Review: Thomas Sowell’s ‘A Conflict of Visions’

If you know someone’s position on gun control, you can probably make a fair guess about their views on everything from corporate tax rates to abortion. It’s not a perfect heuristic, but as Thomas Sowell writes in his 1987 classic, A Conflict of Visions, “it happens too often to be a coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.”

Author, economist, and political philosopher Thomas Sowell, via National Review.

This clustering of political beliefs cries out for explanation. It’s fashionable now to blame tribalism, but Sowell provides a different answer: Individuals hold different visions, “constrained” or “unconstrained,” which entail different views of human nature, different senses of causation — in short, different ideas about the way the world works. And it is the conflict between these macro visions that Sowell argues dominates history.

He employs a few central characters to trace the pattern. Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich Hayek, and — perhaps surprisingly — Oliver Wendell Holmes represent the constrained view. Rousseau, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin are their foils. The former emphasize the fallen nature of man and the limits of human reason; the latter view mankind as if not perfectible then at least much more capable of being improved, invariably by society’s elite.

Hence the reason the same individuals tend to oppose each other on issue after issue: As Sowell puts it, “they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises.”

Because the constrained vision expresses greater skepticism of man’s ability to reason his way to perfection — “much of what the unconstrained vision sees as morally imperative to do, the constrained vision sees man as incapable of doing” — better to trust the accumulated wisdom of history than the latest intellectual fad.

Following tradition, far from unthinking deference to the dead, is plain common sense — the lesson of Chesterton’s fence, applied over and over again. In economics, the analogue is the market — another evolved process which recognizes that no social planner’s wisdom can match the information encoded in the price system.

But what the constrained vision extols as the wisdom of the ages, the unconstrained vision sees as little better than the illusions of the ignorant. Markets aren’t necessarily bad, but the market is simply a process, and the end result takes precedence. Extensive redistribution or regulation, seen as the stepping stones to the road to serfdom in the constrained view, are necessary to ensure justice in the unconstrained vision. This position flows logically from the belief the best and brightest can achieve their intended results — people Burke derisively refers to as “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”

Yet perhaps the main virtue of Sowell’s book isn’t how well it explains why partisans tend to march in lockstep across so many unrelated policy battlegrounds. (The political philosopher Michael Huemer and the economist Bryan Caplan, for example, argue “rational irrationality” is the better explanation.) It’s how well he blends history, economics, philosophy, and law in a way that’s equal parts informative, insightful, and engaging — a gift for any reader, constrained and unconstrained alike.

Matt Winesett is Editorial Assistant of the AEIdeas blog. He studied history and political philosophy at the University of Virginia.