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# Intellectuals and Society

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The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Review: ‘Some ideas are so foolish only an intellectual could believe, no ordinary man so foolish’ - “Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all—the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” “Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous. George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.’’ Sowell clearly belongs this class of ‘intellectuals’. However, he shines a light in a dark corner of the ‘intellectual’ mind . . . “The great problem—and the great social danger—with purely internal criteria is that they can easily become sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality and remain circular in their methods of validation. What new idea will seem plausible depends on what one already believes. When the only external validation for the individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a particular new idea depends on what that group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world.’’ ‘Sealed off from feedback’. Fellow ‘believers’ are not the real world. “The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd. The difference between special knowledge and mundane knowledge is not simply incidental or semantic. Its social implications are very consequential. For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.’’ ‘Easier to concentrate power than knowledge’. So true! “John Stuart Mill, who epitomized the intellectual in many ways, expressed this view explicitly, when he said that the “present wretched education” and “wretched social arrangements” were “the only real hindrance” to attaining general happiness among human beings. Moreover, Mill saw the intelligentsia—“ the most cultivated intellects in the country,” the “thinking minds,” “the best and wisest”—as guides to a better world in their role of “those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling.” The scientific/industrial revolution conquered nature. Why not overcome human life the same way. Well . . . “This has been the role of the intelligentsia, as seen by the intelligentsia, both before and after Mill’s time—that of intellectual leaders whose broader knowledge and deeper insights can liberate people from the needless restrictions of society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous declaration— “ Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” —summarizes the heart of the vision of the anointed, that social contrivances are the root cause of human unhappiness. This vision seeks to explain the fact that the world we see around us differs so greatly from the world that we would like to see. In this vision, oppression, poverty, injustice and war are all products of existing institutions—problems whose solutions require changing those institutions, which in turn requires changing the ideas behind those institutions. In short, the ills of society have been seen as ultimately an intellectual and moral problem, for which intellectuals are especially equipped to provide answers, by virtue of their greater knowledge and insight, as well as their not having vested economic interests to bias them in favor of the existing order and still the voice of conscience.’’ This is a great summary of the ‘vision of the anointed’! What is the correct word — hubris, arrogance, pride? Maybe — supercilious! PART I -INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 -Intellect and Intellectuals INTELLIGENCE VERSUS INTELLECT IDEAS AND ACCOUNTABILITY COMPETING CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE THE ROLE OF REASON PART II -INTELLECTUALS AND ECONOMICS Chapter 4 -Economic Systems CHAOS VERSUS COMPETITION ZERO-SUM ECONOMICS PART III -INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIAL VISIONS Chapter 6 -A Conflict of Visions Chapter 8 -Arguments Without Arguments “SIMPLISTIC” ARGUMENTS “SOCIAL JUSTICE” Chapter 9 -Patterns of the Anointed “CHANGE” VERSUS THE STATUS QUO ATTITUDES VERSUS PRINCIPLES A SEALED BUBBLE CRUSADES OF THE ANOINTED PART IV -OPTIONAL REALITY Chapter 10 -Filtering Reality OBJECTIVITY VERSUS IMPARTIALITY Chapter 11 -Subjective Truth PART V -INTELLECTUALS AND THE LAW Chapter 12 -Changing the Law PART VI -INTELLECTUALS AND WAR PART VIII -AN OVERVIEW Chapter 20 -Patterns and Visions Chapter 21 -Incentives and Constraints THE SUPPLY OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS THE DEMAND FOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS Chapter 22 -The Influence of Intellectuals Sowell leads reader up a smooth, safe path. However, he clearly marks the dangerous sections. Solid reasoning, abundance of facts and enlightening explanations. Fit for both general and academic reader. Provides outstanding insight to the causes, puzzles of modernity. Even more, does not offer any real alternative.
Review: Intellectuals and Society is an All-time Top 10 - I think one of these days I am going to publish a list of the top 10 books that every single thinking person has to read. For a conservative like myself, there are books that have played a formative role in developing, defining, and defending an ideology. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Kirk's The Roots of American Order come to mind - classic works that no serious conservative reader would dare miss. The list has grown by one this year thanks to Thomas Sowell, and I do not make such a claim easily. While his much earlier masterpiece, Conflict of Visions (1987), could arguably be on the list as well, I believe that his newest book, Intellectuals and Society, is not just Sowell at his finest but is perhaps the very essence of conservative thinking at its finest. The book is remarkably readable, extremely practical, and most of all, is such a lethal combination of head shots and body blows to the parasite of modern intellectualism that one finishes the book feeling splattered by the damage Sowell has done. At its core, the book seeks to explore the phenomena of public intellectuals who Sowell carefully defines as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas". There are extremely intelligent people in our society who we do not deem to be "intellectuals" - specialists who possess a particular expertise in a particular field. Sowell provides the important distinction that engineers and scientists and financiers, for example, while not considered to be "public intellectuals", are judged by external standards - by empirical notions of verifiability. Intellectuals, on the other hand, face no such external test. Rather, it is the mere acceptance their own peers provide them that defines their success. They are judged exclusively by internal criteria, devoid of methods of validation. Yet their ideas have consequences, and as Sowell demonstrates in every page of this 317-page delight, the ideas of the intelligentsia over the last century have largely been an unmitigated disaster. Often lethal and frequently incoherent, intellectuals have survived in the last 100 years despite the fruits of their labors. Sowell laments this development, questions its causes, and demonstrates its truth in crystal clear fashion. Intellectuals lack accountability for their disastrous ideas, aided and abetted by non-intellectual accomplices within the intelligentsia that share their unconstrained vision for humanity. Sowell does not target the flaws of public intellectuals that may or may not exist within their particular field of specialization. The book calls these public intellectuals to the carpet for their espousing of ideas and policies to a wider audience than their field of study called for, carrying the same "air of authority" in the wider field that was outside of their field of expertise as they do within the more narrow field to which they claim some degree of knowledge. Sowell points out that "most non-intellectuals achieve public recognition or acclaim by their achievements within their respective areas of specialization, while many intellectuals could achieve comparable public recognition only by going outside their own expertise or competence." Public intellectuals feed off of a demand that is almost entirely self-manufactured. As Sowell has laid out in his aforementioned work, Conflict of Visions, the unconstrained vision of the left is one of an arrogant, elite, anointed - a vision that makes claim to the moral responsibility and intellectual ability to cure the world of its ills. The testing of this unconstrained vision through conventional and empirical validation methods has been devastating in its conclusiveness that the unconstrained vision has been a disaster. The challenge, though, is the lack of accountability that exists for these public intellectuals. Sowell makes clear that their vision is not only one for the world "as it exists and a vision of what it ought to be like, but it is also a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world." For Sowell, "the role that they aspire to play in society at large can only be achieved by them to the extent that the rest of society accepts what they say uncritically and fails to examine their track record." The real target of Sowell's book are those members of the "intelligentsia" who either make up these public intellectual frauds, or worse, serve as their willing accomplices. Judges in the legal system, politicians in government, journalists in media, and worst of all, academic charlatans in the academy, have all served as the support system for this age of public intellectuals promulgating their anointed vision to the world. Sowell meticulously walks through the effects intellectuals have had in 20th century economics, law, foreign policy, and media. He laments the attack on the very concept of truth itself that the intellectuals have launched, and again points out the self-serving nature of their vision. Sowell is a brilliant thinker himself - an idea man - a scholar. But unlike the targets of Sowell's attacks, he does not claim that his expertise in socio-political thoughts exempts him from external validation tests should he branch out into other arenas of thought. Sowell invites external criticism. He holds himself to the standards that public intellectuals refuse to hold themselves to. And while Sowell is an ideologue, he is keenly aware that the repudiation of the unconstrained vision of the anointed - public intellectual leftism - is unlikely to take place as long as this vision maintains its dominance in our school system and modern media. The arrogance of collectivism and surrogate decision-making can be rebuffed in print (as Sowell does in decisive fashion), but the battle must be won where the battle is being fought. Sowell's book is a treasure for those who want to be armed when they engage this fight. The future of our civilization depends on those who hold to the constrained vision - the vision of the founders - taking this fight to the public square. The fight will not be won without Sowell's decimation of the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Paul Ehrlich, and dozens of other blowhards whose ideas have represented indescribable agony for citizens of the 20th and now 21st centuries. But as Sowell makes painfully clear, the vision of the anointed is now the property of the teacher's unions and the New York Times. Conservatives have a lot of work to do. I do not recommend doing anything else when you are done reading this review besides buying Sowell's book. Intellectuals and Society is the magnum opus of this man's life and career, and I have barely scratched the surface of what he accomplishes in this book. Read it. Encourage your kids to read it. And engage the fight. The arrogance of the self-anointed elites will not be defeated until we do. See [...] for more

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #65,398 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #62 in Theory of Economics #86 in History & Theory of Politics #161 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism |
| Customer Reviews | 4.8 out of 5 stars 1,617 Reviews |

## Images

![Intellectuals and Society - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61rNmwtTIzL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Some ideas are so foolish only an intellectual could believe, no ordinary man so foolish’
*by C***R on October 14, 2018*

“Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all—the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” “Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous. George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.’’ Sowell clearly belongs this class of ‘intellectuals’. However, he shines a light in a dark corner of the ‘intellectual’ mind . . . “The great problem—and the great social danger—with purely internal criteria is that they can easily become sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality and remain circular in their methods of validation. What new idea will seem plausible depends on what one already believes. When the only external validation for the individual is what other individuals believe, everything depends on who those other individuals are. If they are simply people who are like-minded in general, then the consensus of the group about a particular new idea depends on what that group already believes in general—and says nothing about the empirical validity of that idea in the external world.’’ ‘Sealed off from feedback’. Fellow ‘believers’ are not the real world. “The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd. The difference between special knowledge and mundane knowledge is not simply incidental or semantic. Its social implications are very consequential. For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.’’ ‘Easier to concentrate power than knowledge’. So true! “John Stuart Mill, who epitomized the intellectual in many ways, expressed this view explicitly, when he said that the “present wretched education” and “wretched social arrangements” were “the only real hindrance” to attaining general happiness among human beings. Moreover, Mill saw the intelligentsia—“ the most cultivated intellects in the country,” the “thinking minds,” “the best and wisest”—as guides to a better world in their role of “those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling.” The scientific/industrial revolution conquered nature. Why not overcome human life the same way. Well . . . “This has been the role of the intelligentsia, as seen by the intelligentsia, both before and after Mill’s time—that of intellectual leaders whose broader knowledge and deeper insights can liberate people from the needless restrictions of society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous declaration— “ Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” —summarizes the heart of the vision of the anointed, that social contrivances are the root cause of human unhappiness. This vision seeks to explain the fact that the world we see around us differs so greatly from the world that we would like to see. In this vision, oppression, poverty, injustice and war are all products of existing institutions—problems whose solutions require changing those institutions, which in turn requires changing the ideas behind those institutions. In short, the ills of society have been seen as ultimately an intellectual and moral problem, for which intellectuals are especially equipped to provide answers, by virtue of their greater knowledge and insight, as well as their not having vested economic interests to bias them in favor of the existing order and still the voice of conscience.’’ This is a great summary of the ‘vision of the anointed’! What is the correct word — hubris, arrogance, pride? Maybe — supercilious! PART I -INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 -Intellect and Intellectuals INTELLIGENCE VERSUS INTELLECT IDEAS AND ACCOUNTABILITY COMPETING CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE THE ROLE OF REASON PART II -INTELLECTUALS AND ECONOMICS Chapter 4 -Economic Systems CHAOS VERSUS COMPETITION ZERO-SUM ECONOMICS PART III -INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIAL VISIONS Chapter 6 -A Conflict of Visions Chapter 8 -Arguments Without Arguments “SIMPLISTIC” ARGUMENTS “SOCIAL JUSTICE” Chapter 9 -Patterns of the Anointed “CHANGE” VERSUS THE STATUS QUO ATTITUDES VERSUS PRINCIPLES A SEALED BUBBLE CRUSADES OF THE ANOINTED PART IV -OPTIONAL REALITY Chapter 10 -Filtering Reality OBJECTIVITY VERSUS IMPARTIALITY Chapter 11 -Subjective Truth PART V -INTELLECTUALS AND THE LAW Chapter 12 -Changing the Law PART VI -INTELLECTUALS AND WAR PART VIII -AN OVERVIEW Chapter 20 -Patterns and Visions Chapter 21 -Incentives and Constraints THE SUPPLY OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS THE DEMAND FOR PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS Chapter 22 -The Influence of Intellectuals Sowell leads reader up a smooth, safe path. However, he clearly marks the dangerous sections. Solid reasoning, abundance of facts and enlightening explanations. Fit for both general and academic reader. Provides outstanding insight to the causes, puzzles of modernity. Even more, does not offer any real alternative.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Intellectuals and Society is an All-time Top 10
*by D***N on June 8, 2010*

I think one of these days I am going to publish a list of the top 10 books that every single thinking person has to read. For a conservative like myself, there are books that have played a formative role in developing, defining, and defending an ideology. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Kirk's The Roots of American Order come to mind - classic works that no serious conservative reader would dare miss. The list has grown by one this year thanks to Thomas Sowell, and I do not make such a claim easily. While his much earlier masterpiece, Conflict of Visions (1987), could arguably be on the list as well, I believe that his newest book, Intellectuals and Society, is not just Sowell at his finest but is perhaps the very essence of conservative thinking at its finest. The book is remarkably readable, extremely practical, and most of all, is such a lethal combination of head shots and body blows to the parasite of modern intellectualism that one finishes the book feeling splattered by the damage Sowell has done. At its core, the book seeks to explore the phenomena of public intellectuals who Sowell carefully defines as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas". There are extremely intelligent people in our society who we do not deem to be "intellectuals" - specialists who possess a particular expertise in a particular field. Sowell provides the important distinction that engineers and scientists and financiers, for example, while not considered to be "public intellectuals", are judged by external standards - by empirical notions of verifiability. Intellectuals, on the other hand, face no such external test. Rather, it is the mere acceptance their own peers provide them that defines their success. They are judged exclusively by internal criteria, devoid of methods of validation. Yet their ideas have consequences, and as Sowell demonstrates in every page of this 317-page delight, the ideas of the intelligentsia over the last century have largely been an unmitigated disaster. Often lethal and frequently incoherent, intellectuals have survived in the last 100 years despite the fruits of their labors. Sowell laments this development, questions its causes, and demonstrates its truth in crystal clear fashion. Intellectuals lack accountability for their disastrous ideas, aided and abetted by non-intellectual accomplices within the intelligentsia that share their unconstrained vision for humanity. Sowell does not target the flaws of public intellectuals that may or may not exist within their particular field of specialization. The book calls these public intellectuals to the carpet for their espousing of ideas and policies to a wider audience than their field of study called for, carrying the same "air of authority" in the wider field that was outside of their field of expertise as they do within the more narrow field to which they claim some degree of knowledge. Sowell points out that "most non-intellectuals achieve public recognition or acclaim by their achievements within their respective areas of specialization, while many intellectuals could achieve comparable public recognition only by going outside their own expertise or competence." Public intellectuals feed off of a demand that is almost entirely self-manufactured. As Sowell has laid out in his aforementioned work, Conflict of Visions, the unconstrained vision of the left is one of an arrogant, elite, anointed - a vision that makes claim to the moral responsibility and intellectual ability to cure the world of its ills. The testing of this unconstrained vision through conventional and empirical validation methods has been devastating in its conclusiveness that the unconstrained vision has been a disaster. The challenge, though, is the lack of accountability that exists for these public intellectuals. Sowell makes clear that their vision is not only one for the world "as it exists and a vision of what it ought to be like, but it is also a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world." For Sowell, "the role that they aspire to play in society at large can only be achieved by them to the extent that the rest of society accepts what they say uncritically and fails to examine their track record." The real target of Sowell's book are those members of the "intelligentsia" who either make up these public intellectual frauds, or worse, serve as their willing accomplices. Judges in the legal system, politicians in government, journalists in media, and worst of all, academic charlatans in the academy, have all served as the support system for this age of public intellectuals promulgating their anointed vision to the world. Sowell meticulously walks through the effects intellectuals have had in 20th century economics, law, foreign policy, and media. He laments the attack on the very concept of truth itself that the intellectuals have launched, and again points out the self-serving nature of their vision. Sowell is a brilliant thinker himself - an idea man - a scholar. But unlike the targets of Sowell's attacks, he does not claim that his expertise in socio-political thoughts exempts him from external validation tests should he branch out into other arenas of thought. Sowell invites external criticism. He holds himself to the standards that public intellectuals refuse to hold themselves to. And while Sowell is an ideologue, he is keenly aware that the repudiation of the unconstrained vision of the anointed - public intellectual leftism - is unlikely to take place as long as this vision maintains its dominance in our school system and modern media. The arrogance of collectivism and surrogate decision-making can be rebuffed in print (as Sowell does in decisive fashion), but the battle must be won where the battle is being fought. Sowell's book is a treasure for those who want to be armed when they engage this fight. The future of our civilization depends on those who hold to the constrained vision - the vision of the founders - taking this fight to the public square. The fight will not be won without Sowell's decimation of the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Paul Ehrlich, and dozens of other blowhards whose ideas have represented indescribable agony for citizens of the 20th and now 21st centuries. But as Sowell makes painfully clear, the vision of the anointed is now the property of the teacher's unions and the New York Times. Conservatives have a lot of work to do. I do not recommend doing anything else when you are done reading this review besides buying Sowell's book. Intellectuals and Society is the magnum opus of this man's life and career, and I have barely scratched the surface of what he accomplishes in this book. Read it. Encourage your kids to read it. And engage the fight. The arrogance of the self-anointed elites will not be defeated until we do. See [...] for more

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Outsmarting the Intellectuals
*by I***L on January 4, 2010*

A book with the title Intellectuals and Society can be expected to range widely, and Thomas Sowell's latest does not disappoint, covering ground from economics to criminology and foreign policy. In each area, Mr. Sowell's complaint is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects. And, maddeningly, these intellectuals are "unaccountable to the external world," immune from sanction, insulated even from the loss of reputation that those in other fields suffer after having been proven wrong. The reputation of certain intellectuals may not be quite so immune after Mr. Sowell has finished with them, because he is withering in assessing and recording their failures. The newspapers take it particularly hard from Mr. Sowell, and not just the American ones. There was the Daily Telegraph's prediction that Hitler would be gone before the end of 1932, and the Times of London's description of the Nazi dictator as a "moderate." Add to this a New York Times column issued by Tom Wicker on the collapse of the Communist bloc, cautioning, "that Communism has failed does not make the Western alternative perfect, or even satisfying for millions of those who live under it." This book does a wonderful job at marshalling facts to puncture commonly held notions of intellectuals and others who tend to be political liberals. It'd be hard to think the same way about income inequality ever again after reading Mr. Sowell's tremendously clear explanation of confusion between income and wealth and "confusion between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings." By the time Mr. Sowell is done, the confusion is gone. He does the same job on gun control, on the supposed epidemic of arson fires at black churches in 1996, and on various topics related to crime and punishment. Mr. Sowell can turn phrases back around at left-wing intellectuals like boomerangs. "What is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan," he writes. "Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing." Even those already steeped in free-market economic thinking will find new facts and perspectives here. Who knew, for example, that restrictions on land use have so artificially inflated housing prices in San Francisco that "the black population has been cut in half since 1970"? "The power of arbitrary regulation is the power to extort," Mr. Sowell writes, giving as an example a San Mateo, Calif., housing development whose approval was contingent on the builders turning over to local authorities 12 acres for a park, contributing $350,000 for public art, and selling about 15% of the homes below their market value. Some of these historical facts may be relevant to our own times, such as Mr. Sowell's observation that, "As President, Hoover responded to a growing federal deficit during the depression by proposing, and later signing into law, a large increase in tax rates - from the existing rate of between 20 and 30 percent for people in the top income brackets to new rates of more than 60 percent in those brackets." Mr. Sowell does sometime tilts his facts to favor his thesis. For example, there's a whole scathing section about intellectuals who opposed President Bush's "surge" in Iraq, but there's no mention of the fact that the idea for the surge came from a right-of-center policy intellectual, Frederick Kagan. While Mr. Sowell faults "intellectuals" for all kinds of bad thinking, in so doing he relies on and cites approvingly a string of other intellectuals -- Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, Robert Bartley, James Q. Wilson, Victor Davis Hanson. Mr. Sowell himself, by his own definition, qualifies as an intellectual. If Mr. Sowell is angry at intellectuals, one reason is for covering up the progress and prosperity of his own country and the open-mindedness of its people. "Data showing the poverty rate among black married couples in America to have been in single digits for every year since 1994 are unlikely to get much, if any, attention in most of the media. Still less is it likely to lead to any consideration of the implications of such data for the view that the high poverty rate among blacks reflects the larger society's racism, even though married blacks are of the same race as unmarried mothers living in the ghetto on welfare, and would therefore be just as subject to racism, if that was the main reason for poverty," he writes. Intellectuals and Society seems to have been written by Mr. Sowell out of a belief, or a hope, that the society will ultimately outsmart the intellectuals. Armed with Mr. Sowell's book, readers will be in a better position to help do that.

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