Thomas Sowell

American economist at Hoover Institution — former Marxist turned free-market conservative — author of over 30 books including A Conflict of Visions, The Vision of the Anointed, and Discrimination and Disparities — one of the most consequential public intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Creates the Constrained/Unconstrained Vision framework for understanding political ideology — Sowell's A Conflict of Visions argues that most political disagreements derive from two fundamentally different assumptions about human nature (constrained: people are limited; unconstrained: people are malleable), a framework that cuts through left-right labels to reveal underlying assumptions.