Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

Originally published in Liberty and Law, May 21, 2018. Republished with permission.

 

We know a noun has pervaded our sensibilities when we derive a verb from it. ‘Network’ appears in sixteenth-century English, and was meant literally: a work of netting, coarse or fine. As an abstraction meaning any complex design of threadlike entities, from a river system to a political economy, the word didn’t arrive until the early nineteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among he early adopters—writers influenced by European Enlightenment thought, especially as filtered through Germany. ‘Networking’ as a verb appeared in our own time, with the computerization of everything serving as an accelerant.

Niall Ferguson does exactly what historians should do, explaining the origins of the modern understanding of networks and illustrating the theory with several dozen examples, ranging from Italian Renaissance merchants and Spanish explorers to the election campaign of Donald Trump. “The Square and the Tower” refers to the city center of Siena, Italy where the shadow of the watchtower falls on the marketplace below. The tower represents the “vertical” or hierarchic structure, the square the “horizontal” or democratic structure. The one tends toward rigidity and command, the other toward fluidity (at times anarchy) and consent. Ferguson notes that the tension between these two kinds of ‘networking’ is “as old as humanity itself,” and sees history as the interplay of the one with the other.

Perennial and universal phenomena like networks must have attracted the attention of intelligent people long before the word was coined. Signor Machiavelli inaugurated ‘modernity’ as the human quest to master the course of events and to gain control over that vast network nature; the centralized modern state he lauded exemplifies the “vertical” network, and he intended it to be an indispensable part of his project to out-‘network’ the biggest network.

Before Machiavelli, the earliest philosophers, in naming ‘nature,’ marked out an order of regularly interacting parts a ‘whole.’ Turning to human life, they did not imagine ‘states’ but instead identified regimes—effectively, networks of rule involving persons and their institutions, their patters of life, and the purposes those persons, institutions, and social patterns aimed at achieving. Those philosophers understood politics as the architectonic art, the political community as the most comprehensive form of human organization.

Ferguson identifies the intellectual founder of modern network theory as the influential Swiss-born mathematician Leonard Euler, who formulated it in 1735 while working in the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. He later joined the Berlin Academy, so his two major political patrons were no less a pair of enlightened despots than Peter the Great and Frederick the Great, sitting atop hierarchical networks that enabled Euler’s theory to circulate far, wide, and rapidly.

Euler studied a set of seven bridges in the Prussian city of Königsburg. Why was it impossible, he wanted to know, to walk across all seven bridges in one trip, without re-crossing any of them? The geometrician’s answer involved understanding the relations of the bridges as a pattern of lines and their intersection points or “nodes.” The pattern or structure of any given set of lines and nodes delimits ways in which energy (in the case of the footbridges, the flow of pedestrians) can travel—as in one of today’s electrical power grids, for example.

Euler was among the pioneers of calculus, the branch of mathematics which takes the classical plane geometry of Euclid and in effect ‘sets it in motion,’ plotting points along a curve—this, much to the fascination of later political philosophers, as they considered both the modern state (the tower) and its civil wars (in the square). Americans will recall their friendly visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, who described both the ‘tower’ of the administrative state and the ‘square’ of democratic associations complementary and conflicting features of modern life.

The attempt to reduce a social network and the changes it undergoes to a mathematically-based science awaited the invention of the modern French- and German-inspired academic discipline of sociology toward the end of the nineteenth century. As the theory developed, Ferguson observes, several insights accrued.

First (and pace Thomas Friedman), even the most ‘democratic’ networks aren’t quite “flat,” horizontally arranged though they may be. Persons located at the nodes where social, political, and economic lines cross enjoy an advantage over persons who aren’t. “Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors,” he says. Whereas he holds up midnight-riding Paul Revere as his example I would choose Benjamin Franklin, that supreme networker of both tower and square.

Second, consent-based networks organize according to the principle of “homophily,” a notion more colloquially captured in the old saw, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’—a principle now playing on a website near you, and in clubs, churches, and political parties for millennia.

Third, and paradoxically, weak ties with a network are strong. The stronger my ties, the more exclusive they are, and the more exclusive my ties, the less extensive they are. This point obviously needs to be supplemented by the observation Ferguson made initially, that certain positions or “nodes” within networks are better than others; a tightknit group occupying a node might extract considerable benefits and hold on to its position for a long time. This accounts for a fact well known to politicians and political scientists alike, which is that oligarchies are hard to overturn, not only because they enjoy ‘vertical’ power but because they cohere well ‘horizontally’—good news for the Chinese Communist Party.

Fourth, when we speak of an image or a message ‘going viral’—whether it’s Hitlerian poison circulating through the veins of Germany or a YouTube photo of kittens in a basket—the structure of the network delivering the message matters more than the message itself. Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message” (which itself went viral, half a century back), succinctly summed up the thought. Grant Wood’s career as a painter went nowhere until he hired an agent with ‘connections’—connections to a network. Or, to take one of Ferguson’s examples, “Without Gutenberg, Luther might have been just another heretic whom the Church burned at the stake.”

Another stock phrase, ‘the city never sleeps,’ applies to networks (all of them, not only urban ones). Even the more rigid, hierarchic networks—trees, monarchies—stay active, change over time, cause things to circulate, so long as they live. Peter and Frederick were not only great; they made things happen by establishing structures, including research and educational institutions, militaries, railway systems.

Networks also interact with other networks. This gets dramatic when a hierarchic network confronts a newer and more egalitarian one. “When a network disrupts an ossified hierarchy it can overthrow it with breathtaking speed,” as communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe learned to their sorrow,” and as current hierarchies in China and elsewhere currently work very hard to prevent. “But when a hierarchy attacks a fragile network, the result can be the network’s collapse” not all bands of guerrilla fighters win their wars of attrition.

Finally, the networked rich really do get richer. “Most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian” given the position of the wealthy along the node-and-line structure of “horizontal” networks. The medieval churchman, the Gilded Age railroad magnate, and even the studiously egalitarian computer entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, got very rich, sometimes very quickly, by occupying strategic chokepoints in the structures they knew very well, having invented them.

All of this means that the much-ridiculed conspiracy theorists among us are on to something, even if they don’t quite know what it is. Ferguson shows how such organizations as the Illuminati and the Freemasons did indeed conspire in their semi-secret networks. In describing exactly who they were, how they operated, and to what extent they succeeded (usually much less than their enemies suppose), he both confirms and sanitizes—makes sane—parts of the conspiracy theorists’ hypotheses. It turns out that, contrary to certain dyspeptic members of the monarchist clergy of France, the Freemasons didn’t really cause the French Revolution—but they did have a hand in it. The most successful network of conspirators in Western history was surely the early Christian Church, to the consternation of pagan-minded observers from the Roman Emperors to Edward Gibbon. Harmless as doves and prudent as serpents, indeed. A conspiracy might be benign, too.

Much of the entertaining instruction in the book comes when Ferguson gets down to cases that illustrate network theory. Born in Scotland, he is one of those charming know-it-all show-offs in the Oscar Wilde line, albeit with fewer witticisms and more facts, as I suppose one must expect from a historian. Not surprisingly, one of his cases is the British Empire, and the way in which the British elite prospered by exercising a “relatively light touch” in ruling Britain’s colonies (American Revolution = lesson learned). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Empire rested in large measure on local rulers and such “private networks” as steamship and telegraph companies, banks, and missionaries. To be sure, the elitists themselves doubled down on snobbery and old-school ties, but they also proved amenable to marrying vigorous and attractive outsiders—even the occasional American such as Jennie Churchill. They still hunted foxes, but condescended to write for newspapers and to sit with tradesmen on corporate boards.

Networks can also fail catastrophically. Designed in 1814, under the Peace of Vienna, to prevent recurrence of anything like the Napoleonic Wars, the European geopolitical order solemnized under that pact held firm for three generations thanks to a well-founded aversion to death and destruction. By the time Otto von Bismarck had prodded the many Germanies into consolidating as one state (a state that could whip France), patchwork on that order was urgently needed.  With his Russian diplomatic counterpart Nikolay Girs, Bismarck then designed the Secret Reinsurance Treaty of 1887. Under its terms, “Germany and Russia each agreed to observe neutrality should the other be involved in a war with a third country, unless German attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary.” Russia was thus blocked from allying with France to contain Germany, but the benefit was Russia’s gaining a free hand over the Black Sea Straits. The arrangement dissolved after the preening, over-ambitious fool of a young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, got rid of the troublesome old Bismarck and failed to honor the 1887 treaty. After that, “the surprising thing” was not that “war happened in 1914, but that it did not happen sooner.”

The Great War itself led to another German networking blunder: sending an obscure conspiratorial networker named V. I. Lenin from confinement in Germany, where he belonged, back to his native Russia, along with $12 million of walking-around money. “To an extent most accounts still underrate,” writes Ferguson, “the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation,” one that took Russia out of the Great War only to plunge it into decades of internecine, state-sponsored terror and to throw the rest of the world into a condition of decades-long tension. The Gulag, after all, was in one sense yet another network, as were the spy cells Josef Stalin established at Cambridge University, Washington, D. C., and indeed around the globe.

This brings up an important difference between network theory and classical regime theory. Networks, studied as mathematicians like Euler and mathematizing social scientists study them, are ‘value-neutral,’ mere structures, whose causal importance outweighs the effects of the ideas and sentiments they convey. As suspicion nags, however: The medium may be the message, but so is the message. The various messages I receive come to me through the same medium, my computer, but some of the messages warrant serious attention (whether grateful or worried), others not.

What is more, a message might shape a medium, as a visit to a Gothic cathedral will suggest. When Aristotle contemplates a network,, he does not rate the structure of the tree, or the city, above the way they live or the purposes they pursue (even if, in the case of the tree, the organism has no consciousness of its purpose, or at least none a human can do much more than imagine). As a latter-day Aristotelian once said, ideas have consequences, too—consequences that are to some degree independent of, even while entwined with, structures, persons, and customs.

 

 

Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 53, Number 6, November/December 2016. Republished with permission.

 

Montesquieu directed his attention to the spirit of the laws, considering what he called “the principles of government” underlying legal codes. The principle of republican government is “virtue,” by which he meant love of the laws, love of country, and a preference of public to private interest. By democracy, as distinct from republicanism, Montesquieu’s close reader Tocqueville meant a social condition, equality—defined not as the absence of social classes or of gradations of wealth but as the absence of aristocracy, a class entitled by birth to rule. This social condition in turn engenders habits of mind and heart that incline citizens toward “self-interest rightly understood”—but also toward “virtuous materialism”—the pursuit of material pleasures in a small way. Without the spectacular excesses of aristocratic corruption, virtuous materialism enervates souls, leads them away from public life, from virtue in Montesquieu’s sense.

Tocqueville famously considers the importance of civil society as a bulwark against the overbearing government of modern, centralized states and also as a counterweight to materialistic individualism. As a sociologist, Dominque Schnapper continues this legacy; while making use of the empirical studies produced by her colleagues, she eschews the sharp dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ that so many of them have posited in their attempts to be scientific. While Tocqueville regarded democratic or egalitarian society (whether under republican or despotic government) as the bedrock of modern political life, Schnapper sees discontent with democracy. Some discontented democrats charge democracy with being insufficiently democratic (typically with respect to race, class, and gender) or with being too democratic, too vulgar and pedestrian or ‘bourgeois.’ More deeply, other critics point to tensions or contradictions generated by the democratic way of life itself—what she calls “democratic dynamics.” Like Tocqueville, who urged upon his fellow aristocrats an intention to guide and moderate democracy against its own excesses, Schnapper both describes and warns.

She starts with Tocqueville’s observation that an egalitarian society will often derive what social cohesion it has from consent—”not on any outside structure religious or dynastic, but on the community of free and equal citizens” who join in “an abstract political society that by means of citizenship transcends the roots and specific loyalties of its members.” Having done so, those loyalties don’t go away, although they are attenuated. Over time, again as Tocqueville predicted, the modern state would take over many of the functions performed by churches and lords of the manor. The risk is that Homo democraticus begins as a citizen but ends as a “beneficiary”—a passive recipient of state-provided support. Moreover, as an ever-more-demanding client of the state, the democrat begins to lose not only civic relations with others but social relations, too. People feel as if they don’t need one another, anymore, and stop “shar[ing] common values and a common conception of the world.” This leads to the condition Schnapper calls “extreme” democracy; it is a long way from Montesquieu’s republican virtue. Such societies can no longer cohere at all, for long.

Democrats thus succumb to “the temptation of the unlimited.” Whereas Adam Smith remarked that the desires of human beings are infinite and their means limited—hence the need for “political economy”—Schnapper extends this observation to all dimensions of political life. She distinguishes “autonomy”—the virtue of the deliberative citizen—from “independence”—radical self-sufficiency that finds no standard of conduct beyond the individual’s will. (I would have reversed these terms, probably because as an American I associate “independence” with our Declaration thereof, a document which firmly upholds standards of conduct and exemplifies deliberative citizenship. But let’s respect the author’s Frenchness.) “If the individual subscribes only to his own caprice and for his own short-term interest, he will overturn the objective trust that constitutes a basic given of all societal life.” The rule of law and political institutions—broadly defined not only as ruling structures but as a way of life—can only decline into confusion. At the same time dependence on the state increases. As this new way of life engrains itself in the minds and hearts of democrats, it redefines the family into an unstable grouping headed by merely consenting adults, which in turn generates single-parent households among those who choose no longer to consent to initial union.

The democrat “is obliged to be himself, to assert his freedom by his personal action—a paradoxical imposition indeed,” and one reminiscent of Rousseau’s famous phrase, “forced to be free.” Without any transcendent standard to guide him, but with all around him equally self-assertive, the democrat finds himself mired in “the feeling of his inadequacy, emptiness and compulsion.”

Fueling this radical egalitarianism or “independence,” modern science promises not only the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate but the conquest of human nature for—what? The conquest of human nature requires the conquest of natural right along with it. The abandonment of human nature as a moral standard yields moral and intellectual instability, as “the democratic individual wavers between the ancient dream of eternal life through science and the catastrophism that, while asserting science’s omnipotence, reverses the idea of nineteenth century triumphant science.” The “transhuman” demi-god fears perishing in some apocalypse, whether “nuclear” or climatological. And even while he lives, he is miserable, as technology and capitalism combine to accelerate life beyond the limits of the democrats’ social nature, which requires the slow growth of mutual trust for the sake establishing and maintaining civic and political association.

Proceeding from liberty to license, the democrat’s critical habit begins to challenge not only prevailing norms but “the very idea of norms.” He goes from divine right to natural right to historical right to a radical historicism that questions the very existence of right. Even the fundamental sociobiological fact of reproduction begins to quail before the will of “the democratic individual,” who “chooses his or her partner freely”—that is, without reference to norms. Similarly, the act of eating means, as a well-know American fast-food chain so winningly puts it, having it your way, and with 24-hour drive-thru service at that. Cholesterol having accumulated, the democrat will die ‘with dignity,’ after which his self-designed funeral will be followed by remembrances designed by his survivors.

The social act of transmitting moral and political standards from one generation to the next—the problem Abraham Lincoln considered in his Lyceum Address—cannot function adequately under the regime of extreme democracy, either. Here is where a life lived in France proves highly instructive, given the French-republican insistence, bordering on obsession, with forming citizens by means of education. Under liberal democracy, “The School transformed the members of a small community belonging to a limited world into citizens.” But, having been loaded also with the economic demand for vocational training, French schools have bent themselves out of shape, ill-fitted to combat new, rival communications technologies that challenge their monopoly on French culture and civisme. How will French culture survive if contradictory cultural norms can be ‘ordered up’ by students, like the hamburgers, they consume? When children can ‘outvote’ adults regarding their own education, has egalitarianism not gone a bit far? And how will political representation—that is, republicanism—survive in an extreme democracy, the logic of which is to govern itself by lot, as Aristotle had seen more than two millennia back? In rejecting deliberative intermediaries between his will and governmental decision, will the democrat enhance democracy or only empower the state, his chosen instrument for the delivery of the goods and services he demands? But contradictorily, if the state is a mere instrument, far from the mighty and authoritative being Hegel imagined, then the more that is demanded of it the less it will be obeyed.

Equality in the public realm drives the quest for individual distinction into the private realm. Simultaneously, in asserting themselves, these individuals make demands on the public realm, on the state, which in turn invites the state to become “a negotiator or a manager, organizing collaboration between structures outside itself,” thereby blurring the “boundaries between public and private.” This only begins the process of erasing distinctions National boundaries, the sexes, public and private, high and low culture, moral and immoral, even living and inanimate, all mix together not in a grand historical synthesis but in an overheated social stew. Because “there is no real thought without distinctions” extreme democracy makes Tocqueville’s gentle remark that democracy “does not favor ‘slow and deep thought'” a gross understatement.

Socially, this character of “indistinction” shows itself in Tocqueville’s well-known description of “individualism,” by which he meant the narrowing of one’s relationships to a small circle of relatives and friends. Its symbol today is the burka, which “demonstrates the rejection of participation in exchanges among all.” While making herself anonymous, so indistinct as to be invisible, the burka-wearer sets herself apart from all around her, isolated from all. This radical effect of equality contradicts equality, inasmuch as “the hidden woman can see others who cannot see her,” challenging the “reciprocity of social bonds” or, as one might say even more explicitly, social equality itself.

The final reduction caused by egalitarianism’s indistinction amounts to nihilism. “A society is defined by a conception of the world that gives meaning, by their organization and hierarchy to the important facts of human experience: birth, filiation, marriage, alliance, death.” But a ‘post-ethnic,’ ‘post-rational,’ ‘post-mortal,’ and ‘post-human’ democracy “in which biological or inherited distinctions might be overcome,” a society in which “the reflexivity of all social norms” leads democrats to attempt to construct lives “solely by people’s will” will veer toward the absurd. In it, we read seriously proposals for giving political rights to the great apes—and indeed why stop with them?

As a social scientist, Schnapper bravely seeks to rescue the discipline from such excesses. Whereas anthropology has made cultural relativism the sine qua non of research—studying such phenomena as ritual torture and cannibalism with calm rather than revulsion—anthropology does not entail absolute relativism, the denial that torture and cannibalism are morally wrong. Cultural relativism as a (so to speak) research technique is one thing, but its extension to the realm of moral judgment quite another. Schnapper recalls the question her father, Raymond Aron, posed to Claude Levi-Strauss: “Are universal judgments on moral behavior incompatible with cultural relativism?” Many have begun to treat them as if they are, and not only professional anthropologists. Against this trend, Schnapper recalls “the classical criticism of skepticism: there is a logical contradiction in the very idea of absolute relativism,” namely, that “in asserting a doctrine, the relativist implies that it is true, that therefore truth exists.” “Like all scientists, the ethnologist believes that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that the progress of scientific knowledge is, in itself, human progress.” But obviously, “if relativism, no longer relative but absolute, were to dominate the intellectual and moral conception of democratic individuals, which would then be founded on the indistinction of intellectual orders, there would no longer exist any difference between justice and equality, the analysis of society and political involvement, facts observed (even if they are always philosophically developed by the researcher) and value judgments.” This would make it impermissible to do what everyone must do, inasmuch as “normativity is part of the human condition,” and “one cannot think and understand the world, one cannot wish to act on it, without value judgments.” It would be to lay down a prohibition against all prohibitions, permitting only the impermissible. The dynamics of democracy would exhaust democracy.

Schapper undertakes to counter this radical skepticism or nihilism dialectically, with a critique of universalized criticism, a critique of critique. She begins by observing that any critique must not only compare a particular society to its own principles (invariably finding it, and sometimes them, wanting) but also to other real, particular societies. It is then hard to avoid noticing that “we lie in the safest societies of human history” and “also the freest, most tolerant, and most prosperous.” Complaints about the rise of super-rich ‘one percenters’ and the decline of the middle classes beg for a touch of anthropological dispassion, if not relativism: “The notion that upward mobility was stronger in the past is a myth.” Anxieties about status divergence have grown because our “ambitions have grown.” The working classes have declined as a percentage of the population not because they have dropped into a Marxian lumpenproletariat but because the many have risen into the middle classes, and especially the managerial classes; the social prophet who saw the future that worked wasn’t Marx, it was James Burnham. Statistical studies claiming to show that the numbers of the poor have increased get those numbers by defining poverty upward. But “the poor in 2012 are objectively less poor than those of 1970.”

“Homo democraticus enjoys freedoms unknown to members of other societies,” even if “the possibility of exercising those freedoms remains unequally distributed.” The real crisis in democracy is a crisis of honor, not material well-being or personal freedom. Economic globalization places working-class men and women “in objective competition with poorly paid workers of poorer societies,” removing the dignity of having a ‘trade’ or a ‘craft.’ The democratic society which honors those who, as the saying goes, ‘reinvent themselves’ as needed or as desired humiliates the single mother that same society has also produced. Not only the prosperous but also the smarter and more ambition reap the benefits. Although Schnapper writes two years before the American presidential primary elections of 2016, it’s easy to see how the condition she describes leaves our political parties vulnerable not only to the appeal of a socialist like Bernie Sanders but also Donald Trump, who avers that the least intelligent among us are also “the most loyal ones.” Thank you, my liege, you are the only one who respects me.

The humiliation of the outsider looking in also animates the enemy of Mr. Trump’s followers, the immigrant. Immigrants and especially their children, “socialized in a democratic society” assert “democratic claims for equal treatment.” “They are democracy’s children,” but “they have not absorbed [democracy’s] obligations and do not know the codes for living together.” Like all disappointed lovers, they turn to reviling the beloved, at times to the point of murderousness. Resentment resists mere social welfare, which differs from old charity precisely by lacking caritas. The state cannot match its godlike providence with godlike love, the love that turns humiliation into just and honorable humility. Welfare states can feed the bodies but not the souls of its dependents; it is scientific/impersonal, and so cannot heal wounded honor. There can be no Department of Plausible Respect—at least not in a government animated by the principles of social science. “By a tragic ruse of history, the society created to ensure equal dignity for all human beings and their emancipation could become the society of humiliation.”

“Democracy is not the society of contempt; it is a society dominated by the gap between the democratic individual’s unlimited aspiration to be fully recognized” in his “individuality unlike any other, and the reality of inevitably asymmetrical social relations.” To save his honor, the democrat recurs to “superstitions and conspiracy theories.” Because we live in a radically democratized society, many feel they are ruled by the Wizard of Oz.

Following her great forebears Tocqueville and Montesquieu, has Schnapper presented us in the end with yet another tale of historical inevitability, based on the dialectical march of the Absolute Spirit or of class warfare or racial conflict, but on an iron logic of democratization? Schnapper thinks not: “Democracies are not fated to be lost because collective destiny is never fated in advance.” Like the real Montesquieu and the real Tocqueville, she urges not resignation but deliberation. When democrats begin to think about their problems, they are no longer simply democratic, and (very much like her father) she makes thinking attractive.

 

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 47, Number 6, November/December 2010.

 

The respected conservative economist Thomas Sowell writes too gracefully and, well, economically to offer a more precise title for this book, such as Modern Intellectuals and Modern Democratic Regimes. But that’s his topic.

By “intellect” Sowell means “the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas.” Intellect forms only part of “intelligence,” a term encompassing “judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory facts and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges.” A bright college sophomore’s intellect ought to metamorphose into intelligence by the time he starts his doctoral dissertation. He probably has a way to go before he achieves “wisdom”—”the rarest quality of all,” combining intelligence with experience and self-discipline. With wisdom he will understand the limitations of his “own experience and of reason itself.” If, however, our sophomore goes wrong he may come to use his capacity to manipulate ideas cynically, in which case he will turn out a sophist or, if gifted with oratorical flair, a demagogue. Quite as likely he may let his wishes be horses, in which case he will be a fairly typical specimen of the intellectual in modern democracy.

“Intellectuals” grasp and manipulate complex ideas. Their work “begins and ends with ideas”; they produce ideas instead of material goods (an economist would usually say ‘widgets’) or actions (‘services’ in econo-speak). Being “intellectuals,” “Adam Smith never ran a business, and Karl Marx never administered a gulag.” The concrete objects intellectuals do produce—manuscripts—serve merely as vehicles for their primary products.

The “penumbra” surrounding intellectuals consists of purveyors of the ideas intellectuals produce: teachers, journalists, social activists, political aides, judges’ clerks. Along with intellectuals themselves, these comprise the “intelligentsia.” Although Sowell claims that “the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by themselves,” this strikes me as improbable. Human beings have wanted explanations of the world for a long time. (The Bible will serve as empirical evidence of this, and I can see social-scientific heads nodding in nearly universal agreement with my methodology.) What is more, rulers have usually wanted justifications of their rule. Intellectuals aspire to the functions of the ancient prophet, priest, or sage. Sowell is right to say that widespread literacy and education generally, along with mass media—all features of the regime of modern democracy—have increased the audience for intellectual services. Modern bureaucracies—impersonal, scientistic if not exactly scientific—also augment demand. Both the characteristic modern regimes—democratic republicanism and democratic despotism—and the characteristic modern political organization—the Machiavellian/Hobbesian centralized state—afford intellectuals heady opportunities for prestige and authority.

The associations of intellectuals with ruling, with political life, leads to difficulties well known to Socrates and his enemies. But these difficulties take a new direction in modern regimes because modern regimes valorize ideas, abstractions, more than they esteem such personal relationships as reverence and deference. Unlike material products and services, Sowell, observes, “no external test” can validate an ideational product. This leaves the producers of ideas vulnerable to circularity of thought or even to outright solecism. The conservative politician Newt Gingrich has decried the fact that social democrats persist in their socialism despite socialism’s real-world failures; Sowell would answer that real-world failure does not exactly disporove an idea in the mind of him who lovingly holds it. Like Brooklyn Dodgers fans of old, the intellectual can always recur to his battle-cry, “Wait till next year.”

Insulated politically by the freedom of speech and academic freedom of modern liberal democracy, intellectuals fortify their never-say-die persistence with the social and political armature of status. At best tenured and at least unmolested by outraged bearers of hemlock, intellectuals form a sort of aristocracy within democracy. With that measure of the acerb he has cultivated over the years, Sowell calls them “the anointed.” Their heads drip with the soothing balm of security from serious harm, no matter what they say or write, and no matter what they say or write about one another. This confidence easily overextends to the habit of ranging outside their field of knowledge, as literary critics pronounce on the latest war and sociologists ‘deconstruct’ literature. (I exempt my fellow political scientists from this stricture, inasmuch as Aristotle rightly describes politics as the architectonic art, but I hesitate to claim that Sowell would concur.)

Intellectuals thus test the limits of human knowledge but have few if any empirical constraints on that test. Given the obvious limits of human knowledge, however, “the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge” than the new aristocrats. This becomes clear when intellectuals propose, and bureaucrats attempt, the governance of vast economic markets characteristic of the revenue-hungry modern state. No amount of rational planning can match the massive, daily, empirical operations of a relatively free market, with its “innumerable features on which no given individual can possibly be expert.” Should this not put practical limits on the rule of intellectuals through the bureaucracies and bureaucrats that adopt and adapt their ideas?

Unfortunately not, Sowell observes. “Modern, expansive government—the centralized, administrative state—”tends to magnify the influence of the intelligentsia, since government as a decision-making institution means essentially legislators, judges, executives and bureaucrats, non of whom is constrained to stay within the area of their own competence in making decisions.” Although the American Founders took care to separate and balance the powers of the central government and also to establish a federal state that would keep most governing decisions in municipalities, counties, and states, the centralizing state-builders of the twentieth century—beginning with the Progressives and continued by the New Dealers and their progeny—deliberately compromised these institutional/structural boundaries in the name of attaining desired economic and social goals. Animated by “a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world”—”a huge investment of ego in a particular set of opinions”—members of the intellectual-political complex effectively re-founded the American regime. What had been a commercial and federal republic now incorporates a permanent if non-hereditary aristocracy. Unlike the aristocrats of feudalism, the new aristocrats inhabit a centralized state dedicated both to leveling all other social groups and to dividing those groups into newly-invented social categories—famously, ‘race,’ ‘class,’ and ‘gender’—the better to rule the new ‘multicultural’ society.

Sowell substantiates his critique with chapters describing the arguments the new aristocrats make in defense of their claims to rule. He groups these arguments into five policy areas: economics, social relations, the information and opinion industries (the media, academia), law, and foreign relations (particularly as they relate to war).

Not surprisingly, one of Sowell’s most trenchant chapters addresses intellectuals’ characteristic economic fallacies. For example, intellectuals make much of the widening income gap between rich and poor, a Marxist theme that renews itself periodically, lending weight to calls for the political authority to redress injustice. True in itself, this claim ignores the fact that the actual members of the several economic classes constantly change, as does the relative prosperity of all classes. So, for example, a 22-year-old college graduate may begin her working life as a low-income worker, but likely will not remain one for more than a few years. “Low-income” is itself a relative term, as the poor of 2010 in the United States enjoy better lives than the poor of 1960.

These facts notwithstanding, the ‘income gap’ performs usefully when described as a social problem that cries out for a solution. As one might expect, the solution does not involve the workings of a free market so much as economic and social planning conceived by the intellectuals and carried out by the intelligentsia—neo-aristocrats armed by intellect supplemented with compassion. To the question, ‘So what?’ Sowell replies: “The crucial distinction between market transactions and collective decision-making is that in the market people are rewarded according to the value of their goods and services to those particular individuals who receive those goods and services, and who have every incentive to seek alternative sources, so as to minimize their costs, just as sellers of goods and services have every incentive to seek the highest bids for what they have to offer. But collective decision-making by third parties allows those third parties to superimpose their preferences on others at no cost to themselves, and to become the arbiters of other people’s economic fate without accountability for the consequences.”

Planners in a government bureaucracy differ from planners in a corporate bureaucracy because they have far less responsibility for ‘making the payroll’; if the government’s numbers don’t add up, they raise taxes, inflate the currency, blame the banks. Insulated from the consequences of their actions more than their counterparts in the market, they need not know, and may not want to know, how difficult running a business is.

As an economist, Sowell has always avoided that simplistic abstraction, Homo economicus. He unfailingly points to social customs, habits of mind and heart that shape the economic choices of individuals. This makes him alert to the repercussions of the intellectuals’ “social vision,” as he calls it. Following a line of thought as old as the Enlightenment, intellectuals assume the malleability of social customs and institutions. Born free but everywhere in chains, with no intractable natural flaws or original sins, mankind can and should break their mind-forged manacles. Social visionaries “are in a sense defending their very souls” as perfectible by the reform of social institutions, a reform movement they step up to lead.

Accurate so far as it goes, Sowell’s account of social visionaries overlooks the historicism of social visionaries ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ Rousseau’s teaching on the malleability of society and indeed of human nature itself served as a mere prelude to the relocation of moral and political authority from God and nature to the ‘march of history,’ which such thinkers as Hegel and Marx took to be a course of dialectical progress toward a perfected end state. This usefully allowed the intelligentsia to define as ‘reactionary’ any one and any thing that impeded progress, as defined and guided by the progressives—i.e., themselves. Because he overlooks this major refinement of the intellectuals’ line of attack, Sowell can praise Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose supposed realism and pragmatism merely underwrite yet another exercise in the social-historicist construction of truth. Sowell writes, “The exceptional facility of intellectuals with abstractions does not eliminate the difference between those abstractions and the real world.” True enough, but that’s the problem historicism, whether in ‘idealist’ or ‘realist’ mode, was designed to solve, and failed to solve. Historicism attempts to make the real ideal and the ideal real; might is right, and vice-versa. On this, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Holmes and someone like Woodrow Wilson, and a world of difference between either of them and Washington or Lincoln.

Sowell puts his most important chapter squarely in the middle of the book. Apparently a discussion of the intellectuals’ doings in academia and the media, it really addresses the fundamental problem of epistemology. No mean analyst of statistics, Sowell shows how the intellectuals avoid serious criticism of their projects by “filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.” Sometimes this gets done crudely, as when Stalinist or Maoist genocides simply proceed unreported. More subtly, an intellectual might select statistics that support his argument and ignore the others, as when numbers on violent crime are manipulated to ‘prove’ that gun control cuts homicide rates. On the verbal level, re-labeling can sanitize a soiled term; thus did self-described ‘progressives’ start calling themselves ‘liberals’ in the 1920s, when Wilsonianism lost its luster, then went back to being ‘progressives’ in the early 2000s, after ‘liberalism’ got loaded, courtesy of conservative radio talk show hosts.

Sowell remarks the limits of such manipulation of knowledge. The truth cannot be subjective, he observes, or else no one would survive very long. Yes, a goldfinch perceives reality differently than humans do, but members of both species demonstrably make mistakes due to misperception of their surroundings. The principle of radical subjectivism, supporting moral and cultural relativism, must be wrong.

Sophistry impedes perception of reality (for humans, at any rate). Media and academic deployment of melodrama, conspiracy theories, and ‘just-so’ stories—appeals to satisfying but delusive emotions—supply the energy for what might otherwise strike most people as rather dry theories cooked up by geeky scribblers and policy wonks. The true appeal of historicist progressivism (one might add) is the universal lure of the happy ending at the end of all our hardships and sorrows.

In the modern world intellectuals claimed the law as their domain early on. Sowell argues that when judges stop saying ‘what the law is’ in the sense of saying what the language of the law in front of them meant to the lawmakers, and when they start saying what the law is in the sense of making the law themselves, they effectively contravene the Constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. By becoming legislators they make the characteristic modern-intellectuals’ move: “going beyond one’s expertise.” Following a number of scholars, Sowell takes note of such phrases as “the elastic Constitution” (Wilson) and “the living Constitution” (Roscoe Pound)—wide roadways through which many a pseudo-interpretive truck may be driven. Such formulations serve “the sociological jurist”: the member of “a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public and whose leadership is bringing popular thought to a higher level,” as Pound put it in 1907. Judges so styled look to effect a result instead of applying the law to a case. Having no training in social analysis, they frequently get their sociology wrong, too.

War is a topic quite far from the expertise of an economist. Unlike many economists in the liberal camp—liberal in the Bright-and-Cobden sense, not in the progressives’—Sowell looks at war with a steady gaze, never supposing that peaceful economic competition will entirely replace it. He makes good sport of deflating the unthinking rhetorical antics of many pacifist intellectuals. In his two chapters on intellectuals’ pronouncements on war, Sowell does best when he avails himself of the writings of a statesman long experienced in war: Winston Churchill. Using Churchill as his guide, he recalls the follies of the 1930s intellectuals who, mixing their fears with hope, called Hitler a moderate while espousing a doctrinaire pacifism that the Nazi leader never professed to share. Sowell also does well on the Vietnam War, relying in large measure on the writings of Korean War veteran and experienced war correspondent Peter Braestrup. He goes off the rails on the First World War, precisely because he does not consult his favorite Churchill or (to give but one example) Charles de Gaulle’s brilliant and pity first book, The Enemy’s House Divided. As a result, he criticizes Wilson for entering the war at all, arguing that the “ostensible cause” of Wilson’s action, German submarine attacks on American shipping, served merely as a cloak for that inveterate intellectual’s “ideological aggrandizement.”

Sowell’s argument here is worth unpacking, and refuting, in more detail, not the least for its illustration of one of his own principal theses—the danger of intellectuals ranging beyond their area of expertise—but mostly because he misses a subtler dimension of the intellectuals’ influence upon the intelligentsia, a dimension that adds resonance to his own insights. The Germans, he begins, sank passenger ships with Americans on board. “But these were ships entering a war zone in which both the British and the Germans were maintaining naval blockades, the former with surface ships and the latter with submarines—and each with the intention of denying the other both war materiel and food.” The Lusitania “was, years later, revealed to have been secretly carrying military supplies.” Further, submarines simply cannot “give warnings and pauses to let crews and passengers disembark before sinking passenger ships.” To Sowell, the fault lies not with the Germans in deploying a class of warships utterly wrong for the task assigned them, but with Wilson, for asserting “a right of Americans to sail safely into blockaded ports during wartime.” But maybe he wanted to court murderous attack in order to fight to make the world safe for democracy.

As I have often asked myself while contemplating a large pizza, where to begin? The war supplies in question, listed on the ship’s manifest and therefore no remarkable secret at all, consisted mostly of rifle ammunition and other items allowed under U. S. law at the time. American statesmen had claimed the right to undertake neutral shipping in wartime since the founding. If the Germans had wanted to exercise the right to block military supplies to their enemies, they needed to deploy the surface ships that would have enabled them to board and inspect the ships of the neutral powers. If they lacked such ships, they had two decent options: to forego the blockade, treating it as a handicap in fighting that particular war; or, better still, to refuse to fight the war in the first place, to avoid signaling Austria to move against Serbia. That would have saved everyone, including Wilson, a great deal of trouble.

As Churchill and de Gaulle show, the German military commanders and civilian rulers understood that unrestrained submarine warfare—attacks on commercial vessels—could very well bring the Americans into the war. Wilson got in only after some two years of such attacks—the Lusitania having been sunk in 1915; during those two year, the Germans themselves ratcheted the submarine attacks up and down, as the internal debate raged—a debate fundamentally centered on the character of the German regime itself, and in particular whether it would be ruled by civilians or soldiers. Wilson described his reluctance to make war not in ideological terms but in light of his memories of the Civil War; his father, a Presbyterian pastor, had opened his churchyard in Augusta for use as a field hospital, and the boy saw the wounded soldiers there. There were very few Americans who did not regard the repeated German depredations, taken together, as a casus belli. Wilson didn’t lead public opinion this time, he followed it. As far as making the world safe for democracy went, Wilson merely responded to one of the principal war aims of the German militarists, namely, to make the world unsafe for democracy. This had been the aim of the Holy Alliance powers in the previous century, as well. The fact that those militarists tried again, two decades later, speaks not against the war but against the peace settlement—Churchill’s point in his great book, The Aftermath.

As de Gaulle shows, it was not so much Wilson but the Germans who were in the thrall of ideology during the war. Considering the military chieftains who finally ruled Germany, de Gaulle writes, “Perhaps one finds in their proceedings the imprint of the theories of Nietzsche on the Elite and the Superman”—theories valorizing “the will to power, the taste for risk, the contempt for others that one sees in Zarathustra, who appeared to these impassioned ambitieux as the ideal to which they should aspire.” In his excellent introduction to his English translation of de Gaulle’s book, Robert Eden explains that Nietzsche did not give the German warriors a doctrine—one might search a long time for a usable war plan in the philosopher’s writings—but rather generated a climate of opinion and sentiment that made such rashness as they exhibited seem admirable, a sign of vitality, a path to domination, to nobility. Reading Nietzsche, breathing in the moral atmosphere Nietzsche and his intellectual epigoni fostered, a generation of spirited warriors learned not to moderate and discipline their spiritedness but to let it run free—disastrously, for themselves, their country, and for Europe. An instance of intellectuals’ unwisdom, indeed.

One thus concludes that Sowell is often right even when he is wrong—that is, more right than he knows. And he very well knows the most important thing about his life’s work: In the end he is an economist who looks beyond the often-dismal science to an economy of the spirit.