Prof. Josh Dunn of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs brought my attention to a nasty review of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book Intellectuals and Society by Aidan Byrne, a Senior Lecturer in English and Media/Cultural Studies at Wolverhampton University in Britain. It was published online in 2012 on a well-read site of the London School of Economics.
Byrne didn’t like Sowell’s arguments at all. According to Byrne it suffers from
“a reductive view of human relations [that] leads to a tour of Tea Party attitudes, rather than any serious discussion of the successes – and manifest failures – of intellectual leadership. . . Intellectuals and Society is a diatribe against sophistication, deliberation and complexity. Intellectuals are rhetoricians freed from consequences and accountability, peddling leftwing dogma in opposition to the collective wisdom of real-world consumers (citizens are never mentioned). . . It is . . . an instructive tour d’horizon of Tea Party concerns.
There’s more in this vein, but you get the idea.
If you suffer through this all the way to the end, however, you then come across this revealing correction:
Amendment: This review was amended on 22 November 2017. The original post contained the line ‘easy for a rich white man to say’. This has been removed and we apologise for this error.
Note that it only took them five years to spot this “error.” A different kind of (leftist) white privilege you might say. Byrne couldn’t even be troubled to do most simple online search to find out Sowell’s identity. I’ll help him out right here.
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