Robert L. Heilbroner,
who died January 4 at the age of 85, was one of a dwindling
generation of professional economists who had broad humanistic
curiosity and progressive values, and who wrote graceful prose for a
large audience. Heilbroner was first and foremost a student of the
history of economic thought. His masterwork, The Worldly
Philosophers, written in 1953, was once required reading in
introductory economics courses. His characterization of the great
political economists was perfect: They were moral philosophers with
empirical curiosity -- worldly philosophers
Heilbroner was not just their chronicler. He was one of them. His
great lifelong project, with Smith, Mill, Marx, and Keynes, was to
get his mind around the capitalist system and to figure out how the
thing worked.
His other truly great book was a short work written in 1985,
The Nature and Logic of Capitalism. Like Marx, with whom he
had an intellectual love-hate relationship, Heilbroner understood
capitalism as a system of social relations and political power, not
just exchange. An empiricist, he had little patience for
oversimplification of any kind, neither “the reductionism of vulgar
Marxism” nor the “vulgar reductionism of modern theoretical
economics, which perceives capitalism as merely a neutral field of
property rights.”
In the early 1980s, I paid a call on Heilbroner while researching
a book. I was a little startled to find that he lived in a Park
Avenue duplex. “I’m not wealthy,” he explained. “I was just
fortunate to sell a lot of books, and I happened to be in the market
for an apartment in 1975,” the year the bottom fell out of the
Manhattan real-estate market. He had picked up his place, he
explained, for well under $100,000. I mumbled something about the
professional economist understanding real-estate cycles. “No,” he
said. “It was just lucky timing.”
A man of charm and sweetness, he appreciated just how much the
economic fate of ordinary people is simply an accident of luck and
timing. That made him an egalitarian (though, as a worldly man, he
didn’t mind living well). I never was his student, but I repeatedly
sought him out as a teacher, and he was unfailingly generous and
wise.
It’s a pity that few economics students nowadays read the worldly
philosophers. Heilbroner, along with John Kenneth Galbraith, Karl
Polanyi, and Albert Hirschman, deserves to be read and read and
read. The academy and the society will be better places when
professional economists again find this broadly educated voice.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect.