“Thomas Sowell is the only living human I care about meeting before he dies,” Wilfred Reilly writes in the new, monthly-format issue of National Review magazine.
Sowell is, as Reilly puts it, “the best known ‘black conservative’ of his era.” He’s also “one of the top ten social scientists,” and a man who “influenced contemporary American discourse in a hundred ways — especially for those of us on the right.”
“Most notably,” Sowell’s writings “outlined the unconstrained and constrained visions of human behavior, the latter of which holds that knowledge is diffuse and widely dispersed rather than concentrated among self-anointed cliques of experts.”
According to the “vision of the anointed,” useful knowledge is rare among the majority of people, whose cognitive capacities are blunted by vices such as religion or illogical race bias. . . .
In contrast, the central claim of the constrained, or tragic, vision is that knowledge is difficult to obtain for all human beings (the wisest rules for human behavior are therefore centuries old and battle-tested) but widely dispersed throughout society. While the smartest person in any given room may indeed know more than any other person in that room — and the occasional shining genius still more — no single individual has more information or wisdom than, taken together, all of the ordinary country lawyers, housewives or home managers, general-practice doctors, and successful farmers of a single midsized town.
Tom Sowell is, simply put, a generational talent as an economist, author, and thinker — and he’s attained folk-hero status for many of us on the right. His long career has had a profound influence on Reilly and on millions of conservatives over the decades — including yours truly.
In the battle against ideas such as those contained in works like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, conservatives need to know Sowell’s writings and apply his insights. It’s for this reason that — as Reilly puts it — we should remember “Why Thomas Sowell Matters.”
Also in the new November 2023 issue:
- Noah Rothman analyzes Hamas’s terror war on Israel and our increasingly dangerous world in “The End of Pax Americana”
- Audrey Fahlberg, NR’s new politics reporter, looks at the ongoing chaos in the House Republican Caucus in “Hope and Despair in the Post-McCarthy House”
- Aaron MacLean, a Marine veteran and scholar, explains “What Americans Need to Know about the Next War”
- Jack Butler reports from Ohio on pro-lifers’ campaign against the Buckeye State’s looming pro-abortion referendum in “Will Ohio Enshrine a Right to Abortion?”
- Yuval Levin thinks through what could be the outlines of a new political coalition in “The GOP Should Be the Party of Parents”
- and Jonah Goldberg makes his triumphant return to NR’s pages with an essay on our political dysfunction titled “What’s Wrong with Congress”
Of course, as with any edition of NR magazine, you’ll find Rob Long’s satire column (in this issue, Rob mocks the Hamas-defending student groups at Harvard), Ross Douthat’s film reviews, and a myriad of cultural and literary essays.
You might have noticed that I mentioned above that NR magazine is now a monthly. Yes, the change is here — and we’re excited.
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can create a magazine for the modern age — an age of 24/7 Twitter-driven news cycles. Our new redesigned monthly format allows us to complement our daily coverage on National Review Online with a magazine that takes a longer view. The new magazine is more handsome, includes more photographs and art, and each issue will feature essays that take a step back to view the roiling turmoil of daily events with a wider lens. Plus, at a 30 percent larger size than the old biweekly magazine, we’ll have more pages per issue to devote to a couple of longer-form essays. If we’ve done our jobs right, you should be able to pick up the magazine anytime in the next month and get something incredible out of it.
But don’t conflate “longer” and “bigger” with “dense” or “boring.” The new magazine’s format is designed to be readable. We want NR to be approachable, lively, and fun! A great example of that is one of the new features I’m most excited about: In each issue, we’re sending a writer to go check out something about this great, big, eccentric, and sometimes very weird country that we live in and love. In the first issue, we sent Charlie Cooke to take his English, soccer-loving dad to a Jacksonville Jaguars game. It’s a wonderful essay — less about football per se and more about family, life, and that fish-don’t-know-they’re-wet quality that is authentic Americana.
I also want to remind readers that, starting next Friday, we’ll be launching an all-new weekly newsletter version of NR’s famous “The Week” section of the magazine. Sign up (here!) if you’d like to receive our weekly recap and commentary on the Sturm und Drang that is American politics, life, and culture — straight to your inbox! It will be free to all for a few months before we begin to limit the newsletter to subscribers.
Speaking of subscribers — if you’re not one already, we’d love to have you. Right now, you can sign up for a print-and-digital NRPlus bundle for only $52 — that’s 60 percent off the sticker price and just a buck per week for the next year.
If you’d like to sign up for just the redesigned print magazine, you can subscribe for a full year for only $28.
Or you may want to give the gift of NR to someone you know — like that college student in your life.
Subscribing to NR is the single-best way to support the work that we do. I say this all the time, but it’s true: NR simply could not exist without our readers and subscribers. NR isn’t owned by a big corporate conglomerate, and we don’t have a single mega-donor backing us.
We work for you, the reader.
And we couldn’t do any of this without you. To all of you out there: Thank you.