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 remained for some fifty years.

Although a highly unconventional economist, who regards himself more of a social theorist and "worldly philosopher" (philosopher pre-occupied with "worldly" affairs, such as economic structures), and who tends 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, "primitive"), Command (centrally planned economy, often involving the state), Market (free market capitalism), or Mixed (a mixture of the previous three).

Heilbroner died in January, 2005.

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Bibliography

partial list:

The Worldly Philosophers, 1953, Simon & Schuster, 7th edition, 1999: ISBN 068486214X
The Future as History, 1960
The Making of Economic Society, 1963, Prentice Hall, 10th edition 1992, 11th edition 2001: ISBN 0130910503 (the first edition served as his PhD dissertation)
"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 0393951391, R. S. Means Company, 3rd edition 1991: ISBN 0393961850
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 0155055305.
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 0684846411
The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, 1985, W. W. Norton, ISBN 039395529X
Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy, 1988, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0393305775
The Debt and Deficit: False Alarms/Real Possibilities (with Peter Bernstein), 1989, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0393306119
"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 0887845347, 1994 paperback: ISBN 0393312283.
"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 0521497744
Teachings from the Worldly Philosophers, W. W. Norton, 1996, ISBN 0393316076
The Economic Transformation of America Since 1865 (with Alan Singer), Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997, ISBN 0155012428