The difference in worldview comes down to how you see human potential.
-when you don’t believe in “general superiority” of certain groups of people
-surrogate decision makers

-conflicting views of what “power” means

-leftists believe “power” just has to be redirected, and informs their view in personal responsibility for crime and violence

-property rights….intellectual property (should have equal protection) which is why free speech is so important. We would not put up with the amount of infringement on our personal property as we do with intellectual property (free speech).

The concept of “social justice” is a religion and needs to be treated as such. There is a reason we have protection from a specific church running our government (separation of church and state).

Social justice is a “confused evasion of harsh reality” (Hayek) ……sloppy thinking…..dishonest demand for special interest….the Trojan horse through which totalitarian governments have entered (Nazi Germany for example).

Many don’t know what they mean by it (social justice)—intellectual dishonesty

The belief that all individuals are entitled to a share of the wealth produced by the working people of that nation, regardless of productivity.

Charity vs. justice

social justice=prep for communism (rules don’t apply because the goals of the “plan” are good?!)

Conservative view: you can only create social PROCESSES, you can’t create social RESULTS

Affirmative action and social justice ignore personal preference and differences in ideas of “success”….government programs for the moral and spiritual development of citizens instead of letting parents and a person’s faith or religion develop the moral and spiritual.

Again, Sowell is erudite and wise. This is my second time through CoV and I noticed some changes from the original version, particularly in chapter 7. But the core remains one of the best analysis of the reasons for political differences. Highly recommended to understand your political foes/allies.

At times it is hard to follow Sowell, because of his detailed litany of dichotomies. However, I found this book helpful in the creation of two overarching categories, the "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions wherein like worldviews and values are contained.

Sowell has many strong points, but his understanding of libertarianism is not one of them. Like so many often do, Sowell understands Ayn Rand to be libertarianism's greatest benefactor. This is just fundamentally wrong. Sowell doesn't really attack libertarianism, but he does draw a caricature that does little justice in accurately describing the beliefs of Murray Rothbard or Hans-Hermann Hoppe. This is ironic, since so many libertarians claim Friedrich Hayek whom Sowell places so much emphasis upon in this book.

Nuances aside, I think it is fair to say that Sowell did his research and has made tremendously meaningful observations which will serve in creating dialog with those whom we most disagree on the other side — those with constrained visions and those with unconstrained visions (e.g. Capitalists and Marxists).

I am glad to know that this book is just one of three in a series because I feel like more needs to be said to accurately convey the points he is making.

I thought Sowell was mainly an insightful analyst of American history, sort of like James Baldwin. But this book is classic philosophy, building on the Enlightenment-age thinkers like Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, or William Godwin (all of these guys being men). And he builds in a very discerning way, exploring both sides of the typically binary divide we see in how people view the world around them.

This is an excellent book that thoroughly discusses the nature of ideological values, morals, and beliefs. Sowell uncovers the origins and ulterior meanings of human thought and action. His writing is very clear, focused, and well researched. I actually found out more about my own views while reading this book.

Simply—WOW! This book was my introduction to the brilliant mind of Thomas Sowell and I warn you it works like heroin. I can't wait for my next fix.

What makes this book so astonishingly ingenious that it explains in such an elucidative manner why two intelligent people can talk to each other in plain English and yet completely misunderstand what the other is saying. This is not an easy read because the visions of the Right and Left are clusters of normative abstractions about idealized societies based on even further abstractions about values, morals, and human nature. It takes you to an Inception-like journey where you get to travel from one layer of political thinking to increasingly deeper and nuanced layers of ideological reasoning, and witness how our political history can be reconstructed in completely unexpected yet intellectually robust new ways. You can only come out of it as a wiser member of society.

Why do those occupying different points on the political spectrum never seem to get my reasoning though I go to great lengths to logically support my position? Why do those talking to me from the other side seem to view me as likewise "thick-headed".

Perhaps the reason for this dissonance goes beyond the issue du jour. Perhaps there are fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of man that inform our opinions and prevent us from seeing the soundness of the opinions of our opposite number, and visa-versa.

This is the theme of Sowell's book, "A Conflict of Visions. Now while there are as many visions as there are people, visions, he argues fall along a spectrum of "constrained" or "unconstrained". I've heard this referred to by others as tragic vs. utopian. Sowell's visions inform us of the nature of man, his potential and/or lack of potential, and the fundamental meaning of terms such as liberty, justice, power, equality, and the rule of law.

Read this book and you'll understand the barrier your political adversary has in understanding you, and your impasse at making a persuasive impact on him. You may surmise techniques to dig a bit deeper; to discover underlying assumptions. You may find that questions might hold forth greater convincive fruit than a profusion of irrestistable arguments.

Though, if you've read some of Sowell's other works you may well be aware of his passionate opinions on things political and in the field of economics, this work is balanced and unbiased. It's only attempt is to give one a framework in which to view the visions that form the foundation of political and economic stances of ourselves and others.

Nice work.

Interesting insight into the underlying visions that drive political struggles. It is not about left versus right but how one views human nature and the consequences from that view.

Sowell is a national treasure.

I couldn't express enough praise for this book in its content and utility.

But also I am amazed the fairness and thoughtfulness of its author who is strongly of one ideological persuasion to equally represent that which he is diametrically opposed to.

Wow. A real “must read” for pretty much anyone who has ever disagreed with anyone. Four stars only because I’m not smart enough to understand its full content.

Interesting that the unconstrained visions, which always rely on the smartest, also require them to be unambitious insofar as application of their intellect for the greater good regardless of how it affects them directly.

P7. “Social visions are important in a number of ways. The most obvious is that policies based on a certain vision of the world have consequences that spread through society and reverberate across the years, or even across generations or centuries. Visions set the agenda for both thought and action. Visions fill in the necessarily large gaps in individual knowledge. Thus, for example, an individual may act in one way in some area in which he has great knowledge, but in just the opposite way elsewhere, where he is relying on a vision he has never tested empirically. A doctor may be a conservative on medical issues and a liberal on social and political issues, or vice versa.”

P8. “Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along. The effects of visions do not depend upon their being articulated, or even on decision-makers' being aware of them. "Practical" decision-makers often disdain theories and visions, being too busy to examine the ultimate basis on which they are acting.”

P18. “Man is, and short, “perfectable” – meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection.”

P26. “Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.“

P28. “The continuing battle between ideals and the costs of achieving them is only one part of the ongoing conflict of visions.”

P29. “Visions rest ultimately on some sense of the nature of man--not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations. Those who see the potentialities of human nature as extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which themselves produce unhappy side effects.”

P32. “Despite necessary caveats, it remains an important and remarkable phenomenon that how human nature is conceived at the outset is highly correlated with the whole conception of knowledge, morality, power, time, rationality, war, freedom, and law which defines a social vision.”

P36-37. The constrained vision of reason. “From this perspective, ‘Man has certainly more often learned to do the right thing without comprehending why it was the right thing, and he still is better served by custom than understanding.’”

P39. William Godwin: “Nothing must be sustained because it is ancient, because we have been accustomed to regard it as sacred, or because it has been unusual to bring its validity into question.”

P39. Candorcet: “…everything that bears the imprint of time must inspire distrust more than respect.”

P45. “In short, starting from different conceptions of how much a given individual can know and understand, the constrained and the unconstrained visions arrive at opposite conclusions as to whether the best social decisions are to be made by those with the most individual knowledge of a special kind or by systemic processes that mobilize and coordinate knowledge scattered among the many, in individually unimpressive amounts.”

P46. Godwin: “Accuracy of language is the indispensable prerequisite of sound knowledge.”

P53. Hayek: “The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.”

P71. The constrained vision is not a static vision of the social process, nor a view that the status quo should not be altered. On the contrary, its central principal is evolution. Language does not remain unchanged, but neither is it replaced according to a new master plan. A given language may evolve over the centuries to something almost wholly different, but as a result of incremental changes, successfully validated by the usage of the many rather than the planning of the few.

P75. "Delegation to experts has become an indispensable aid to rational calculation in modern life." What is "desirable" or "undesirable," "preferred," "satisfactory," or "unsatisfactory" are referred to in passing, without explanation, as apparently things too obvious to require explanation.

P78. From this perspective, loyalty, promises, patriotism, gratitude, precedents, oaths of fidelity, constitutions, marriage, social traditions, and international treaties are all constrictions imposed earlier, when knowledge is less, on options to be exercised later, when knowledge will be greater.

P92. If a footrace is conducted under fair conditions, then the result is just, whether that result is the same person winning again and again or a different winner each time. Results do not define justice in the constrained vision. To those with the unconstrained vision, the best results should be sought directly. To those with the constrained vision, the best processes should be used and protected, because the attempt to produce the best results directly is beyond human capacity. The two visions' original differences and assumptions about human nature dog their footsteps as they go from issue to issue.

P93. Language is one example of such order without design, and its complexity, subtlety, and effectiveness exemplify the power of systemic processes which tap the experience of all, instead of relying on the special wisdom or nobility of any individual or council.

P94. Justice, in the constrained vision, thus means adherence to agreed-upon rules, while in the unconstrained vision, something is just or unjust according to what end results occur.

P129. Equaliy, like freedom and justice, is conceived in entirely different terms by those with the constrained vision and those with the unconstrained vision. Like freedom and justice, equality is a process characteristic in the constrained vision and a result characteristic in the unconstrained vision.

P134. It was not merely that some have little and others have much. Cause-and-effect are involved: some have a little because others have much, according to this reasoning, which has been part of the unconstrained vision for centuries.

P136. Modern technological wonders brought little improvement to what the rich already had, however much they revolutionized the lives of the masses:
* The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited little from modern plumbing: running service replaced running water. Television and radio--the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets-all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person.

P155. War, as seen in the constrained vision of The Federalist Papers, seemed to require virtually no explanation. The Federalists considered it axiomatic that if the thirteen recently independent American colonies did not form one nation, they would inevitably and incessantly be at war with each other. To the Federalists, it was obvious that "nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it."

P156. "A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral." This was the direct opposite of Godwin's unconstrained vision, in which a nation whose "inoffensiveness and neutrality" would present no military threat to cause a “misunderstanding" with other nations or to "provoke an attack."

P189. “Justice thus derived its importance from the need to preserve society--not society its raison d'être from the need to produce justice. Moreover, justice need only be "tolerably observed" to serve its social function of maintaining order, and that overriding need for social order was due to the limitations of man.”

P193. “The social benefits of known law, as a framework within which the many could make their own decisions, were weighed in a similar fashion by the celebrated English legal theorist of the eighteenth century, William Blackstone. The trade-off between individual justice and the social benefits of certainty was particularly striking within the British legal tradition, where "courts of equity" were institutionally distinguished from "courts of law"-the former to make exceptional adjustments for the sake of individual justice. Blackstone said:
Equity thus depending, essentially, upon the particular circumstances of each individual case, there can be no rules and fixed precepts of equity laid down, without destroying its very essence, and reducing it to positive law. And on the other hand, the liberty of considering all cases in an equitable light must not be indulged too far, lest thereby we destroy all law, and leave the decision of every question entirely in the breast of the judge. And law, without equity, tho' hard and disagreeable, is much more desirable for the public good, than equity without law; which would make every judge a legislator, and introduce most infinite confusion; as there would be almost as many rules of action laid down in our courts, as there are differences of capacity and sentiment in the human mind.”

P215. “The greatest danger of the concept of social justice, according to Hayek, is that it undermines and ultimately destroys the concept of a rule of law, in order to supersede merely "formal" justice, as a process governed by rules, with "real" or "social" justice as a set of results to be produced by expanding the power of government to make discretionary determinations in domains once exempt from its power.“

P236. “Thinkers with identical moral values and social preferences must nevertheless reach opposing conclusions if their initial senses of reality and causation--their visions--are different.”

P245. “Though these controversies often become emotional, the opposing views tend to cluster, not around an emotion, but around the logic of a vision. Each vision tends to generate conclusions which are the logical consequences of its assumptions. That is why there are such repeated conflicts of visions in such a range of otherwise unrelated issues.”

This is a classic that has had a profound impact on my leadership style as well as on my political philosophy. The beauty of this book lies in its exposition of two fundamentally different, yet plausible, conceptions of the human condition, and Sowell's use of these two conceptions to illuminate how reasonable people can disagree on fundamental issues. In my own book, Accountability Citizenship, I describe Sowell's work as follows:

Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is the most elegant expression I have encountered of how intelligent people can reason to fundamentally different conclusions on the same issue. Sowell proposes that each of us reason from different “visions” of human nature. He presents two ends of the spectrum as the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision but is careful to note that each of us may apply different parts of the spectrum to various aspects of our set of values and beliefs. Basically, the constrained vision is the sense of human beings as being limited by our self-interest. On this view, people will behave selfishly by nature. Government must craft trade-offs and establish incentives for actions that are desirable for optimal social harmony. The unconstrained vision is the sense of human beings as capable of rising above self-interest to act for the greatest good of all. From this perspective, the role of government is to enable people to achieve their potential by eliminating incentives and trade-offs that encourage constrained behavior. Reasoning from different starting points on the spectrum of visions leads reasonable people to different conclusions.
Sowell’s work allowed me to acknowledge the rationality of others’ views without giving in to the popular temptation to demonize those with different beliefs and values as evil or stupid or selfish. Sowell’s distinction is not a cure for political and social disagreement, but I believe it offers a path to restore a higher level of civility in our discourse. It may be the case that seemingly intractable problems can be advanced or resolved by leaders willing to discuss solutions and compromises without the emotional handcuffs of strict partisan ideology.

I have recommended this book since I first read it in 1992, and I still feel it should be mandatory reading for all first year college students... maybe even seniors in high school.