Thomas Sowell is among the most prolific yet underappreciated public intellectuals of the past half-century. A University of Chicago-trained economist who has taught at schools such as Cornell and UCLA, the 93-year-old is a scholar who has been a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 1980 and an author who has written more than 50 books on subjects pertaining to economics, education, race, and political philosophy. The quality of his output has been even more impressive than its quantity. Light on rhetoric, seriously heavy on data, and accessible in style, there is a reason why Sowell has been described as “among the most brilliant thinkers in the world today” by Harvard University’s Steven Pinker and an “American sage” by the Wall Street Journal.

His new book, Social Justice Fallacies, clocks in with only 130 pages of text. Its aim is to slice through the rhetoric and bypass the debates characteristic of day-to-day politics by addressing the assumptions underlying what he terms the “social justice vision.” That task is difficult because of that vision’s precipitous rise over the past decade and its acceleration since 2020. Yet, it is crucial for the same reason. We should not want to live in a society in which the premises of the dominant intellectual paradigm are based on utter falsehoods — taken as axiomatic rather than ever proven empirically.