The Politically Incorrect Book Club Sydney

Meeting at the usual place, The Shakespeare Hotel, 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, at 7.00pm on July 31, we will be discussing The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is an intellectual giant of the 20th and 21 centuries. He writes beautifully, putting complex ideas into simple and entertaining language. An academic at prestigious universities, he has written over 40 books on economics and the social sciences.

The Vision of the Anointed: self-congratulation as a basis for social policy (1995 and 2019) is his analysis of a particular class of thinkers - academics, policymakers, media figures, and cultural elites - who see themselves as morally and intellectually superior guides to the rest of us. These are the people who push grand social visions with soaring rhetoric, while dismissing ordinary experience and common sense as outdated or reactionary.

The class of the 'Anointed' - in Sowell's words - are those people who adopt lofty positions on public policy, while using their economic wealth to insulate themselves from the consequences of their positions. Whether it is welfare policy, educational reform, crime, housing, immigration or race relations, Sowell shows that failures are rarely acknowledged. Sowell contrasts this to the 'tragic vision' — a worldview grounded in historical experience and the understanding that human nature has its limits. In this view, trade-offs are inevitable, perfection is impossible, and policy should be judged by outcomes, not lofty intentions.

The format of the discussion is that we focus on discussing the book for an hour. The meeting formally ends but almost everyone stays behind to talk more about the book or anything else. We meet on the top floor, which means negotiating two sets of small stairs. There is no minimum spend - people can buy food, a drink, or neither. Ask at the bar for details in finding us.

Meeting at the usual place, The Shakespeare Hotel, 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, at 7.00pm on August 28, we will be discussing Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1996). We meet on the top floor in the semi-private 'Two Tables Room.'

Huntington's main argument is that after the Cold War, future global conflicts would be cultural - rather than ideological or economic. The main fault lines of conflict, he argued, would be religious, cultural and historical.

He identified 8 world civilizations including Western and Islamic (with its 'bloody borders').

The work was heavily criticized by the left, such as by Palestinian activist and professor of English, Edward Said, who called the work a 'clash of ignorance.' Edward Said wrote about similar issues in his famous work, Orientalism.

The format of the discussion is that we focus on discussing the book for about an hour - discussing the arguments of the book - in favor and against. The meeting formally ends but almost everyone stays behind to talk more about the book or anything else. We meet on the top floor, which means negotiating two sets of small stairs. There is no minimum spend - people can buy food, a drink, or neither. Ask at the bar for details in finding us.