Via X I learn that the Hoover Institution has just has just posted Peter Robinson’s special Uncommon Knowledge episode with Thomas Sowell, recorded this past December (video below):
This special episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson features our most requested guest: Hoover senior fellow and acclaimed economist and author Dr. Thomas Sowell. But rather than discussing Sowell’s many books, this conversation explores the full arc of Sowell’s life — from his childhood, along a dirt road in North Carolina, through his years in Harlem, the Marine Corps, Harvard, and ultimately to his long tenure at the Hoover Institution.
Through rich storytelling and candid reflection, Sowell recounts his early struggles and triumphs: growing up in poverty yet surrounded by love, discovering books and ideas in a Harlem library, working his way through school and menial jobs, and eventually earning degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Along the way, he shares how experience and evidence—not ideology—shaped his transformation from a young Marxist to one of America’s most influential champions of free markets and individual responsibility.
The interview reveals the wit, humility, and intellectual rigor behind the man who has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom. From tales of family and resilience to his enduring skepticism of government programs, Sowell’s reflections illuminate a life defined by hard work, empirical reasoning, and independence of mind.
Peter draws on Sowell’s memoir A Personal Odyssey (2000) for much of the interview. It’s not too late to catch up with it. We want to understand how he came to be the man he is.
Sowell elicits profound feelings of gratitude from readers of his books and columns — for their clarity, their expository gifts, their depth, their evident fairness, and their ability to get to the heart of the matter in prose that sparkles and bites. Especially in his columns, he is able to distill his conclusions in an incomparable aphoristic style. Someone should compile a book of his wit and wisdom like Quotations From Chairman Bill.
I think I first read Sowell in his 1975 Commentary review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book Money. Galbraith was the Harvard professor, liberal economist, esteemed intellectual, friend of William Buckley. Sowell’s brief review punctured Galbraith’s balloon. First sentence: “For all his sophisticated wit and parade of scholarly erudition—enlivened by lovingly detailed anecdotes—John Kenneth Galbraith is fundamentally as anti-intellectual as any ungrammatical Archie Bunker.”
What is your favorite of his books? We all have our own favorites. It’s hard to choose. Some would pick his writings on economics, some on affirmative action, some on race and culture, some on other subjects I haven’t read. I have my own favorites, but here I would defer to our friend Katherine Kersten. I think she would go with A Conflict of Visions.
