In this survey of the political economy literature, originally published in 1987, Thomas Sowell finds that there are two distinct overarching visions of human political theory, which he labels constrained and unconstrained. According to Sowell, these visions are present in authors' ideas, even if the authors themselves are perhaps not completely aware of their assumptions. The background of these ideas constitute a vision that is implicit, and rarely stated, even in the original text. Since these visions are, or were prior to Sowell's analysis, undiscovered, they are not explicitly cited in commentary or criticism of the literature. In writing this book Sowell is creating a new avenue of analysis of the political philosophy.
It is no secret that contention among political philosophers exists. The common sense of this is right vs left, capitalism vs communism, free markets vs planned economies, though this is an oversimplification and not the line along which the constrained/unconstrained divide runs. Unlike scientific and technical fields, in which theory, experiment, and evidence gradually cause evolution of the field and ongoing consensus as to truth and falsehood (more properly, quality of resistance of hypotheses to falsification), political philosophy conflicts have never been resolved in the several hundred years since The Enlightenment. This is in part because of contending interests, which lie at the heart of the constrained and unconstrained visions.
This is not to say that each of the philosophers write what is firmly classifiable as one or the other. Some are hybrids, and some change from one type to the other as an expectation of societal change over time.
The constrained vision is one in which man and his imperfections is accepted as-is. The general consequence is one in which people are expected to be inept at making broad stroke decisions involving moral outcomes, but who are expected to exhibit the habits, skills, and foibles generally attributed to the common man. Often this manifests as a philosophy of processes, in which the process is established to carry things through in the long run as individuals handle the applications of processes at the level of their daily lives. Since governments are run by people, they are therefore subject to the same weaknesses and foibles as men, and need to be constrained by law as well. This is demonstrated by the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution and explained in essays such as the Federalist papers, in which government is restrained to well-defined processes and prohibited from independent action, even if such action could be readily shown to produce large benefits in singular cases.
The unconstrained vision is one in which the best aspects of mankind are assumed at start, and in which man is assumed to be perfectible as time goes forward. The emphasis in this vision is that optimality of outcome or results are superior to adherence to process. This then necessarily involves use of agents to act as decision makers to untangle issues that arise. Most writers of this vision are welcoming of the idea of an elite intelligent class that may act as the deciding agent. This is called for because each decision made, at local as well as national levels, should be undertaken with the good of the all in mind. Clearly, this could involve a large amount of data, calculation, and consideration, and since in some cases this may be beyond the ability of individuals, educated intelligent agents can assist.
For each of a great many societal concerns, such as justice, law, crime, war, individual rights, and the economy, Sowell applies the thinking of the constrained and unconstrained visions and the resulting effect of the vision toward that concern. For example, the constrained vision views nearby nations as troublesome and prone to make war if a gain is a reasonable prospect, and therefore calls for a build up of armaments and weaponry to deter aggressors. The unconstrained vision, in contrast, views neighbors as exhibiting the common decency attributable to all humanity, and therefore inherently friendly. Since neighboring nations would not make war unless there were some miscommunication, the unconstrained vision therefore views diplomacy and dialog with potential aggressors as a strong deterrent of war.
The book is excellent throughout. Sowell's thinking is crystal clear, and he marches citation after citation in support of his points. Since he encircles the topic with all of the concern areas (process costs, freedom, knowledge, power, use of force) and addresses them all in turn, it is difficult to see how one could mount any sort of successful attack on the central idea, which is that these opposing political policy camps are well-described by his constrained and unconstrained labels.
In the final chapter Sowell summarizes the thesis, and this is the sole area where I found his analysis wanting. One can imagine that computing a "best" vision would amount to comparing its attributes to a set of values and scoring them accordingly with a cost or benefit function, like fitting a curve to a set of data points. Here, he says
"Values are vitally important. But the question addressed here is whether they precede or follow from visions. The conclusion is that they are more likely to derive from visions than visions from them is not merely the conclusion of this analysis, but is further demonstrated by the actual behavior of those with the power to control ideas throughout a society..."
In response to this chicken and egg question, his view is that it is definitely the chicken. But this may be too simplistic, in that the vision is not as concrete at the emotional level, like a data point, and that the process of settling on a vision must necessarily first include data that the human mind must sift and consider in order to make them into a consistent vision. The human mind soaks in observations and then makes them consistent through a process of hypothesizing; it seems that one could argue strongly that visions are of this type of mental process, and therefore it is the data (egg) that arrives first.
Sowell makes the further points that visions are rarely merely the bias or class position of the speaker, showing over and over that the gains supposedly accruing to the writer of a political philosophy work are at odds with his actual station at that time.
After all this work, do we have a winner? Sowell has remained agnostic throughout the book, and does not reveal his position even at the end. He does, however, indicate that the process of deriving a winner could be a messy business:
"Empirical evidence is crucial intellectually, and yet historically social visions have shown a remarkable ability to evade, suppress, or explain away discordant evidence, to a degree that scientific theories cannot match."
"Emphasis on the logic of a vision in no way denies that emotional or psychological factors, or narrow self-interest, may account for the attraction of some people to particular visions."
And in the end, he discounts heavily the value of "winning" at all:
"While visions conflict, and arouse strong emotions in the process, merely 'winning' cannot be the ultimate goal of either the constrained or the unconstrained vision..."
He has no further explanation for this conclusion. It is not discussed in the context of a metastructure, like the one briefly introduced above, nor in the value of diplomacy within a civil society. What we are left with is a new, even if valuable, framework for understanding the conflict, but the conflict remains intact.
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Thought, Basic Books, 2007.
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