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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