Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The problem with professional intellectuals

Grant Morgan reviews Sowell’s New Boook

  • “Thomas Sowell’s provocative new book looks at this question. Intellectuals and Society will make both public intellectuals and their supporters decidedly uneasy. In this book, Sowell argues that . Specifically, he argues that people defined as “intellectuals” have, for at least the past century, promoted a centralized, statist, and anti-democratic vision which undermines both individual freedom and the effective functioning of the state. Furthermore, they have done so without facing any consequences for the results of their (mostly failed) ideas.

  • Sowell’s thesis on the effect of intellectuals on society has several distinct elements. To start, he defines “intellectuals” as the class of people who produce ideas as the primary end product of their work. Thus, engineers and neurosurgeons, while certainly possessing specialized knowledge, are not intellectuals per se. The problem with professional intellectuals, according to the author, is not that they possess specialized knowledge but that they assume that this specific knowledge also endows them with expertise on unrelated matters.

  • Thus, in order to implement this general expertise, intellectuals consistently advocate a political vision characterized by a strong central state which will allow them greater technocratic control over human activity. This vision, Sowell argues, in fundamentally flawed because intellectuals, while possessing specialized knowledge in a single field, do not possess the consequential “on the ground” knowledge necessary to make wise decisions in most cases. For example, the Soviet Union employed large numbers of economic planning experts, but they could not efficiently set the prices of the 25 million different consumer goods over which they had control, because they could not possibly know the local demand for each product at all times.

  • Because intellectuals face no consequences if their ideas fail they can continue advocating them and be lauded by their peers for their “principles” even if those principles are counter-productive. Where respect from other intellectuals (and approval, in matters such as awarding tenure) is the primary currency, Sowell argues that being faithful to the “vision of the anointed” is more important than being correct.

  • The author outlines several areas in which he believes intellectuals have distorted the debate or advocated poor policy because of their lack of knowledge of the concrete consequences of their ideas.”

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