Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions
Scheuer, Jeffrey
A CONFLICT OF VISIONS: IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF POLITICAL STRUGGLES, by Thomas Sowell. New York: William Morrow, 1987. 273 pp. $15.95. It may be a truism to say that a clash between two broad and...
...Although each claims to comport better with the "facts" of social life, neither vision (nor any variant of them) is in any objective sense superior...
...The ancient dilemma is how to realize that more extravagant and humane vision through the cumbersome agency of the state without incurring the costs that might validate the simpler and more frugal vision of the constrained right...
...Yet these polar world views are seldom explored systematically...
...And in the course of Sowell's analysis, the logic and validity of this dichotomy become strikingly clear...
...At its best, the hostility of the constrained view toward government is double-edged...
...suffice it to say that the search for new forms of democratic participation has been a longstanding concern of the American left and not a preoccupation of conservative thinkers...
...These are propositions that conservatism cannot accept...
...It will not prompt a great deal of rethinking of ideological commitments or conceptual categories...
...progressives, on the other hand, offer a broader, more holistic picture of social reality—including the fundamental recognition that rules and results (like the economic categories of "stock" and "flow") are distinct but interdependent ways of ordering human conduct...
...but only a necessary condition of unconstrained, which insists on economic equality as well...
...Yet at the same time, one of the book's refreshing features, despite its discernible rightward tilt, is its balance and lack of polemic...
...Whereas adherents of the constrained vision seek order and accept compromise, unconstrained thinkers seek ideal solutions and final justice...
...few thinkers, in this polemical and analytic age, are concerned with charting the metaphysical divide between these great watersheds of the mind or with locating the headwaters of their moral and political currents...
...Constrained justice stresses adherence to rules...
...The sort of social determinism that Marxism epitomizes is in fact a central issue of this book...
...This claim deserves, if only for its novelty and improbability, far more treatment than he accords it...
...unconstrained justice stresses results...
...Where the constrained vision trusts in the uncoordinated acts of multitudes (at least within the economic sphere), the unconstrained, according to Sowell, trusts in the rational agency of the few...
...However, even if it is possible to divorce Marx's historical materialism from his normative vision—which seems unlikely—it is the normative dimension that is most relevant to Sowell's visionmapping, and in that dimension Marxism remains the very zenith of unconstrained thought...
...Sowell is not primarily concerned here with partisan political argument...
...What Sowell calls "the constrained vision" is epitomized by Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, and latter-day conservatives such as Friedrich A. Hayek...
...Thus, with the notable exception of Hegel, there is no conservative equivalent—either in profundity or obscurity—of Marx, or even of Kant...
...But such divergent ways of perceiving social causality are not strictly empirical, as he claims...
...What is remarkable is not the novelty of the thesis but its explanatory power in demarcating familiar terrain, even for those who disagree with Sowell's conservative views...
...It values settled experience and the known grooves of tradition, seen as the unconscious accumulation of practical wisdom about human nature and the uses and limits of government...
...Because these differences are systematic, and not simply accidental or emotive, the political spectrum resolves, on a theoretical level, into Sowell's dichotomy...
...between a view of freedom or equality that is narrowly centered on the state, and one that accommodates a broader range of social forces—these are important aspects of a deeper theoretical chasm, between simpler and more complex normative visions...
...The fault line between the two visions, while clearly visible at the bedrock level of causality, penetrates even further into the geology of the mind...
...what is most lacking in the book is not some crucial insight (although, as I have suggested, I believe an important theoretical step was overlooked), but a systematic defense of the constrained vision that Sowell clearly prefers or a sustained attack on the higher, more difficult ground of the unconstrained position...
...Processes determine results, and vice versa...
...In the end they are essentially contestable...
...In fact, if you happen to be a worker, consumer, dependent, poor person, or small-business person, the market is no democracy, and the welfare state is not the nemesis of your basic economic freedoms but their inadequate guarantor—a shield against the accidents of birth, the ravages of fortune, and the predations of larger economic enterprises...
...The constrained view is more existential, whereas the unconstrained view assigns significance to a wide range of causal forces and agencies in society...
...Here, Sowell holds the solution to the 'riddle of ideology in his hands...
...At a deeper level, it centers on different thresholds of complexity within social thought itself: thresholds of tolerance, one might say, for the various overlapping intellectual distinctions and connections that are available to us as tools of understanding and judgment...
...It may be a truism to say that a clash between two broad and diametrically opposed visions of society underlies virtually all democratic political debate...
...Sowell alludes to this in passing: 380 • DISSENT The complexity of social processes is a recurrent theme in both visions, but in very different senses...
...Conflicts between processoriented and result-oriented justice...
...nothing reinforces assumptions like examining them...
...On its clearest axis, the dichotomy is between a purely formal and procedural conception of justice on the constrained right, keyed to rules and processes, and a rival conception on the left (indeed, definitive of the left) in which justice also involves SUMMER • 1988 • 379 the distribution of society's material and statusrelated goods...
...Political equality (representation, civil liberties, due process) is a sufficient condition of constrained justice...
...It accepts trade-offs rather than dreaming of golden mountains, regards justice as instrumental to a stable social order...
...But that admission is hardly fatal...
...A second objection is to Sowell's view that Marxism—in the unseemly company of utilitarianism and fascism—is a hybrid of the two visions...
...On the latter view, mankind is more plastic and perfectible, and so is the state...
...Sowell correctly emphasizes, and it is his most important theme, that the two visions differ most basically as conceptions of "social causality...
...One of the chief discongruities between the two visions, in his view, is in regard to the "locus of discretion" of political and economic power...
...To those with the constrained vision, it is axiomatic that no individual or council can master this complexity, so that systemic processes—market economies, social traditions, constitutional law—are relied on instead...
...Each appeals, at least in these pages, to our best and most basic intellectual instincts: the impulse to isolate and simplify, in the one case, and the impulse to connect and complicate, in the other...
...much of the argument is no more (but no less) than a careful exploration of rather obvious fissures within the political spectrum...
...Only in terms of the most basic moral and humanitarian values and (in most cases) a commitment to democratic government are they at all concordant...
...A prima facie case can be made for either as an understanding of social causality, and of the subtle logical and metaphysical questions of form and matter, means and ends, that underpin moral and political debate...
...The state can be much more than a night watchman, yet much less than a Big Brother...
...there is no objective sense, no higher seat of judgment...
...without some such approach we could hardly think at all...
...The two visions indeed differ profoundly about social causality, the scope of individual responsibility, and the consequent level of moral traffic in reciprocal rights and duties that justice requires...
...They are quintessentially normative, if perhaps not the ultimate source of all norms and values...
...But to those with the unconstrained vision, individuals and councils can and must wrestle with social complexity...
...To liberals and radicals—who inhabit, by degrees, the larger and more starry moral universe that defines the unconstrained view—the particular challenge of A Conflict of Visions is its ability to impart a measure of intellectual plausibility to both visions...
...Sowell and his compatriots on the right confuse the market with democracy, and talk as if every man, woman, and child in America, if only left alone by government, would be a thriving entrepreneur...
...The unconstrained left proposes a more ambitious moral agenda, with deeper and more intricate theoretical foundations...
...On the conceptual keystones of freedom, equality, rights, and justice—as in their views of human nature and history, economics and law, war and peace, crime and punishment—they offer fundamentally different modes of perception...
...A Conflict of Visions is a survey, not a venture into new theoretical areas...
...The objections noted here are hardly fatal...
...Conservatives (with some rare exceptions, such as Burke and Hegel) get the prize for neatness and atomistic simplicity...
...The more liberal vision, which he labels "unconstrained," is exemplified by thinkers from Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and William Godwin in the eighteenth century to Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls in the twentieth...
...he is aware that collapsing the ideological spectrum into two polar visions invites certain qualifications, the most obvious being that "a continuum has been dichotomized...
...Like any good theorist, Sowell is not afraid of generality...
...both are held to higher and more complicated standards...
...This is an old canard...
...Least of all does experience (in any immediate or empirical sense) confirm or disconfirm the world views to which we adhere...
...Most exhortations to "examine our assumptions" are mere cant...
...Though sound in its essentials, Sowell's analysis invites several objections...
...But by construing freedom in narrowly formal and negative terms, and principally in relation to the state, constrained theorists obscure the fact that there are various overlapping and interacting kinds of freedom, definable in terms of various loci of impediment: not just governmental but also natural, psychological, interpersonal, and corporate...
...The constrained vision is more pessimistic and (by its own lights) more realistic...
...thus, simply taking him to task for his incipient conservatism misses the point...
...The differences between them are normative, not conceptual or empirical...
...However, in claiming that what distinguishes the two visions is "their different empirical assumptions as to human nature and social cause and effect," and not normative assumptions or premises, Sowell weds that cardinal truth to an error...
...A vision is, to a very considerable extent, "a sense of causation...
...between an existential world view and one that incorporates layers of social causality...
...The brief argument is that Marxism is constrained as a theory of history but unconstrained as a normative vision...
...But in laying bare some of the substructure of competing moral-political visions, Thomas Sowell has performed a useful service...
...opportunity and welfare are intertwined...
...The end of ideology will not arrive until these contrary drives, the most elemental functions of the rational mind, are magically reconciled or brutally suppressed...
...The implication is that the right is more democratic and obedient to mass choice, while the unconstrained left, putting ends before means, is given to quick fixes and autocratic fiat...
...In A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, draws an extensive map...
...The unconstrained vision, he claims, prizes the "articulated rationality" of individual surrogates, whereas the constrained vision prefers that social decisions follow from "whatever systematic interaction produces from the innumerable individuals exercising their own individual discretion in their own individual interests...
...The tenets of classical liberalism may serve as a useful brake on unconstrained thinking and as an intellectual bulwark against statist bureaucracy or oppression (although, in the Reagan-Meese Era, such tendencies are more often found on the other side of the divide...
...The two visions differ at every level and on every point, differ systematically, perhaps even necessarily...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
