In the 1982 revised edition of his book Capitalism and Freedom, economist Milton Friedman reflected on the dramatic shift in American politics between Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1964 and the success of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. While Friedman argued that the primary change occurred in the pantheon of ideas, he insisted that the broader “phenomena” of the last two decades—Vietnam, growing inflation, the failure of socialism abroad—had done more to drive this transformation than “the ideas of books dealing with principles” (xiii). By 1980, Friedman suggested, this intellectual transition had culminated in the widespread belief that capitalism mixed with limited government was essential to American democracy and freedom.
Despite his modesty, Friedman and his contemporaries at the University of Chicago economics department—known today as the “Chicago school”—had played no small part in facilitating this transition in the public mind. The economist and intellectual historian Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) entered the school’s economics doctoral program in 1959 as a self-described Marxist. However, his ideas soon pivoted to free market economics as a near-panacea for society’s ills, firmly eschewing belief in government as a driver for equality. As an African American, this intellectual trajectory would prove thorny for Sowell, whose conversion in the 1960s came during a decade when government, through momentous legislation, was integral to strides in racial justice.
What does the intellectual journey of Thomas Sowell, an only marginally studied public intellectual from the Chicago school, tell us about the dynamics of race, economics, and the state as America drifted from a nation under the New Deal to a new, neoliberal order? Scholarship on neoliberalism in recent years, like that of Gary Gerstle and Johanna Bockman, has explored neoliberalism’s seemingly incongruent views on the state. Bockman, notably, has concentrated on its paradoxical roots in Left wing ideology. Others, like Ben Jackson, have recognized that neoliberalism may be historicized more broadly in the context of contemporary cultural and ideological trends and the individuals influenced by them. This think piece joins this body of work, focusing on Sowell’s early life and beliefs as a Marxist to help explain the parallels between his new ideas on the Right and former ideas on the Left. In so doing, I illustrate the tensions within Sowell’s ideas of government—in particular, his free market principles and the coercive role of the state adjudged to be their best protection.