Robert Heilbroner
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Robert L. Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 – January 4, 2005) was an American economist. The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
Heilbroner grew up in New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1940 with a summa cum laude degree in philosophy, government and economics. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and worked at the Office of Price Control under John Kenneth Galbraith, the highly celebrated and controversial Institutionalist economist. After the war, Heilbroner worked briefly as a banker and entered into the academia in the 1950s as a research fellow at the New School for Social Research. During this period, he was highly influenced by the German economist Adolf Lowe who was a foremost representative of the German Historical School.
In 1963, Heilbroner earned a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research, where he was subsequently appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971, and where he remained for some twenty years.
Although a highly unconventional economist, who regarded himself as more of a social theorist and "worldly philosopher" (philosopher pre-occupied with "worldly" affairs, such as economic structures), and who tended to integrate the disciplines of history, economics and philosophy, Heilbroner was nevertheless recognized by his peers as a prominent economist. He was elected Vice President of the American Economic Association in 1972.
Written in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold nearly four million copies -- the second-best-selling economics text of all time (the first being Paul Samuelson's Economics, a highly popular university textbook.) The seventh edition of the book, published in 1999, included a new final chapter entitled "The End of Worldly Philosophy", which included both a grim view on the current state of economics as well as a hopeful vision for a "reborn worldly philosophy" that incorporated social aspects of capitalism.
He also came up with a way of classifying economies, as either Traditional (primarily agriculturally-based, perhaps subsistence economy), Command (centrally planned economy, often involving the state), Market (capitalism), or Mixed.
Though an outspoken socialist for nearly his entire career, Heilbroner famously wrote in a 1989 New Yorker article:
- Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won...Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.[1]
He further explained in Dissent in 1992 that "capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure" and complimented Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises on their insistence of the free market's superiority. He emphasized that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."
Heilbroner died in January, 2005.
[edit] Bibliography
partial list:
- The Worldly Philosophers, 1953, Simon & Schuster, 7th edition, 1999: ISBN 0-684-86214-X
- The Future as History, 1960
- The Making of Economic Society, 1963, Prentice Hall, 10th edition 1992, 11th edition 2001: ISBN 0-13-091050-3 (the first edition served as his PhD dissertation)
- A Primer on Government Spending (with Peter L. Bernstein), New York: Vintage Books, 1963
- The Limits of American Capitalism, Harper & Row, 1966
- "Do Machines Make History?" Technology and Culture 8 (July 1967): 335-345.
- An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 1974, W. W. Norton, 2nd edition 1980: ISBN 0-393-95139-1, R. S. Means Company, 3rd edition 1991: ISBN 0-393-96185-0
- Marxism: For and Against. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980. ISBN 0-393-95166-9
- The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977; 2d ed. (with Aaron Singer), 1984; 4th edition (Wadsworth Publishing), 1998, ISBN 0-15-505530-5.
- Economics Explained: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works and Where It's Going (with Lester Thurow), 1982, 4th edition, 1998, ISBN 0-684-84641-1
- The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, 1985, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-95529-X
- Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy, 1988, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-30577-5
- The Debt and Deficit: False Alarms/Real Possibilities (with Peter L. Bernstein), 1989, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-30611-9
- "Analysis and Vision in the History of Modern Economic Thought." Journal of Economic Literature (September 1990): 1097-1114.
- 21st Century Capitalism, 1993, W. W. Norton hardcover: ISBN 0-88784-534-7, 1994 paperback: ISBN 0-393-31228-3.
- "Technological Determinism Revisited." In Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, edited by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
- The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought. (with William S. Milberg), 1995, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-49774-4
- Teachings from the Worldly Philosophers, W. W. Norton, 1996, ISBN 0-393-31607-6
- The Economic Transformation of America Since 1865 (with Alan Singer), Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997, ISBN 0-15-501242-8
[edit] See also
Langdon Gilkey, “Robert L. Heilbroner’s View of History,” Zygon, 10 (1975), 215-33.
