness of recent years that insists upon gender-neutral language and denounces Mercator-projection maps as culturally biased. Sowell targets a variety of people and organizations: Ralph Nader, John Kenneth Galbraith, legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, journalist Tom Wicker, former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Worldwatch Institute, and the Children's Defense Fund, among others.

The Vision of the Anointed impressively marshals facts and figures to puncture "progressive" ideas and proposals on a wide range of subjects. This is in keeping with Sowell's stated purpose to present an empirical comparison of the promised and actual consequences of policies advocated by self-anointed elites. Unfortunately, the book's argument is weakened by its relentlessly polemical tone. Sowell makes little effort to conceal the disdain he feels for his intellectual opponents, and although this makes for entertaining reading, it also demonstrates that the anointed are not alone in showering derision upon those with whom they disagree.

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and an economist by training, Sowell has earned a formidable reputation in several niches of intellectual...