Ebook: Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society—and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

This much revised and reorganized edition of Intellectuals and Society is more than half again larger than the first edition. Four new chapters have been added on intellectuals and race, including a chapter on race and intelligence.

These new chapters show the radically different views of race prevailing among the intelligentsia at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the end-- and yet how each of these opposite views of race had the same dogmatic quality and the same refusal to countenance differing opinions among their contemporaries, much less engage dissenting opinions in serious debate. Moreover, each of these very different views of race produced flourishes of rhetoric and travesties of logic, leading to dire social consequences, though of very different sorts in the two eras.