For those wishing for a "Cliffs Notes" from me, please see Carl Bitzer's review at Amazon - it's a fair summation of why you may wish to read the entire work, or not. But if you don't read the book (or listen to it, as I did) you will be missing out on a real treat. So many ideas that get battered about on blogs, the news, and in commentary seem to always have two sides - I think Sowell will help you see why some are just flat wrong and not just different. While his expertise remains economics, he wades right into sociology, crime, war and others - a truly entertaining work while treating all subjects seriously. A few vignettes come back from his "Vision of the Anointed" - a complaint of one reviewer. A couple reviewers complained of "long sentences" and "difficult to read" - both of which give me some cause for concern - unless some grade school students have been pointed here by eager parents. Intellectuals are people whose end products are ideas. There are other people with great expertise whose end products are things like the Salk vaccine. By this those experts are judged by the end product which is not simply ideas. Conversely, if an intellectual who has a brilliant idea for rearranging society that ends in disaster, there is no way to have him taking up the responsibility. “The fatal misstep of intellectuals is assuming that superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized to superior wisdom or morality overall. Chess grand masters, musical prodigies and others who are as remarkable within their respected specialties as intellectuals within theirs, seldom make that mistake.” For example, Noam Chomsky' work in linguistics made him one of the great figures of the twentieth century, without a doubt. But his work in politics? By Sowell's standard, "absurdity," or I should say, questionable at best.(Since what else you'd expect from a person who would be careless enough to hold a board with Chinese political propaganda he cannot understand and take picture as a sign of blind support?)
Do You like book Intellectuals And Society (2010)?
This is a very thorough analysis. I loved this book.
—tljenks
