Upside

By Otto Friedrich

It is a murky business, trying to specify the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans, boll weevils and gypsy moths; even the traditional differences between liberals and conservatives get cloudy when people call themselves moderates, pragmatists, middle-of-the-roaders. Thomas Sowell, an economic historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, would like to start all over again. He has divided people according to two different views of human nature: the "constrained vision" and the "unconstrained vision." "Conflicts of interests dominate the short run," he says, "but conflicts of visions dominate history."

A vision, as Sowell uses the term, is not some mystical moment of perception, "not a dream, a hope, a prophecy, or a moral imperative," but rather what another scholar has called a "pre-analytic cognitive act." It is an almost instinctive sense of what the human race is like and how it functions. "Visions," says Sowell, "are the foundations on which theories are built." The constrained vision imagines people basing all their acts on self- interest and having only a very limited ability to affect their surroundings; the unconstrained vision sees people being guided by reason and always able to improve things. To put it another way, the unconstrained see human beings as perfectible, the constrained as forever flawed. The constrained vision, as expressed by Adam Smith or Alexander Hamilton, seeks trade-offs; the unconstrained vision, as in John Stuart Mill or Thomas Jefferson, seeks solutions. "The constrained vision is a tragic vision of the human condition," Sowell writes. "The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions."

Sowell steadily pursues his own vision of visions, applying it to a broad variety of contemporary issues. The unconstrained, he says, believe in government action to improve life; the constrained believe in markets and process. The unconstrained think war is irrational and can be prevented by greater understanding; the constrained think it is perfectly rational and can be deterred only by the threat of force. In general, the unconstrained put faith in education, the constrained in experience; the unconstrained in youth, the constrained in age.

In their correspondingly contrasting views of such basic political concepts as equality or justice, the constrained and unconstrained not only differ from each other but differ so widely that they can hardly understand each other; they use the same words to mean completely different things. "Both visions believe in rights," Sowell says. "But rights as conceived in the unconstrained vision are virtually a negation of rights as conceived in the constrained vision." The constrained vision supports equality of opportunity, for example; the unconstrained judges equality not by opportunity but by results. Hence the emotional arguments over such issues as affirmative action in the marketplace or the comparable worth of different jobs, with both sides invoking high moral principles to reinforce their visions.

This begins to sound rather like a redefinition of liberalism and conservatism, but Sowell insists that it is not, and that no one holds to the same vision 100% of the time. There are even what he calls hybrid visions, and he applies that term to both Marxism and fascism. "The Marxian theory of history is essentially a constrained vision," he writes, "with the constraints lessening over the centuries, ending in the unconstrained world of communism." Fascism relies on several key aspects of the constrained vision, "obedience to authority, loyalty to one's people, willingness to fight," but all this under an "unconstrained leader" who feels "no obligation to respect laws, traditions, institutions, or even common decency."

Sowell claims to be describing both conflicting visions impartially, to be making no judgment on their comparative merits, but somehow the quasi-liberal unconstrained vision often seems to lead to positions that few liberals would accept as their own. Sowell cites John Stuart Mill's admiration for "the most cultivated intellects" to suggest that the unconstrained are elitist, and hypocrites as well. "It is consistent for the unconstrained vision to promote equalitarian ends by unequalitarian means," he writes, "given the great differences between those whom Mill called 'the wisest and best' and those who have not yet reached that intellectual and moral level."

None of this is very surprising, for Sowell is a dedicated conservative (though he dislikes such labels) much admired in the Reagan Administration & and elsewhere. He has won considerable attention for his attacks on affirmative action, school busing and various black leaders. While he likes to ascribe the unconstrained viewpoint to unauthoritative authorities like Ramsey Clark, Sowell often attributes the constrained vision to masters like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who provides some splendid dicta. For example, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." And, "Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge." And, "It is desirable that the burden of all should be equal, but it is still more desirable to put an end to robbery and murder." Thus stated the case for the constrained vision becomes more impressive than Sowell's rather pedestrian prose could otherwise have made it.