Heilbroner, Robert (1919–2005)

ROBERT LOUIS HEILBRONER was the author of The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, which sold over four million copies in seven editions published between 1953 and 1999.

Heilbroner was born into a wealthy German Jewish family in New York City. His father, Louis, founded Weber and Heilbroner, one of the best-known men's clothing businesses of the era. When he went to Harvard University in 1936, the American economy was still in the grip of the Great Depression and John Maynard Keynes's General Theory had just been published. A Phi Beta Kappa economics major, Heilbroner became a keen observer of furious debates over economic theory and policy. Taking courses from notables like Joseph Schumpeter, Edward Chamberlin, Wassily Leontief, Edward Mason, and Alvin Hansen, he was especially influenced by Paul Sweezy, who subsequently became the foremost American Marxist economist of the post-World War II period.

After college, he worked at a commodity-trading firm before a brief wartime stint at the Office of Price Administration, and served as chief intelligence officer in a combat division in the Pacific Theater and later in occupied Japan—for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. After the war, he became a successful freelance writer on topics ranging from economic policy to celebrity interviews.

Concurrently he enrolled in graduate school at the New School for Social Research, where he was greatly influenced by Adolph Lowe and became a democratic socialist. His doctoral research became the basis of The Worldly Philosophers, which was eventually translated into 15 languages. Awarded a Ph.D. in 1963, he was hired by the New School, where he spent the remainder [Page 478]of his career as the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics.

The success of The Worldly Philosophers is generally credited to Heilbroner's remarkable, masterful prose, his ability to clearly and engagingly explain complex issues, and his success at integrating the history of the field into a broader picture. The chapters of The Worldly Philosophers focus on Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, utopian socialists, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter. Critics complain that the work is a “highly prejudicial, unbalanced view of economics.” Without mention of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, or Friedrich Hayek, “free-market proponents” were “poured down an Orwellian memory hole,” according to Mark Skousen.

Heilbroner, who served on the editorial boards of Dissent and Challenge, disdained the term “free market,” countering that “markets aren’t free. They depend on government.” He wrote extensively about the contradictions and shortcomings of capitalism in works like The Limits of American Capitalism (1966) and Business Civilization in Decline (1976). However, he increasingly questioned the Marxist commitment to socialism as a historical destination that can be attained by “scientifically” guided analysis, in works like Marxism: For and Against (1980).

After the collapse of communism in eastern Europe (which he contended to be a “defeat … for human aspiration”), he famously opened a 1989 New Yorker essay titled “The Triumph of Capitalism” this way: “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won. The Soviet Union, China, and eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy; however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism; and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one.” In retrospect he concluded that he had accorded too little adaptability to capitalism and too much to socialism.

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