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The Vision of the Anointed

Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

The Vision of the Anointed Open the full-size image

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Contributors

By Thomas Sowell

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Jun 28, 1996
Page Count
320 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465089956

Price

$19.99

Price

$24.99 CAD

Format

  1. ebook

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $19.99 $24.99 CAD
  2. ebook $16.99 $21.99 CAD

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A provocative critique of the failures of liberalism 

“Compelling.” —Wall Street Journal 


This book is a devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, “politically correct” theory is repeatedly confronted with facts—and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites—the anointed—often consider themselves “thinking people,” but much of what they call thinking turns out, on examination, to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against these assumptions.

Genre:

  • Nonfiction
  • Political Science
  • Public Policy
  • General

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. For more than half a century, his writings have appeared in both popular and scholarly publications on both sides of the Atlantic; and his books have been translated into a dozen languages. Since 1980, after a career as an economist in the government, academia, and the corporate world, he has been a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, devoting his efforts to research and writing on subjects ranging from the history and influence of intellectuals to education and social policies in countries around the world.

  • “This is as compelling an explanation as any for the seemingly disproportionate amount of condescension and politically correct invective that emanates from the liberal side of the political spectrum toward the conservative opposition.”
    Wall Street Journal
  • “Important and incisive.”
    New York Times
  • “As always, Sowell's analysis is well informed and displays a great deal of that increasingly uncommon quality, common sense... In the largest sense, The Vision of the Anointed is a book about the perils of ideology—those dazzling intellectual-moral constructions that seduce the unwary into ignoring the way the world works for the sake of dreams about the way it must.”
    American Spectator
  • “Mr. Sowell's eye is sharp, and everyone who has been up against progressive orthodoxy will find his or her own candidate for Most Annoying Liberal Kiss-Off Award.”
    Washington Times
  • “Avid conservatives, for whom Sowell is a true-blue intellectual force, will certainly seize upon his analysis for succor.”
    Booklist

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Thomas Sowell

About the Author

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of dozens of books including Charter Schools and Their Enemies, winner of the 2021 Hayek Book Prize. He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including the National Humanities Medal, presented by the President of the United States in 2003.

Learn more about this author

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