This book is a flex by one of the smartest economists of our time. I don't think he's trying to show off but if I had this complex understanding of the economics canon, I would sure want to show off like this!

The premise of this book is actually quite lovely. He parses out differences of political opinion into two groups: constrained and unconstrained visions. He uses the fundamentals of the founding fathers of social and economic science to prove this and he has such an amazing mastery of their works. I read these works in graduate school and don't remember them well enough to contradict his use of them even if I wanted to so some of this went over my head.

Still, I like this way of viewing political differences. There is a lot here that I will reference. Sowell never calls any one group right or wrong. His aim is to show how groups operate from different assumptions of human nature and how those visions can change and evolve over time.

I can see why Sowell considers this among his best three works. In A conflict of Visions, he presents a generalized philosophical model that frames every major economic and political viewpoint. He references many prominent thinker on both sides of his model, which is based not on left vs. right, nor authoritarian vs. libertarian, but instead on constrained vs. the unconstrained visions. So many ideological discussions about politics, religion, trade, and social justice would be far more enlightening if participants had considered them within the context of Sowell's brilliant and well-written analysis.

A vision is something that forms one's ideology, but it's not an ideology, it comes before it. It's there as a sort of unconscious set of beliefs about world and human nature which everyone of us have, and since it is unconscious at some level, we experience vision as something axiomatic.
Sowell is laying two main, opposite visions that make our political and social scene. Unconstrained vision is a vision in which a person believe that humans have a potential for development in all areas. It's obvious that our potential as a species is not fulfilled, so there has to be something that prevents the potential from actualization. Those are institutions, and/or social norms that are stifling human potential. Therefore, institutional actions and sweeping social reforms are usually advocated by proponents of unconstrained vision when they debate about different issues.
Constrained vision views humans as irremediably unimprovable beings. Humans are constrained by their very nature. Societies cannot be perfected, and every attempt to perfect the system is going to bring chaos and suffering. Instead, for every problem we should find not a solution, but a trade-off, in a way we're finding a "solution" that's a least bad one.
We can easily recognize that unconstrained visions are propagated by progressives and leftists, and constrained visions by conservatives.
The book is great because this is an interesting subject. Sowell does a great job with showing examples of how similar people are always found on the same side of an issue, whether it's about economy, education or law, justice or war. The terms constrained and unconstrained are just beautiful in terms of their explanatory power.

However, he's analyzing thinkers only from 17th century forward. He talks about Smith, Burke, Shaw, Rousseau etc. but everyone have already written about those people. It becomes a little tiring to read about what Burke or Smith have written, like those guys are paramount and everyone else is below and irrelevant for Western history. American and English writers have that irritating proclivity to write about only their cultural products (writers, philosophers, ideas) when they indulge into deliberations about various subjects.
It would be much better to incorporate thinkers from the beginning of human thought. For example, were Jesus, or Plato, or Confucius proponents of unconstrained or constrained, or mixed visions? That would definitely make the book much more appealing. But it is a great book, nonetheless.

One of the hardest to follow books I have ever gone through... and I say this having read books with a neologism dictionary in the other hand more than once... but this is not necessarily that kind of issue. Partly it's the construction on a lot of big historical and cultural data, but mostly i think it's the fact that... the author expresses so many hiiiiigh level truths that as the book progresses he's forced to express himself in such long series of abstract words that I do believe he long surpasses the 5 (or was it 7) max length that (I think) Jamie Smart, NLP instructor mentiones as the threshold where people space out :P

So, the book... well, it's about two major views of the world, u could call them axioms that people say... and which have been fighting eachother for centuries, milenia probably, in the most varied fields with huge impact on the lives of many maaany millions of people. It's funny how each side, be tends to choose a premise but after that they reason completely rationally, so, at the end people find themselves arguing opposing views both feeling quite rational about it. My side... well, i think despite my highly idealistic choices and tendencies I'm probably leaning more towards the constrained view of the world, with it's implications. What do you believe in? Are we living in a world of solutions or of trade offs?

I'm not going to be able to give a scholarly critique of Sowell's historical philosophical and economic analysis here. I admit I have not read works from half of the main sources that Sowell derives his premise here.

Here's what I will say:

1. Sowell is a brilliant and well-read man. He analyzes the worldview ("vision") of many prominent economic and sociopolitical philosophers over the past few centuries, which alone is worth the read to receive a junior-level survey of some of these prominent thinkers.

2. Sowell's explicit grouping of philosophies/worldviews into Constrained vs Unconstrained is very thought-provoking, and, I think, even a necessary exercise for those aspiring to high-level political and socio-economic thought.

3. At times listening through the audiobook, a thought crept in: is this a dichotomy? Is the real shape of truth something that has both constraints and yet can evolve as the Unconstrained thinkers believe, yet at a different pace, through different means, or in a different direction? Yet I think as the book goes on, and you give Sowell credit for his full argument with all of its nuance, I believe you can see this objection handled. Though I do think he stays up high at such an objective level, that I think a prototype unconstrained thinker will NOT catch that nuance, and may have an aversion to what they THINK he may be saying. Basically, I feel this may be unlikely to change the mind of many unconstrained thinkers (which, probably, was not Sowell's goal anyway). I think more could have been done in that regard through storytelling.

I wish I could give it 4.5 stars, but in the choice between 4 and 5, Sowell deserves my credit as a fully recommended read.

This is a dense book for a mind like mine. But, it is so worth the effort. Sowell is truly a great thinker, and this book brings so much light and understanding to the disunity we see in the States today as well as many other places. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to make some sense of the nonsense we see on the news everyday. I would recommend many of Sowell’s YouTube videos as well; some speak directly to this book.

Really interesting and well argued. This helped me to gain empathy and understanding for those who differ markedly from me politically.

I thought Sowell does a commendable job being rather even-handed in his analysis.

Wow, reading this book was like riding my bike up a very steep hill. It required great effort, concentration, and perseverance. Yet I found it profoundly enlightening. It was a description of "the ideological origins of political struggles", based on two different visions of man and his limitations or lack thereof. I am amazed at two things: first, that Sowell could present both visions so even-handedly, and second, that the unconstrained vision, which favors government intervention into economics and many other areas of life in order to create the same results for every individual, could be so tenaciously clung to and defended.

This book is a travesty. I’d recommend actively avoiding it. Not because it’s badly written (indeed, it’s written very eloquently in parts). Rather because it’s a devious work, written without intellectual honesty. With an intent to sway the reader of a position that the author is clearly biased in favour of. An author who uses eloquence and appeals to authority instead of facts and reasons.

Let me start with the good first:

Good
•tThe author is smart. Great command of language. At times, it’s a pleasure to read – he often captures concepts with the same clarity of great authors in political economy.
•tHe quotes liberally from great thinkers – Smith, Hume, Mill, Hamilton. There are gems in these quotes – one that stood out: “the constitution is not simply a mirror, nor is it an empty vessel whose users may pour into it whatever they will” (Tribe).
•tThere are about 60 pages of notes, which come as a welcome surprise as one is plodding frustratingly through, anticipating an end to the monotony...


Bad

The first bucket of objections is to the general theme of the book – that there is a fundamental conflict of “visions”:
•tIt starts on a bad premise. The concept of a vision is so nebulous as to be useless. A foundation to an all-encompassing theory (as this purports to be) should begin with an all-encompassing feature of the world – evolution, information, entropy, complexity etc.
•tThe distinction between the two visions is so artificial as to be a caricature of how people think. Similar to decomposing the world into quantitative-only, and qualitative-only thinkers. The author never admits for the possibility that the world can be mostly viewed as a combination of the visions.
•tThere’s so much fancy footwork that’s required for the author to try and fit the world into his dichotomy. It’s as if he’s started on the basis of all matter being made of earth, air, fire and water, and then had to contort every facet of every observation to try and preserve that. He avoids more parsimonious, elemental explanations of human behavior that have far wider reaches.
•tBecause the premise is flawed, he’s forced to bend his theory so that it says both everything and nothing. Ironically, as a result, a phrase that the author uses applies to his own thesis: “the theory is reduced to empirical meaninglessness; since all possible outcomes are consistent with it, it predicts nothing.”

The second bucket of objections is to the surreptitious conservative bias. And my objection isn’t to the conservative-ness, it’s to the intellectual dishonesty with which he portrays the superiority of his preferred vision by straw-manning the alternative. Some specifics:
•tHe portrays rationality at the systemic level as being completely distinct from, and superior to, that at the individual level. To quote: “A pattern of regularities may reflect either an intentional design OR the evolution of circumstances not planned by any of the agents or forces involved in its emergence.” He never admits for an AND instead of an OR. Systematic rationality has as a core component the rationality at the individual level. The market is not some abstract, nebulous beast. It’s a collection of individuals. Interactions are complex, and there can be information processed collectively that’s greater than the sum of the individuals. But for this process to work reason must still be applied individually. This perspective smacks of the ivory-tower economist who’s never had to interact with the real world, where individual reason is esteemed as a virtue because of it’s efficacy; as the thing that has allowed man to climb out of his cave.
•tHis diminishment of individual “explicitly articulated” reason in favour of a faith in the market is wildly one-sided. The market is not a panacea – yet he avoids considering any description of market failures (or flaws in our evolved intuitions) that may weaken his case. Likewise, he conveniently avoids any arguments in favour of the necessity of individual knowledge and reason contributing to progress. A particular example: in covering Malthus’ pre-evolutionary theory of population dynamics, he conveniently avoids mention of Norman Borlaug, the man who majorly contributed to the solution of food security in the world through the invention of the dwarf crop. How did Norman do it? Reason, evidence, science, knowledge (c.6000 trials of cross-breeding species using good ol’, traditional, articulated reasons). Reason at the individual level is a virtue that is deviously mischaracterized.
•tHe presents evolution and complexity as some opaque process beyond all comprehension. It’s not. We can understand it – read modern complexity/evolutionary authors like Mitchell, West, Page, Ridley.
•tOn affirmative action, he positions it as a focus on equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity, whereas he could have equally applied his own preferred lens of process-based justice, by looking at the problem as one of applying the law to the faults of past coercion. Or indeed using it as a disincentive for future breaches of the law. Another convenient avoidance of any argument that could jeapordise his thesis.

Two last objections:
•tAlthough eloquent at times, >80% of the book is of a rambling, verbose style. As a prolific author, one gets the sense that he enters into an automatic mode of churning out this academese. The whole book has a patina of unnecessary intellectualism – case in point: “the locus and mode of decision making”, instead of “who decides and how”.
•tI had to chuckle at the internal inconsistency of his entire thesis. When you take a step back and wonder what it is that you actually just read: an elite academic using explicitly articulated reason to convince the reader against elite academics using explicitly articulated reason!

A wonderful and illuminating guide to understanding the underlying visions (or you might say worldviews) which influence how one understands political issues. This is well worth your time. Sowell does not advocate for one side or another in the book he but he helps to explain how people can come to such wildly differing opinions on politics even when either side seems, on the surface, to have similar moral values.

Not very empirical.

Enlightening. Wow, this is a tough book to read. It requires stopping and thinking a lot at least for me because I would not grasp the concept with just a casual reading. This first few chapters are dedicated to answering the question, WTF are you talking about? It takes a lot of time to define what is meant by the title of the book but by the end it is made so clear that it seems obvious. He defines two types of visions that people have and that permeate many aspects of our thinking. The constrained vision recognizes that everything is a trade-off that is, benefits have costs and most if not all of the time ideals cannot be fully achieved without intolerable and often unintended consequences. The unconstrained vision uses reason, logic and the faith in humankind to overcome constraints because the importance of the vision supersedes the negative consequences and thus the solutions should be pursued regardless of costs. The last chapter elevates the book to masterpiece status by showing how vision can unfortunately overwhelm truth. We are all susceptible to it and will allow or see (unintentionally I hope) only evidence supporting our vision. The book does a good job of not taking sides but instead explains how the different visions shape our thinking although I’m pretty sure to which side the author subscribes. It explains to me how news stories can be off and running in a direction that later is shown to be opposite of reality. The vision is held in higher regard than is evidence to the contrary. The book is definitely worth the read.