Intellectuals and Society

Sowell’s subject is a class defined by its output: people whose end product is ideas rather than things. His argument is that this class faces no external verification. A surgeon is checked by his patients and an engineer by his bridges, but an intellectual is judged by other intellectuals, so influential ideas can survive indefinitely after the evidence has gone against them. The book works through the mechanisms — the filtering of facts, the substitution of verbal virtuosity for empirical test, the assumption of expertise outside one’s field — and is the analytic companion to his The Vision of the Anointed and A Conflict of Visions, which appear beside it in the same section.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s modern conservatism section, where three Sowell titles run together; this is the one about the incentive structure of the people who produce the ideas the rest of the list is made of.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Modern Conservatism. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Expertise — the claim the book interrogates.
• Academia — the peer system that supplies the feedback.
• Ideology — what survives when reality does not check it.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.