The Liberating Power of the Dismal Science
I’m reading Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics (1975), which had a major influence on Clarence Thomas. Sowell is a black conservative economist. In his chapter on slavery, Sowell writes:
Although a slave-owner’s power to punish a slave was virtually unlimited by either law or custom, there were economic limits on the profits to be derived in this way.
In many respects unremarkable, the passage nevertheless gives a sense of what a disenchanted black radical like Thomas, searching in the 1970s for a way past the impasse of the Black Freedom movements, might have found in Sowell’s conservative and economistic mode of thinking. For what Sowell is suggesting is that the one power that stood above or beyond that of the white slaveholder was the power of economics itself. While law and custom put no constraint on the slaveholder—that claim of political impotence would have echoed throughout the disillusioned left of the 1970s—the economic imperative did. Profit and loss was the one force that transcended and trumped the white master’s personal authority over the black slave. It’s not too much a jump, I think, to see how Thomas might have seen in this vision of the market’s disciplining force a way past the power of the white man, an ally in the struggle against the white man.