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The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers (Paperback)
by Robert L. Heilbroner
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Biography |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A nice summary and analysis of the great Economic thinkers from Adam Smith, Marx, Ricardo to Mill, Keynes, Schumpeter and others. A helpful bibliography. |
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Author: Robert L. Heilbroner
Publisher: Touchstone
Pub. in: August, 1999
ISBN: 068486214X
Pages: 368
Measurements: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00834
Other information: 7 Rev Sub edition
ISBN-13: 978-0684862149
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- MSL Picks -
"A man who thinks economics is only a matter for professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the barricades. A man who has looked into an economics textbook and concluded that economics is boring is like a man who has read a primer on logistics and decided that the study of warfare must be dull."
Robert Heilbroner has accomplished his mission in writing a book making the major economic theories in human history easily understandable. He writes in a very engaging style about the life and times as well as the socio economic history of the times of some of the most important economists throughout history. His useful insights into these men's lives and the world around them is essential in understanding why they developed their economic theories, such as capitalism, communism, socialism and a command economy. Heilbroner deftly brings these concepts to light using easy to understand examples to explain difficult concepts. He also provides a very useful bibliography for those who would like to delve deeper into economics.
Heilbroner puts a human side to the often-bleak science of economics by describing the personalities and social situation of the various characters in the story. This makes it easy to understand what was possibly behind their political beliefs and economic models. It also makes it easy to understand their views on issues like the motives of individuals, the motives of the wealthy, the role of labor and land in economic thought, and beliefs about the cause of imperialism. Models of production, consumption, and the distribution of wealth evolved with the growth of society and of political-economic systems supporting capitalism, socialism, and communism. This evolution of economic thought is best understood within the philosophical concept of Hegelian dialectics. Economic ideas changed because of synthesis of previous ideas challenged by new and opposing ideas that result in a new concept or synthesis, which is closer to the truth than the previous thoughts. This appears to be the approach used by many of the economic philosophers. It is also the approach used by Heilbroner to help pull the historical story together throughout his book.
Heilbroner clarifies or provokes thinking on a number of issues and questions that politicians and economists continue to debate and attempt to understand. First, he shines a light on the dichotomy between capitalism and socialism and drives thinking on where along the continuum societies have evolved. He also drives thinking on the interplay between economic models and the larger socio-political environment. This brings into question the impact of government and society on economic models and theories. Economic models are developed given assumptions about how citizens and governments behave under a given set of conditions. The thinking of citizens and governments evolve which could render established economic models relatively ineffective. For example, established economic thinking and models were changed by the industrial revolution. The current technological revolution and information age is again causing a rethink of economic assumptions. No one would have predicted the events of September 11, 2001 and the impact it had on the thinking of citizens and the U.S. government.
Anyone interested in philosophy, history or politics wanting to start educating themselves in economics will find this book a great place to start.
- From quoting Michael A Neulander and R. E. Bremer
Target readers:
General readers
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Robert L. Heilbroner is the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at The New School for Social Research and is the author of more than twenty books. He lives in New York City.
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From the publisher
The Worldly Philosophers is a bestselling classic that not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas - namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.
In a bold new concluding chapter entitled "The End of the Worldly Philosophy?" Heilbroner reminds us that the word "end" refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today's increasingly "scientific" economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.
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Introduction
This is a book about a handful of men with a curious claim to fame. By all the rules of schoolboy history books, they were nonentities: they commanded no armies, sent no men to their deaths, ruled no empires, took little part in history-making decisions. A few of them achieved renown, but none was ever a national hero; a few were roundly abused, but none was ever quite a national villain. Yet what they did was more decisive for history than many acts of statesmen who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing than the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kings and legislatures. It was this: they shaped and swayed men's minds.
And because he who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter, these men shaped and swayed the world. Few of them ever lifted a finger in action; they worked, in the main, as scholars - quietly, inconspicuously, and without much regard for what the world had to say about them. But they left in their train shattered empires and exploded continents; they buttressed and undermined political regimes; they set class against class and even nation against nation -- not because they plotted mischief, but because of the extraordinary power of their ideas.
Who were these men? We know them as the Great Economists. But what is strange is how little we know about them. One would think that in a world torn by economic problems, a world that constantly worries about economic affairs and talks of economic issues, the great economists would be as familiar as the great philosophers or statesmen. Instead they are only shadowy figures of the past, and the matters they so passionately debated are regarded with a kind of distant awe. Economics, it is said, is undeniably important, but it is cold and difficult, and best left to those who are at home in abstruse realms of thought.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A man who thinks that economics is only a matter for professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the barricades. A man who has looked into an economics textbook and concluded that economics is boring is like a man who has read a primer on logistics and decided that the study of warfare must be dull.
No, the great economists pursued an inquiry as exciting - and as dangerous - as any the world has ever known. The ideas they dealt with, unlike the ideas of the great philosophers, did not make little difference to our daily working lives; the experiments they urged could not, like the scientists', be carried out in the isolation of a laboratory. The notions of the great economists were world-shaking, and their mistakes nothing short of calamitous.
"The ideas of economists and political philosophers," wrote Lord Keynes, himself a great economist, "both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."
To be sure, not all the economists were such titans. Thousands of them wrote texts; some of them monuments of dullness, and explored minutiae with all the zeal of medieval scholars. If economics today has little glamour, if its sense of great adventure is often lacking, it has no one to blame but its own practitioners. For the great economists were no mere intellectual fusspots. They took the whole world as their subject and portrayed that world in a dozen bold attitudes - angry, desperate, hopeful. The evolution of their heretical opinions into common sense, and their exposure of common sense as superstition, constitute nothing less than the gradual construction of the intellectual architecture of much of contemporary life.
An odder group of men - one less apparently destined to remake the world -- could scarcely be imagined.
There were among them a philosopher and a madman, a cleric and a stockbroker, a revolutionary and a nobleman, an aesthete, a skeptic, and a tramp. They were of every nationality, of every walk of life, of every turn of temperament. Some were brilliant, some were bores; some ingratiating, some impossible. At least three made their own fortunes, but as many could never master the elementary economics of their personal finances. Two were eminent businessmen, one was never much more than a traveling salesman, another frittered away his fortune.
Their viewpoints toward the world were as varied as their fortunes -- there was never such a quarrelsome group of thinkers. One was a lifelong advocate of women's rights; another insisted that women were demonstrably inferior to men. One held that "gentlemen" were only barbarians in disguise, whereas another maintained that nongentlemen were savages. One of them - who was very rich - urged the abolition of riches; another - quite poor - disapproved of charity. Several of them claimed that with all its shortcomings, this was the best of all possible worlds; several others devoted their lives to proving that it wasn't.
All of them wrote books, but a more varied library has never been seen. One or two wrote best-sellers that reached to the mud huts of Asia; others had to pay to have their obscure works published and never touched an audience beyond the most restricted circles. A few wrote in language that stirred the pulse of millions; others - no less important to the world - wrote in a prose that fogs the brain.
Thus it was neither their personalities, their careers, their biases, nor even their ideas that bound them together. Their common denominator was something else: a common curiosity. They were all fascinated by the world about them, by its complexity and its seeming disorder, by the cruelty that it so often masked in sanctimony and the success of which it was equally often unaware. They were all of them absorbed in the behavior of their fellow man, first as he created material wealth, and then as he trod on the toes of his neighbor to gain a share of it.
Hence they can be called worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities - his drive for wealth. It is not, perhaps, the most elegant kind of philosophy, but there is no more intriguing or more important one. Who would think to look for Order and Design in a pauper family and a speculator breathlessly awaiting ruin, or seek Consistent Laws and Principles in a mob marching in a street and a greengrocer smiling at his customers? Yet it was the faith of the great economists that just such seemingly unrelated threads could be woven into a single tapestry, that at a sufficient distance the milling world could be seen as an orderly progression, and the tumult resolved into a chord.
A large order of faith, indeed! And yet, astonishingly enough, it turned out to be justified. Once the economists had unfolded their patterns before the eyes of their generations, the pauper and the speculator, the greengrocer and the mob were no longer incongruous actors inexplicably thrown together on a stage; but each was understood to play a role, happy or otherwise, that was essential for the advancement of the human drama itself. When the economists were done, what had been only a humdrum or a chaotic world, became an ordered society with a meaningful life history of its own.
It is this search for the order and meaning of social history that lies at the heart of economics. Hence it is the central theme of this book. We are embarked not on a lecture tour of principles, but on a journey through history-shaping ideas. We will meet not only pedagogues on our way, but many paupers, many speculators, both ruined and triumphant, many mobs, even here and there a grocer. We shall be going back to rediscover the roots of our own society in the welter of social patterns that the great economists discerned, and in so doing we shall come to know the great economists themselves - not merely because their personalities were often colorful, but because their ideas bore the stamp of their originators.
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| View all 10 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-12 00:00>
This is a great book about philosophers who layed the foundation for modern economic ideas. It provides a wonderful snapshot of the lives and times of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, J.S. Mill, Thorstein Veblen, J.M. Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter, along with a synopsis of their economic thought. Professional economists and economic historians will find this book a bit too basic. The intended audience here is the sophisticated general reader interested in intellectual history, especially as it pertains to economics. I also recommend this book to all students of economics, political economy, public policy, and those studying history of Britain of the last two centuries.
Heilbroner is a good writer and brings his subjet to life. Political economy of economically advanced countries is one of my fields of specialization; and I wrote a dissertation on it, using the Internet as an example of a technological field created as a result of cooperation between business, government, and universities. Still, I learned a lot from this book. It has important facts as well as interesting tidbits that will captivate most intelligent readers. |
Craig (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-12 00:00>
As an economics major in college, I found this to be the most interesting economics book I've read in the field and highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in business, economics, or history. It reads like a good novel as it covers each economist's thoughts and lives, and leads up to the present time. After my older copy wore out, I bought the newer edition. I was disappointed to hear that the author recently passed away, thereby making this the final edition (unless others revise it). Another interesting introductory book is "New Ideas from Dead Economists" which I would recommend after Robert Heilbroner's book. |
Newman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-12 00:00>
This book is an important history of economic thought throughout the ages. It gives the general reader a basic understanding of how economics has changed through the years from Adam Smith to contemporary times.
The impression I gained of this book was that economics does not have a unified theory that addresses all circumstances. A doctrinaire approach could lead to disaster if the solutions proposed to not match the circumstances they were meant to address. In fact, most of the great thinkers of economic matters are addressing specific difficulties which tend to be narrowly focused on a particular set of circumstances. Adam Smith sought to address the problems of mercantilism, Karl Marx the dislocations of the industrial revolution, Keynes, the problems of deflationary economic policy. This is an insightful thesis which explains a great deal.
This book is useful to the person who is familiar with economics and a cautionary tale for people like myself who are not. It provides a good overwiew and gives a good critical understanding of the men and ideas who have contributed to our understanding of these issues. |
Jack (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-12 00:00>
This book is about learning from the past and applying it to the future. It is important that we understand the philosophic economics of the past. The author explains what has happened in a "reader friendly" way where the past is understandable and applicable, which is the pure purpose history serves. |
View all 10 comments |
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