&gt; The above description makes left wing views sound superior to right wing views, which was not my intention.<p>It certainly wouldn&#x27;t be <i>Sowell&#x27;s</i> intention (you don&#x27;t get to be a Hoover Institute fellow with that kind of attitude.)<p>&gt;  In fact Sowell&#x27;s book lays down an extremely fair and balanced description of both right and left wing beliefs and assumptions, with IMHO no discernable bias between them.<p>As I understand it, <i>A Conflict of Visions</i> is the first part of a trilogy whose overall thrust, as I understand, is an attack on the &quot;unconstrained&quot; vision (the one you ascribe to the left wing -- not sure how accurate that reflects Sowell); though the first volume is mostly stage setting and the serious attacks are in the other two volumes.<p>From your description, it may be fair and balanced (though, given everything else I&#x27;ve seen from Sowell, I wouldn&#x27;t expect that except in the Fox News sense of &quot;fair and balanced&quot;), but it doesn&#x27;t seem at all <i>accurate</i> of the difference between the left and the right (it might better explain some of the difference between the libertarian and the authoritarian -- though I would not describe it, even there, as the <i>dominant</i> or <i>sole</i> basis for either view -- and certainly its not unheard of for right-libertarians, especially American right-libertarians, which Sowell certainly is, to conflate the left-right and libertarian-authoritarian axes.)