by Oscar Hughff-Coates
In the 1982 revised edition of his book Capitalism and Freedom, economist Milton Friedman reflected on the dramatic shift in American politics between Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1964 and the success of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. While Friedman argued that the primary change occurred in the pantheon of ideas, he insisted that the broader “phenomena” of the last two decades—Vietnam, growing inflation, the failure of socialism abroad—had done more to drive this transformation than “the ideas of books dealing with principles” (xiii). By 1980, Friedman suggested, this intellectual transition had culminated in the widespread belief that capitalism mixed with limited government was essential to American democracy and freedom.
Despite his modesty, Friedman and his contemporaries at the University of Chicago economics department—known today as the “Chicago school”—had played no small part in facilitating this transition in the public mind. The economist and intellectual historian Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) entered the school’s economics doctoral program in 1959 as a self-described Marxist. However, his ideas soon pivoted to free market economics as a near-panacea for society’s ills, firmly eschewing belief in government as a driver for equality. As an African American, this intellectual trajectory would prove thorny for Sowell, whose conversion in the 1960s came during a decade when government, through momentous legislation, was integral to strides in racial justice.
What does the intellectual journey of Thomas Sowell, an only marginally studied public intellectual from the Chicago school, tell us about the dynamics of race, economics, and the state as America drifted from a nation under the New Deal to a new, neoliberal order? Scholarship on neoliberalism in recent years, like that of Gary Gerstle and Johanna Bockman, has explored neoliberalism’s seemingly incongruent views on the state. Bockman, notably, has concentrated on its paradoxical roots in Left wing ideology. Others, like Ben Jackson, have recognized that neoliberalism may be historicized more broadly in the context of contemporary cultural and ideological trends and the individuals influenced by them. This think piece joins this body of work, focusing on Sowell’s early life and beliefs as a Marxist to help explain the parallels between his new ideas on the Right and former ideas on the Left. In so doing, I illustrate the tensions within Sowell’s ideas of government—in particular, his free market principles and the coercive role of the state adjudged to be their best protection.
From Marxism to the Market
Where Sowell took his first steps—1930s North Carolina—offers clues to his later disenchantment with government as an effective remedy to poverty. Successful though the New Deal was in rescuing capitalism from the brink of collapse, FDR’s progressive agenda could only be sustained with the support of pro-segregation southern Democrats, who made up a large and powerful wing of the party.
Programs like the National Recovery Administration (NRA), acrimoniously dubbed the “Negro Run Around” and “Negro Removal Act” by some African Americans, introduced wage codes that helped price African Americans out of jobs (163). Polemics against the unintended consequences of progressive legislation would become a staple of Sowell’s economic arguments:
Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 [which birthed the NRA] and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly (232).
Moving to the historically black neighborhood of Harlem, New York, at age eight, Sowell soon learned that poverty was not a regional issue confined to the South. It was here, as a young man, that he first encountered Marxism. In an interview with former Reagan speechwriter, Peter Robinson, Sowell later shed light on why Marx was so persuasive:
I used to come home … on the Fifth Avenue bus … we’d start out from twenty-third street and go all the way up Fifth Avenue past all the glittery places, and we would turn left at Fifty-Seventh Street and go up past more glittery places including Carnegie Hall, and then we’d turn up toward … Broadway, and then out toward Riverside Drive and all the fancy stuff there. At One Hundred Thirty-Fifth Street, we’d come in off a viaduct and immediately there’d be the tenements. Of course, this is where I live. I went, ‘What is this?’ And Marx seemed to explain that.
Class, then, as opposed to race, appears to have been more salient for the young Sowell. But understanding the full extent of his beliefs during this period is difficult. Throughout his career, Sowell readily admitted his previous Marxist leanings in interviews. He also engaged deeply with Marxism at an intellectual level, writing both his undergraduate and master’s theses on Marxian economics. Yet Sowell’s 2007 memoir, A Man of Letters, a collection of correspondence spanning nearly half a century, is noticeably silent on this matter. The year Sowell chooses to begin with, 1960, is the same year he has claimed to have turned his back on the Left. Underscoring this silence, Man of Letters early on contains a letter Sowell penned in 1960 condemning the newly minted socialist leaders Fidel Castro (Cuba) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) as authoritarians (18). Moreover, the only substantive biography by Sowell, Jason L. Riley’s complimentary Maverick, similarly skirts the issue, focusing almost exclusively on Sowell’s intellectual biography after his time as a Marxist. For Sowell and his admirers, former ideas are best kept at arm’s length.
Given that Sowell had already spent a year at Chicago, and had, even before joining, read the works of Friedman and other free-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek (both of whom would teach him at Chicago), it is not surprising he would be convinced of a philosophy based on classically liberal ideas which found their North Star with thinkers like Adam Smith. With this newfound approach to economics, Sowell would build on work done by his peers at Chicago to provide ideological justifications for state intervention. In Knowledge and Decisions (1980), a book inspired by Hayek, Sowell claims “freedom” and “power” are antithetical (368). Yet a freedom from government necessarily confers power on something else:the individual, by Sowell’s argument. In Road to Serfdom, Hayek himself critiqued socialism’s calls for “freedom from necessity,” asserting that freedom “is merely another name for power or wealth” (77). While the market doesn’t exert power to achieve equality of outcomes, as does Marxism, it does still inhibit freedom. Notably, Sowell, despite his suspicion of government, advocates coercive power by the state, in essence, to curtail those with access to the free market who do not act in ways conducive to its success.
Sowell’s complex views on the state are doubtless influenced by ideas of freedom and power. They suggest that freedom is not wholly attributable to a free market, nor is government freedom’s denier if its interventions serve the purposes of law and order. These caveats were key to neoliberal perceptions of the state.
Economics as Jurisprudence
Gary Gerstle’s Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order positions free market capitalism at the heart of the neoliberal project, engendering a “dynamism, creative destruction, [and] irreverence toward institutions” anathema to the “order, hierarchy, tradition, embeddedness, [and] continuity” represented by classical conservatism (105). Despite Gerstle’s contention, Sowell’s writing reveals a synergy between the two ideologies. What Sowell posits as freedom is really a path to economic power within a set framework of ideological capitalism. This framework comes through in his views of a limited, or minimalist, state, which he believes must retain coercive powers for the benefit of free market enterprise. Attributes like order and continuity therefore remain essential.
Moreover, given the progressive nature of institutions after the New Deal, it is unclear whether irreverence towards them really constituted opposition to classical conservatism. As conservative philosopher Russell Kirk once wrote, “freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all” (8). Free market capitalism moved the Overton window in this direction when thinking about the state’s role—one which protected property rights as quasi-natural rights and argued that “liberty must be under the law” (100).
Gerstle’s focus on free market capitalism was similarly fixed upon by philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1978 lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics. Here, Foucault described the jurisprudence of neoliberalism as, in effect, an “economic tribunal” assessing government action “in strictly economic and market terms” (247). Papers written by Sowell’s contemporaries certainly justify this conclusion. Gary Becker and Sowell’s mentor, George Stigler, each sought to quantify the effects of crime in absolute economic terms, whereby state intervention was justified if it optimized output in the market. Isaac Ehrlich, founding Editor-in-Chief of the University of Chicago Press’ Journal of Human Capital, similarly wrote a paper brimming with equations that aimed to quantitatively define the impact of capital punishment on crime rates and justify its efficacy. This body of work helps explain Sowell’s support for the death penalty, a seeming paradox given his acute misgivings about government intervention more generally. In Knowledge and Decisions:
The irrevocable error of executing the wrong person is a horror to anyone. The killing of innocent people by released or escaped murderers is no less a horror, and certainly no less common. The recidivism rate among murderers has never been zero, nor can the human error in capital cases ever be reduced to zero. Innocent people will die either way [emphasis in original] (286).
Given Sowell’s guarded view of the state in economic terms, suggesting it retain this sort of power over life and death, whether empirically grounded or not, is surely no less a threat to freedom. Nonetheless, this was foundational to proponents of a small welfare state who, at the same time, advocated the continued buildup of security and carceral states. Power, then, remained as much a part of Sowell’s philosophy after Marxism as before.
Anti-statism and Freedom
On nineteenth-century, industrial America, historian Jonathan Levy observes, “American critics were more likely to look backwards—to the revolutionary inheritance of Thomas Jefferson’s ‘labour republicanism,’ … than to look forward to any socialist, communist, or anarchist utopia” (273). The same held true for Thomas Sowell after 1960. This change was evidenced by how he now perceived the state’s role in protecting freedom in opposition to Marx. “Freedom was for Marx and Engels not simply the absence of deliberate constraints imposed by other human beings, but environmental freedom,” he wrote in Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, “freedom to, not freedom from” [emphasis in original] (37).
By 1980, the ideas Sowell had cultivated since the 1960s had become increasingly mainstream. Television was used masterfully by Milton Friedman in his documentary Free to Choose, a ten-part PBS special which exposed to American audiences the pernicious incentives created by government initiatives. As Levy posits, invoking the figure of Jefferson made for powerful imagery—imagery which Friedman wields in episode 5, Created Equal, direct from Monticello: “To Thomas Jefferson, all men are equal in the eyes of God. They all must be treated as individuals who have, each separately, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But, Friedman warns, “he surely did not mean that they were equal, or identical, in what they could do, or what they believed. After all, he was himself the most remarkable person.” Jefferson proved useful for advocates of a free market like Friedman and Sowell, symbolizing conservatives’ renewed ability to claim the ideological mantle of America’s founding—a founding, wrote Russell Kirk in 1953, that was “by and large … a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives” (72).
For Thomas Sowell, race was pivotal. It was African Americans, in his mind, who had before and would again benefit most from the economic freedoms he envisioned. As he wrote in 1975’s Race and Economics:
Appeals to principles of brotherhood have been far less effective than the unplanned effects of mutual economic advantage. Economic incentives destroyed slavery throughout much of the Western Hemisphere … where governmental and ideological power protected slavery, as in the United States, then other governmental power was necessary to destroy it (208).
Thus, neoliberal law-and-order policies which took root in the growth of the carceral state would, in Sowell’s mind, be especially effective in protecting black businesses in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by crime and civil unrest.
The intellectual puzzle at the heart of Sowell’s philosophy, then, is how his profound distrust of government intervention reconciled itself with calls for a more robust security state. During an “age of fracture,” power, writes historian Daniel T. Rodgers, “slipped out of structures and institutions and into words and discourse” (133). Despite attempts to distance ideas of power from a state grounded in free market economics, Sowell’s writing encourages the investment of power through coercion in neoliberal statecraft. In this sense, it is not as different from a state governed by Marxist ideas as Sowell would have us believe.
Ultimately, Sowell’s ideological transformation in the mid-twentieth century offers a powerful window into appeals of the Right and Left for those disaffected by liberal projects on race from the New Deal onward. His political and economic philosophy moreover evidences the unlikely marriage between neoliberal and Leftist ideas of the state. In so doing, he harnessed seemingly contradictory worldviews to justify calls for a strong security state oriented towards ensuring free market enterprise, thus illustrating how ideological lines during the Cold War were by no means binary.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Oscar Hughff-Coates is currently studying for an MA in United States Studies: History and Politics at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. His interests, broadly, centre on how ideas at the elite and grassroots levels have acted as precursors to institutional change throughout American political history.
Edited by Tom Cryer.
Featured image: Thomas Sowell, 1964, via Wikimedia Commons.
