Word: vision
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...between liberals and conservatives get cloudy when people call themselves moderates, pragmatists, middle-of-the-roaders. Thomas Sowell, an economic historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, would like to start all over again. He has divided people according to two different views of human nature: the "constrained vision" and the "unconstrained vision." "Conflicts of interests dominate the short run," he says, "but conflicts of visions dominate history...
...vision, as Sowell uses the term, is not some mystical moment of perception, "not a dream, a hope, a prophecy, or a moral imperative," but rather what another scholar has called a "pre-analytic cognitive act." It is an almost instinctive sense of what the human race is like and how it functions. "Visions," says Sowell, "are the foundations on which theories are built." The constrained vision imagines people basing all their acts on self- interest and having only a very limited ability to affect their surroundings; the unconstrained vision sees people being guided by reason and always able...
Sowell steadily pursues his own vision of visions, applying it to a broad variety of contemporary issues. The unconstrained, he says, believe in government action to improve life; the constrained believe in markets and process. The unconstrained think war is irrational and can be prevented by greater understanding; the constrained think it is perfectly rational and can be deterred only by the threat of force. In general, the unconstrained put faith in education, the constrained in experience; the unconstrained in youth, the constrained...
...their correspondingly contrasting views of such basic political concepts as equality or justice, the constrained and unconstrained not only differ from each other but differ so widely that they can hardly understand each other; they use the same words to mean completely different things. "Both visions believe in rights," Sowell says. "But rights as conceived in the unconstrained vision are virtually a negation of rights as conceived in the constrained vision." The constrained vision supports equality of opportunity, for example; the unconstrained judges equality not by opportunity but by results. Hence the emotional arguments over such issues as affirmative action...
This begins to sound rather like a redefinition of liberalism and conservatism, but Sowell insists that it is not, and that no one holds to the same vision 100% of the time. There are even what he calls hybrid visions, and he applies that term to both Marxism and fascism. "The Marxian theory of history is essentially a constrained vision," he writes, "with the constraints lessening over the centuries, ending in the unconstrained world of communism." Fascism relies on several key aspects of the constrained vision, "obedience to authority, loyalty to one's people, willingness to fight," but all this...