A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

Author:Thomas Sowell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Conservatism & Liberalism, Philosophy, Ideology, Religion, Political Science, Mysticism, World, Visions, History
ISBN: 9780465002054
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 1987-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

As noted in Chapter 3, the distribution of knowledge and reason is vastly more unequal in the unconstrained vision, because its definition of knowledge and reason as articulated information and syllogistic rationality puts them much more in the province of the intellectual elite. But the cultural conception of knowledge in the constrained vision makes it far more widely diffused, and the systemic logic of cultural evolution and survival in competition dwarfs to insignificance the special logical talents of the intellectual elite. Thus, while the common man was seen by Hobbes to be more capable in some respects than his more highly educated social superior,63 and the latter's social claims were at least viewed very skeptically by Smith, Friedman, and Hayek, a vast chasm between the existing intellectual and moral capabilities of the common man and those of the intellectual elite has been an enduring characteristic of the tradition of the unconstrained vision.

In an eighteenth-century world where most people were peasants, Godwin declared that "the peasant slides through life, with something of the contemptible insensibility of an oyster."64 Rousseau likened the masses of the people to "a stupid, pusillanimous invalid."65 According to Condorcet, the "human race still revolts the philosopher who contemplates its history"66 In the twentieth century, George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."67

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