Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With ‘Social Justice’. The eminent economist faults intellectuals who expect equal outcomes and treat individuals as if they were mere ‘chess pieces.’
Wall Street Journal | 10/6/23 | Jason L. Riley

Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).

In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”

The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”

I like Rousseau (I’ve only read one work, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” which I think was his first), and I don’t find him to be a collectivist or authoritarian or a Nazi — more of an anti-Nazi. He just tries to describe how people come to assemble from individual family units into societies, without saying that rulers should rule without check. He has a section on how tyrants should be kicked out and how hereditary rule is bad. But I defer to Dr. Sowell. He’s demonstrably more learned than I am. I haven’t read this book to see where he goes with this.