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by: Thomas Sowell
List Price: $18.00Amazon.com's Price: $12.24 You Save: $5.76 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.520973
EAN: 9780465089956
ISBN: 046508995X
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 305
Publication Date: June 27, 1996
Publisher: Basic Books
Sales Rank: 24387
Studio: Basic Books
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Product Description:
Sowell presents a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Sowell sees what has happened during that time not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a tainted vision whose defects have led to crises in education, crime, and family dynamics, and to other social pathologies. In this book, he describes how elites—the anointed—have replaced facts and rational thinking with rhetorical assertions, thereby altering the course of our social policy.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Thomas Sowell, the psychologist!
For those who have enjoyed Thomas Sowell's history books, this book reveals him as an astute psychologist too. Piggybacking off of Paul Johnson's thesis in "Intellectuals," the book delves into the psychology of being a liberal... of having a lofty, "anointed vision" of what humanity could be like but a condescending (and often inaccurate) view of people, individuals. He contrasts intellectual and aristocratic social engineers who have "the anointed vision" to the common and conservative individualists ... Read More
Rating: - Sowell's Foresight is Unparallelled
Reading this book some 13 years after its original publication and in the middle of a contentious Presidential race, it seems clear that Thomas Sowell had one specific person in mind when writing this book: Barack Obama.
Okay, not really, but it is amazing how much Obama fits the mold of the "Anointed" of the title: self-congratulatory, well-meaning, but either completely ignorant of the facts of history or completely willing to ignore them because they do not fit his agenda.
For ... Read More
Rating: - explaining today's partisan politics
Sowell explains why liberals and conservatives do not work together to solve problems, such as education, in which all have a stake.
Rating:  - More Finger Pointing Politcal Nonsense
Here you have another typical one-sided (read: one-sighted) book fully of finger pointing and false accusations. This book will appease any far right-leaning American who thinks that the left are idiots and liars. This book will offend anyone who leans to the left.
But if you are like me, and tread in the middle to nowhere category, this book will simply annoy you. Sowell talks about how the left (referred to as the "Anointed" literally three million times in the book) spins truths and statistics ... Read More
Rating: - The man does his homework
This is a brilliant book. I'm an historian (I teach history at a community college) and have studied, in depth, the philosophic background and history of the rise of modern secular ideology and its utopian vision--the people Sowell refers to as "the anointed" (and it is an accurate term). Sowell is hated by these people for two reasons: he's black and thus does not fit their stereotype of the down-trodden African-American, and his argumentation, which attacks some of the actual consequences of "the anointed's" ... Read More
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