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Book

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as the Basis for Public Policy

by Thomas Sowell

See its constellation

Published
1996
Genre
Political Science
Pages
320
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3044.The_Vision_of_the_Anointed?ac=1&from_search=true

Reading measures

Suggested reading age
ages 15–18
Ambleside year
Year 10 onwards · ages 15–18

An Ambleside year is a year of the Ambleside Online programme, not a reader's age. Year 0 is its first year, and a book used over several years shows the span. The ages beside it are that band offered two grades up and none down, which is how we offer a band; they are a placement, not a reading measure.

The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts -- and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites -- the anointed -- often consider themselves "thinking people," but much of what they call thinking turns out, on examination, to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against those assertions.

Tags

Community Life-PoliticsEconomicsScience-PhilosophySocial Studies-Government