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The Quest for Cosmic Justice Paperback – February 5, 2002
by Thomas Sowell (Author)
4.9 out of 5 stars 511 ratings
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This is not a comforting book -- it is a book about disturbing issues that are urgently important today and enduringly critical for the future. It rejects both "merit" and historical redress as principles for guiding public policy. It shows how "peace" movements have led to war and to needless casualties in those wars. It argues that "equality" is neither right nor wrong, but meaningless.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of the fundamental principles of freedom -- and the quiet repeal of the American revolution.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Jay Nordlinger National Review The burnished product of a lifetime of thinking, arguing, refining, and -- in essence -- getting it straight.
David Boaz author of Libertarianism: A Primer and editor of The Libertarian Reader No one should pronounce on justice or equality again without grappling with Thomas Sowell's powerful argument. In this book, reflecting a lifetime of wide-ranging research and careful reflection, Sowell makes us understand the difference between results and processes, between "cosmic justice" and traditional justice, between the rule of law and the power to do good. The ratio of insights to words in this book is remarkably high.
Judge Robert H. Bork In The Quest for Cosmic Justice Thomas Sowell once again displays his distinctive combination of erudition, analytical power, and uncommon sense.
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About the Author
Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute and the author of A Personal Odyssey, The Vision of the Anointed, Ethnic America, and several other books. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, and Fortune and are syndicated in 150 newspapers. He lives in Stanford, California.
Product details
Publisher : Free Press; 1st edition (February 5, 2002)
Language: : English
Paperback : 224 pages
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Customer Reviews: 4.9 out of 5 stars 511 ratings
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Top reviews from the United States
Razzmatazz
5.0 out of 5 stars More Relevant Than Ever
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2018
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The only negative thing one could say about this book is that it doesn't also focus on the issues of when our markets or policies are allowed to run wild without the intervention of basic human ethics (as opposed to government enforced moralizing or special interests) and we are made to suffer the unnecessary pains of a strictly avaricious, rather than a truly prosperity driven, economy. However, the concise focus and pure distillation of Sowell's writing is part of what makes this book so great.
What stood out to me most was how precisely Sowell identifies the problems and the fundamental errors in judgement that allow people to live out an endless quest for cosmic justice that not only fails overwhelmingly often, but isn't concerned with prosperity, equality, freedom, happiness, or any other commonly professed goal--the quest for cosmic justice is solely concerned with the endless self-perpetuation of the quest itself and the drug-like passions and illusions it creates in intellectuals and law makers. The quest gives people with no skin in the game a sense of moral superiority without any requirement that they actually solve any problems or help those they intended to help. There is a rhetoric of empathy and compassion that breeds arrogance and authoritarianism. Sowell shows how all of this isn't just a factual failure to achieve stated goals, but a pernicious cancer that is eating away at the most fundamental principles of American society and the rule of law all in the name of disastrous utopian rhetoric which not only fails to produce results, but cripples or prevents our best efforts to make genuine progress.
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61 people found this helpful
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Charlie G
4.0 out of 5 stars Good book just not one of Sowell's best.
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2018
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Good book just not one of Sowell's best. However good for Sowell is still 4 stars on Amazon. Rather than read this book though I would read "The Vision of the Anointed" also by Sowell. It is organized better with more specific examples that we walks you through. This book is more of a long speech. I think Sowell got more emotional writting this book.
Both books have similar themes - how some of the elites in America have lofting goals that come along with possibly bad results. If you like Sowell you will probably like Nassim Taleb as well.
38 people found this helpful
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T.spence
5.0 out of 5 stars What an eye opener.
Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2017
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This book exposes the fallacy of social justice. The computation of all the advantages and disadvantages of any individual is beyond impossible much less trying to do this for any given group. Even more impossible and arrogant is the notion that the governing elite can make policy to truly level the playing field in order to guarantee equal outcomes and not inflict enormous unintended cost on society. Individual choices or even local cultural values related to work ethic or pursuance of education are not the fault or responsibility of the federal government. To reward poor values with economic rewards is to enable and perpetuate these poor values. To take financial rewards from those who made better choices and worked hard and listened in class just to give it to someone who did not do these things is theft. It is not just nor is it compassionate to future generations to keep handing out fish but never teaching them how to catch fish on their own.
49 people found this helpful
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James M Bathgate
5.0 out of 5 stars As fresh today as the day it was published.
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2017
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Although this book was written in 1999, it is as fresh today as it was when it was first published. The political wars have not changed and the descriptions/arguments made here are timeless. A great summary of the philosophies of the left and the right. These essays would be a great introduction for young people seeking to understand in a deeper way the the basis for the organization of government and why the U.S. Constitution is unique in the world. I would also highly recommend The Thomas Sowell Reader as a book accessible to people just getting involved in politics.
24 people found this helpful
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Diogenator
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely loved it. Great writer discussing great ideas
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2017
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Absolutely loved it. Great writer discussing great ideas. Outstanding food for thought in these days of excessive polarization in U.S. society. Those who agree with him will take reassurance that what they feel and suspect about social contract is reinforced and clearly expressed by a great thinker. Those who disagree with him will, I suspect, simply discount his points of view as narrow minded, unprogressive, and passé.
31 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read book for everyone!
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2018
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I read this book in one sitting. This book is a breath of fresh air, especially in today's society where a lot of Americans strongly believe in politicians "social justice visions" that sound really great on the surface, but are actually terrible ideas when you thoroughly disect and break the ideas down. Evidence and facts should be the most important thing in decision making, not what "feels like the most moral thing to do". Sowells way of evidence based thinking, and thorough examination of the data while looking at all the options available is the most logical way to tackle the world's biggest problems.
One of my favorite quotes from the book is a metaphor describing dumb politicians and their "social justice vision" for the economy
"He asks not whether it is gasoline or water he tosses on the economic fire---he only asks if it was a well-intended act"
21 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries
Henry
5.0 out of 5 stars A seer for our times
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2020
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Considering this book was first published in 1999 it just shows how far ahead of his time Thomas Sowell is, laying out clearly with at least 15 years before anyone else all the contradictions and problems posed by what we call today 'Social Justice' or as he called it back then 'Cosmic Justice'. From affirmative action to reparations and then on the role of activist members of the judiciary in furthering the myths of 'diversity'n 'redistribution' etc., Sowell demonstrates with hard facts that Cosmic Justice is not only impossible to achieve but also comes with costs (financial and social) that are never taken into the consideration by posturing wannabe intellectuals and that discrimination/ bias *cannot* be inferred by statistical inequalities. Definitely recommend reading this book.
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Poor quality, looks like cheap knock off!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 4, 2019
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I have just received this but found the physical book to be of very low quality and certainly not worth the £10 cost. It looks a fake that was run off on a printer using cheap paper. Avoid it!
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Mr. P. Briody
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2018
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Interesting. His book on the Anointed is better. But still worth a read.
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Brad Souster
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest minds of our time
Reviewed in Canada on December 5, 2018
Verified Purchase
This is the first of his books I've read and I can see why right-leaning political personalities revere Sowell.
If you're a left-leaning individual, Sowell is the most well-spoken, articulated and rational conservatives you'll ever meet. If he isn't remembered for his laissez-faire economics, he'll be remembered forever in philosophy.
4 people found this helpful
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Amora
Aug 10, 2020Amora rated it really liked it
Shelves: political-science
When John Rawls published his famous treatise on justice he popularized the view that if a group doesn’t have the same prospects as another group then that’s an example of injustice. However, as Sowell shows in this classic using history and economics, equal prospects are neither logical nor possible. This book is a damning indictment of Rawlsian thinking and it’s a shame Rawls never got the chance to debate Sowell. I’m sure they would’ve had a blast.
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Doug
Mar 09, 2010Doug rated it it was ok
Shelves: economics-politics
As a young conservative in the 1980s, I was a cheerleader for Thomas Sowell's work. It was a bit of a surprise, then, to see him using so many of the same arguments in this book, almost verbatim from his earlier works. Like many conservatives, Sowell writes very much as if he's stuck in the debates of the 1970s.
As in many of his econ books, the options here are economic extremes, Cold War extremes; it's always a choice between a free market and a Stalinist command economy. Even his examples remain stuck in hot topics of the 1970s and 80s -- Vietnam, Carter, Pol Pot, Bork, Reagan, overpopulation, comparable worth, rent control, the Cold War, even Lenin, over and over. And his main foil is John Rawls' 1971 opus on justice. By missing the debate of the last two decades, Sowell’s work comes off as being only interested in cementing the convictions of conservative true believers. He’s been left behind in the debate and so no longer even tries to connect or persuade opponents.
Sowell also has this rather bizarre inability to see how most of his criticisms of his opponents could easily be turned on himself. He argues without a hint of self-consciousness. For example, in his other recent works (e.g., The Vision of the Anointed) and here, he's very big on the facts and using the facts to solve all of our policy decisions: “anointed visionaries can hold tyrannical sway in disregard or defiance of facts” (100). For him, it’s only the anti-capitalists who show little attention “to testing theories logically beforehand or empirically afterward” (137). His opponents are always dreamers and visionaries who never think to consider evidence and logic. But this is what every vision says of its opponents. Every. Sowell’s opponents have been writing big fat books for decades trying to show how factually disconnected conservatism is. Does he really not realize every side believes this about the other? The complaint about factuality is so naïve and trivial that most debaters don’t even raise it. We all get it. But for Sowell it’s actually a discovery.
A similar lack of self-consciousness shows up in Sowell’s worries about how his enemies demonize their opponents. Like most conservatives, Sowell pictures himself as a victim of intellectual bullies who demonize him and his friends. For these anointed visionaries, “those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized” (103; 137). This nasty demonizing means that they depict conservatives as “intellectually deficient, lacking in imagination, or blinded by habit” (103). But this is exactly the language Sowell himself uses to describe his opponents. They have “the arrogant vision of the anointed elite” (140), a “vision which its devotees are loath to relinquish, even in the face of evidence” (141), indicative of “their heavy emotional investment in their vision” (ibid.). Within one essay, he must bandy his meat-fisted “anointed visionaries” at least forty times like a sophomore without genuine argument. Is he really so disconnected and wounded that he can’t see what he’s doing? We all have blind spots, but this is unnerving.
Sowell is always very quick to complain about “conceptual difficulties” (59) and his opponents’ lack of clear and precise definitions. And yet when he comes to wield the conservatives’ favorite way to silence just about any criticism – the ominous charge of envy – Sowell gives us little. The closest is that envy is “hostility toward others” (78), and he suggests it’s synonymous with the claims of “social justice” (77). Well, why write the rest of the chapter, then? If that’s what envy is, then no more argument is needed. And count Jesus and the prophets as the most envious spokesmen in history. Sowell’s vision is just too easy and sloppy.
Perhaps the most unnerving thing about Sowell’s argumentation is the Pollyanna way he views the world working. It is a world where money has no power, a world where there are no corporate lobbyists, a world where the rich never use the state to increase their wealth, a world where only the poor envy, a world where every country was much poorer before capitalism, a world where sweatshop work is a step up for the poor, a world where military industries reject war profits, a world where international economics is really about raising the standard of living for everyone. In his world, the rich can never do evil because free exchanges are always voluntary and stateless. For him, only the state can mess things up, the state apparently as this bodiless, impersonal, poor spirit, driven only by envy and emotion. It’s a good thing the rich have never been interested in wielding state power. Sowell might have to notice.
In the first essay, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice,” Sowell makes the most amazing concession. He spends plenty of time seemingly trying to show that the woolly, irrational, Marxist Cosmic Vision of Equal Justice is bad, but no, he narrows that to the claim that the good state should only deal with impartial, procedural justice due to its lack of omniscience. In fact, it turns out Sowell defends a brand of Marxism: “Nobody should be happy with cosmic injustices....[T:]hose who see cosmic justice as a dangerous mirage [i.e. Sowell:] must also recognize how naturally people of all philosophical persuasions prefer the vision embodied in this quest and attempt to practice it, whenever circumstances permit....Even the most conservative families often operate on the Marxian principle, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,’ when they spend heavily for the present and future benefit of children who are themselves earning no money. Indeed this pattern sometimes extends into the children’s adulthood and it often extends to other family members struck by medical or financial disasters” (43,44).
He’s quite right. For Christians, though, Sowell’s hard distinction between state and family confuses things. Because a central tenet of Christ’s gospel is the creation of a kingdom that is a family. In Christ, we are all brothers and sisters. Blood relations become secondary but the Church is a new international family, in which, “if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it” (1 Cor. 12:26). As an anarchist, I don’t extend this in the state socialist direction of trying to make the nation state into a family. Instead, Sowell’s Marxism in the family should rightly push Christians to a greater embrace of the economic mission of the Church. Though Sowell’s good state society can allow for some people to go without medicine, water, and live in squalor, the Christian Church can’t do the same. We are a family after all, and some of our family are holding the Eucharist in city dumps and killing themselves to make my clothing. Forget the State. The Church can’t let this go on. These are sisters and brothers. It’s a question of family justice, as Sowell says.
Conservatism gets Christians to think of Sowell’s impersonal, procedural justice as the most important brand of justice. But he concedes that’s false for our most important loves. Conservatism encourages Christians to ignore justice as a species of love, since, for conservatives, justice should only be a procedural state issue. Political conservatism can’t envision the biggest justice as love at all, and so it pushes us away from the prophets, apostles, and Jesus. Here’s a test. When have you ever heard a Christian political conservative talk like this “Marxist” statement from the apostle John? “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17). Which world are we in?
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Jeremy
May 03, 2009Jeremy rated it really liked it
Shelves: econ
“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcomes – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” Milton Friedman
“In short, traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.”
“The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantage and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggest hubris.”
“Even those who proclaim the principles of justice, and call these principles more important than other benefits, as Professor Rawls does, seem unlikely to act on such principles in real life, given the costs of doing so. Imagine that a ship is sinking in the ocean with 300 passengers on board and only 200 life-preservers. The only just solution is that everyone drown. But most of us would probably prefer the unjust solution, that 200 lives be saved, even if they are no more deserving than those who perish.”
“We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or farmer, but only believers in the vision of cosmic justice are likely to take moral solace from that.”
“Recognizing that many people “through no fault of their own” have windfall losses, while those same people – and others – also have windfall gains, the time is long overdue to recognize also that taxpayers through no fault of their own have been forced to subsidize the moral adventures which exalt self-anointed social philosophers.”
“The abstract desirability of equality, like the abstract desirability of immortality, is beside the point when choosing what practical course of action to follow. What matters is what we are prepared to do, to risk, or to sacrifice, in pursuit of what can turn out to be a mirage.”
“However, most income cannot be redistributed because it was not distributed in the first place. It is paid directly for services rendered and how much is paid is determined jointly by those individuals rendering the service and those to whom it is rendered.”
“But to invoke the blanket slogan ‘Question Authority’ is to raise the question: By what authority do you tell us to question authority?”
“Virtually no one seriously questions the principle of equal regard for human beings as human beings…It is the fatal step from equal regard to equal performance – or presumptively equal performance in the absence of social barriers – that opens the door to disaster.”
“On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin. This has long been a hallmark of those with a cosmic vision of the world and of themselves as saviors of the world, whether they are saving it from war, overpopulation, capitalism, genetic degradation, environmental destruction, or whatever the crisis du jour might be.”
“The British, American, and other Allied soldiers who paid with their lives in the early years of the war for the quantitatively inadequate and qualitatively obsolete military equipment that was a legacy of interwar pacifism were among the most tragic of the many third parties who have paid the price of other people’s exalted visions and self-congratulation.”
“…it is necessary to explore what purposes are served by these visions, by their evasions of particular evidence, and – especially in the case of the humanities – by their denigration of the very concepts of evidence and cognitive meaning.”
“Desperately ingenious efforts to evade particular evidence, or to denigrate objective facts in general, are all consistent with the heavy emotional investment in their vision, which is ostensibly about the well-being of others but is ultimately about themselves.”
“The prerequisites of civilization are not an interesting subject to those who concentrate on its shortcomings – that is, on the extent to which what currently exists as the fruits of centuries of efforts and sacrifices is inferior to what they can produce in their imagination immediately at zero cost, in the comfort and security provided by the society they disdain.”
“It may easily be seen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers themselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“As Aristotle said, ‘things that are true and things that are better are almost always easier to believe in.’ In short, the truth often seems ‘simplistic’ by comparison with elaborate attempts to evade the truth.”
“There is no way to specify in precise general rules, known beforehand, what might be necessary to achieve results that would meet the standards of cosmic justice.”
“Just as freedom of the press does not exist for the sake of that tiny minority of the population who are journalists, so property rights do not exist for the sake of those people with substantial property holdings.”
“The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.”
“For the courts to strike like a bolt from the blue hitting an unsuspecting citizen, who was disobeying no law that he could have known about beforehand, is the essence of judicial tyranny, however moral or just the judges may imagine their innovation to be.”
“In other words, the federal government may do only what it is specifically authorized to do, while the people or the individual states may do whatever they are not specifically forbidden to do.” (Referring to the 10th amendment)
“Schemes to extend federal power into the nooks and crannies of local and even private activities are never publicly advertised as expansions of federal power, much less erosions of the Tenth Amendment, but always in terms of the wonderful goals they are said to achieve – ‘universal health care, ‘investing in our children’s futures,’ ‘insuring a level playing field for all,’ etc.”
“The much-vaunted ‘complexity’ of constitutional law comes in most cases not from the Constitution itself but from clever attempts to evade the limits on government power set by the Constitution.”
“The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political, and military power in the world was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.” (less)
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Amy
Nov 19, 2020Amy rated it it was amazing
Shelves: jurisprudence, made-me-think, audio, summit-oxford, law, thomas-sowell, free-market, philosophy
Thomas Sowell is remarkable. Even though a lot of the arguments in this book felt familiar since I run in the circles that quote him often, I continually find something more to learn. Highly recommend.
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Nico Alba
May 06, 2018Nico Alba rated it it was amazing
Finally read my first Thomas Sowell book; picked this one up based on a recommendation by @jimmy__delacruz. To put it simply, Sowell is a giant who is way ahead of his time. His story is a remarkable one--Southern-born and Harlem-raised, Sowell's father died before he was born and he was raised in poverty by his aunt. As the first person in his family to study beyond the 6th grade, Sowell dropped out of high school to provide for his family but eventually went on to receive his PhD in Economics from Univ of Chicago.
In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Sowell shows how misguided notions of equality and justice end up producing inequality and injustice. He shows how the tyranny of visions produces self-exalting "solutions" to social problems that not only ignore contrary empirical evidence, but ignore the actual consequences of enforced policies on the ostensible beneficiaries and on 3rd parties. He discusses the difference between cosmic justice and traditional justice—a terribly important distinction—with incredible clarity. His input is data, and his output is facts—facts that tend to crush the souls of the "morally anointed". The man is 87 years old and has written 30+ books, but he's still kicking and I'm incredibly excited to read more. (less)
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Kris
Sep 13, 2020Kris rated it it was amazing
Shelves: audiobooks, politics
A fantastic exploration of the meaning of justice. He focuses on the consequences of trying to implement a kind of social justice (and the tradeoffs for freedom). He touches on lots of areas like war, gender equality, pacifist movements, educational funding, affirmative action, racial disparities, income inequality, and taxes. Sowell is very well spoken and obviously experienced, and I loved listening to his opinions. This is the first time I've read him, and I look forward to picking up more of his work in the future.
Also on my list: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (less)
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Mary Catelli
Jun 27, 2013Mary Catelli rated it it was amazing
Shelves: philosophy
A sobering book.
A discussion of the attempts to work out great plans of justice and the knowledge necessary -- vastly more than humanly possible -- and the disasters that have ensued.
flag6 likes · Like · 1 comment · see re
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[His opponents are always dreamers and visionaries who never think to consider evidence and logic. But this is what every vision says of its opponents. Every. Sowell’s opponents have been writing big fat books for decades trying to show how factually disconnected conservatism is. Does he really not realize every side believes this about the other? The complaint about factuality is so naïve and trivial that most debaters don’t even raise it. We all get it. But for Sowell it’s actually a discovery. ...
A similar lack of self-consciousness shows up in Sowell’s worries about how his enemies demonize their opponents. Like most conservatives, Sowell pictures himself as a victim of intellectual bullies who demonize him and his friends. ... This nasty demonizing means that they depict conservatives as “intellectually deficient, lacking in imagination, or blinded by habit” (103). But this is exactly the language Sowell himself uses to describe his opponents.]
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