Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell (born 1930) is a writer and economist and one of the few prominent African-American Libertarians. He was born in North Carolina. Sowell graduated in 1948 from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and holds an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College, an A.M. in Economics from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, known for its Chicago school of economics. Sowell has taught at prominent American universities including Cornell University and UCLA, and since 1980 has been a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, where he holds the fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.

Besides scholarly writing, Sowell has written books, articles and syndicated columns for a general audience, in such publications as Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and major newspapers. Sowell primarily writes on economic subjects, in which he generally advocates a laissez-faire free market approach to capitalism. Sowell also writes on racial topics, and is a critic of the policies of affirmative action, which has made him a controversial figure. Sowell's most recent book is "Basic Economics, a Citizen's Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded".

Table of contents

1 A Conflict of Visions
2 Saddam Hussein
3 Links

A Conflict of Visions

Sowell's opening chapter tries to answer the question of why the same people tend to be political adversaries in issue after issue, when the issues vary enormously in subject matter, and sometimes hardly seem connected to one another at all. The root of this, he says, are the "visions", or the intuitive feelings, that people have about human nature; different visions imply radically different consequences for how they think about everything from war to justice.

The rest of the book describes two basic visions, the "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions, which are thought to capture opposite ends of a continuum of political thought on which one can place many contemporary Westerners, in addition to their intellectual ancestors of the past few centuries.

The book should be compared with George Lakoff's Moral Politics, which aims to answer a very similar question.

The book has been published both with and without the subtitle "Ideological Origins of Political Struggles".

Saddam Hussein

Sowell wrote in his syndicated column:

Since stoning people to death is a tradition in parts of the Middle East, that might be the most appropriate way to execute Saddam Hussein. If each relative of someone murdered by Saddam were allowed to throw a stone, the line might stretch back for miles. Television pictures of that line, broadcast throughout the Arab world, could completely undermine any notion that this is just an American vendetta against Muslims. [1]