Intellectuals And Race Thomas
Download Intellectuals And Race Thomas PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Intellectuals And Race Thomas book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Intellectuals and Race
Thomas Sowell's incisive critique of the intellectuals' destructive role in shaping ideas about race in America Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence -- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.
Intellectuals and Society
The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. 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.
American Catholic Intellectuals and the Dilemma of Dual Identities, 1895-1955
This work is as an example of what might be called Sixties history --the belief that in that decade there occurred major breakthroughs to a more enlightened and humane level of existence, with the concomitant rejection of much of what went before. Dr. Schmiesing is the first to examine in a systematic way the intellectual life of American Catholics between 1895 and 1955, and to approach that era in its own terms, not merely as a prelude to the changes of the 1960s. A common view of American Catholic history holds that two papal warnings against Americanism around 1900 had the effect of stifling real intellectual activity among American Catholics for six decades, until the liberating affects of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. This thesis is as an example of what might be called Sixties history - the belief that in that decade there occurred major breakthroughs to a more enlightened and humane level of existence, with the concomitant rejection of much of what went before. Kevin Schmiesing is the first scholar to examine in a systematic way the intellectual life of American Catholics between 1895 and 1955, and to approach that era in its own terms, not merely as a prelude