Book review of “Maverick” - about Thomas Sowell

 

Charles Murray reviews Jason L. Riley’s new book Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell as well as an overview of Mr. Sowell’s contributions to “race, political philosophy, and economic theory.” Here are a few extracts published in The Claremont Review of Books:

The Immortal Sowell

In a reasonable world, Thomas Sowell’s life would be celebrated in the same way we honor Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson—as a black hero, born into a genuinely systemically racist America, who not only endured but prevailed.

. . .

Jason Riley, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), outlines Sowell’s personal history in his new biography, Maverick, but does not dwell on it. Instead, Riley decided to give readers an overview of Sowell’s thought. It was a formidable task. I counted 36 book titles in his Wikipedia bibliography, and that total doesn’t include collections of essays and revisions of earlier books. His work has touched on virtually every important social and economic policy issue of our era. How does one summarize it without either oversimplifying Sowell’s contributions or losing the reader’s attention? It can be done, Riley demonstrates, with clean prose and a journalistic narrative. Maverick is a pleasure to read.

Diverse as Sowell’s topics have been, most of them may be grouped under three headings: race, political philosophy, and economic theory.

. . .

One measure of Riley’s success is that I finished Maverick inspired to read Sowell’s books that I had missed and to reread some of the ones I thought I already knew. And that, I hope, will be Maverick’s impact on others as well: to get people in the 2020s and beyond to read Sowell. He has so much to teach to a new generation—and most emphatically, to the generation that is redefining the American Right.

. . . When researching Losing Ground in the early 1980s, I was startled to discover that 19th-century thinkers had analyzed the moral hazards of welfare with far greater sophistication than the public intellectuals of my era. In 2021, reminded by Maverick of all that Sowell has accomplished, I had a parallel reaction: Sowell’s analyses of a host of social and political issues are more sophisticated and acute than those of just about everyone who writes on the same topics today. As far as I can tell, every argument that one might make against the positions of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi had already been laid out by Sowell by the mid-1970s, and no one since has described them better. Forty-two years ago, Knowledge and Decisions provided a deeper analysis of the dysfunction of modern welfare states and administrative states than anything in the contemporary debate. Thirty-five years ago, A Conflict of Visions identified the dynamics that drive today’s political polarization. With Maverick, Jason Riley makes the case for what I consider to be the core truth about Thomas Sowell’s legacy. He would be seen as one of a handful of seminal intellectuals of the last half-century—in a reasonable world.

Full book review is here. 

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