Jason L Riley - Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

H OW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED ? ASKED THE interviewer.

The year was 2003, and Thomas Sowell, age seventy-three at the time, had been on a writing tear. During the previous decade he had published eleven books on topics ranging from education and culture to social justice and economic literacy. Unbeknownst to the questioner, and perhaps even to Sowell, the next fifteen years would bring nine more original works, expanded or revised editions of five others, as well as the eighth, ninth, and tenth collections of his newspaper columns and other writings.

Asked earlier in the interview of which titles he was proudest, Sowell didnt hesitate. As an intellectual achievement, he answered, I would say A Conflict of Visons or Says Law, works on the history of ideas and economic theory. When questioned about the long-term impact of his writings, however, Sowell demurred: Im not sure anyone can assess his own work. I certainly wouldnt have the objectivity. Lasting influence is difficult to foresee, he added, citing the twentieth-century Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who is best remembered today as a staunch advocate of free markets. People who never heard of him, who never read a word he wrote, are nevertheless strongly influenced by his ideas on economic liberty. There are think tanks in Australia and Jamaica and South America based on Hayeks work that are now directly reaching the public, who have no idea who the source is. For Sowell, personal notoriety was less important than having tested ideas prevail in policy decisions, regardless of who gets credited. Im sure that at least 95% of the people in this country have never heard of me, and thats the way it should be.

So, how would Sowell liked to be remembered? Oh, heavens, he replied eventually. Im not sure I want to be particularly remembered. I would like the ideas that Ive put out there to be remembered.

This book is a treatment of Sowells ideas. Its a selective introduction to a body of work amassed over more than a half-century by one of Americas leading social theorists. Sowells corpus is both wide-ranging and voluminous, and you will not find anything close to a comprehensive appraisal of it in the pages that follow. Rather, the goal of this book is to place what he and others consider his most important observations into context, and then trace the intellectual traditions from which those insights derive and the orthodoxy they often challenge. Nor have I set out to psychoanalyze the author or unpack his personal life in any greater detail than is necessary to illuminate his scholarship and respond to various detractors. For those who want a deeper dive into his background, Sowell has published a memoir, A Personal Odyssey (2000), as well as a book of correspondence spanning more than four decades, A Man of Letters (2007). Hes also offered sketches of his upbringing and family in numerous columns and other semiautobiographical tomes, including Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972) and Late-Talking Children (1997).

True, assessing someones work while neglecting his personal character entirely is next to impossible and in this case would be a great disservice to the reader. Sowell was born in rural North Carolina in 1930 to a family with no electricity or running hot water. His father died before he was born and his mother, a maid, passed away giving birth to his younger brother a few years later. The orphaned Sowell was taken in by a great aunt, who raised him as her son and hid from him the fact that he was adopted and had a sister and four brothers. The family relocated, first to Charlotte, North Carolina, and later, when Sowell was eight years old, to New York Citys Harlem neighborhood, where he was raised thereafter.

A bright student with a tumultuous home life, Sowell was admitted to one of New Yorks most competitive high schools but dropped out at age sixteen. He left home a year later, after a magistrate labeled him a wayward minor, and moved into a shelter in the Bronx for homeless boys, where he kept a knife under his pillow at night for protection. He took whatever jobs were available at the timemessenger, laborerfor a black high school dropout with few marketable skills. At one point he was so destitute that the foreman at a machine shop where he worked lent him money to buy food. For a full decade, Sowell received his education from the school of hard knocks, as he put it; he didnt get around to earning a college degree until he was already in his late twenties and had served in the Marines, where he had attended photography school and taught pistol shooting.

In this volume, I draw from those recollectionsas well as from interviews I conducted with Sowells friends and colleagues and from my own conversations with himto present what I hope is a well-rounded assessment. Nevertheless, this is primarily an intellectual biography, meaning that my focus is on the authors scholarly output, not his life story. And as often as possible, I let Sowell make his arguments in his own voice, since one could hardly improve on it.

The first time I heard his name was in college in the early 1990s. During a discussion about affirmative action, someone remarked that I sounded like Thomas Sowell, to which I responded, Whos that? My interlocutor suggested that