This book is a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social issues.

In this book the ‘politically correct’ theory of the liberal elite is repeatedly confronted with facts, and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites (the ‘anointed’ of the title) often consider themselves ‘thinking people’, but much of what they call thinking turns out to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against these assertions.

‘As always, Sowell’s analysis is well informed and displays a great deal of common sense…’ The American Spectator

1995, Published by Perseus Publishing, ISBN 978-0 465 08995-6, 310pp, PB