A Conflict of Visions

In The Cave and the Light (2013), Arthur Herman argues that ‘the struggle for the soul of western civilization’ has been primarily a philosophical one between Aristotelian empiricism, which lends itself to realism, and Platonist rationalism, which lends itself to idealism and ‘the utopian impulse’. The supreme articulation of this idea is found in Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions (1987), a book of rare clarity, which argues that modern political struggles boil down to two very different visions of humanity: the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. Later, in The Blank Slate (2002), Steven Pinker recast these in perhaps more poetic terms: the tragic vision and the utopian vision. The political scientist Larry Arnhart prefers to call them the ‘realist’ and ‘utopian’ visions. The constrained (or empiricist, or tragic, or realist) vision sees the limit of human potential in its very nature. Humans have essentially unchanging characteristics that constrain what can and cannot be expected of them. They are primarily selfish, greedy and driven by self-interest, although they retain some capacity for cooperation. In this view ‘man is an individual, an individual born with a natural sociability … but also a desire to protect his own natural rights and his own self-interest’. In this tradition, we find an extensive line of thinkers; Sowell names Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke, Oliver Wendell Holmes, F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Scholars of the early modern period would also surely add Niccolò Machiavelli to that list. In fact, it seems to me that the constrained vision was broadly dominant in Western thought until at least John Locke. As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, we can see variants of the constrained vision in Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin.