A Conflict of Visions

A Conflict of Visions is a book by Thomas Sowell. Sowell's opening chapter tries to answer the question of why

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the same people tend to be political adversaries in issue after issue,

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when the issues vary enormously in subject matter, and sometimes

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hardly seem connected to one another at all. The root of this, he

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says, are the "visions", or the intuitive feelings, that people have

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about human nature; different visions imply radically different

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consequences for how they think about everything from war to justice.

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The rest of the book describes two basic visions, the "constrained"

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and "unconstrained" visions, which are thought to capture opposite

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ends of a continuum of political thought on which one can place many

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contemporary Westerners, in addition to their intellectual ancestors

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of the past few centuries.

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The book could be compared with George Lakoff's Moral Politics, which aims to answer a very similar question.

Related Topics:
George Lakoff - Moral Politics

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The book has been published both with and without the subtitle "Ideological Origins of Political Struggles".

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