The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, Seventh Edition by Robert L. Heilbroner (PDF)

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The bestselling classic that examines the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Karl Marx—“all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish” (The New York Times).The Worldly Philosophers 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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Editorial Reviews: Review “A brilliant achievement.” —John Kenneth Galbraith“If ever a book answered a crying need, this one does. Here is all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish by a man who writes with immense vigor and skill, who has a rare gift for simplifying complexities.” —The New York Times“Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers is a living classic, both because he makes us see that the ideas of the great economists remain fresh and important for our times and because his own brilliant writing forces us to reach out into the future.” —Leonard Silk“The Worldly Philosophers, quite simply put, is a classic….None of us can know where we are coming from unless we know the sources of the great ideas that permeate our thinking. The Worldly Philosophers gives us a clear understanding of the economic ideas that influence us whether or not we have read the great economic thinkers.” —Lester Thurow“Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith inspired several readers to become Nobel laureates in biology. Robert Heilbroner’s new edition of The Worldly Philosophers will inspire a new generation of economists.” —Paul Samuelson From the Back Cover 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. About the Author Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Worldly PhilosophersThe Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic ThinkersBy Robert L. HeilbronerTouchstoneCopyright © 1999 Robert L. HeilbronerAll right reserved.ISBN: 068486214XIntroductionThis 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.It would be convenient if we could begin straight off with the first of the great economists — Adam Smith himself. But Adam Smith lived at the time of the American Revolution, and we must account for the perplexing fact that six thousand years of recorded history had rolled by and no worldly philosopher had yet come to dominate the scene. An odd fact: Man had struggled with the economic problem since long before the time of the Pharaohs, and in these centuries he had produced philosophers by the score, scientists, political thinkers, historians, artists by the gross, statesmen by the hundred dozen. Why, then, were there no economists?It will take us a chapter to find out. Until we have probed the nature of an earlier and far longer-lasting world than our own — a world in which an economist would have been not only unnecessary, but impossible — we cannot set the stage on which the great economists may take their places. Our main concern will be with the handful of men who lived in the last three centuries. First, however, we must understand the world that preceded their entrance and we must watch that earlier world give birth to the modern age — the age of the economists — amid all the upheaval and agony of a major revolution.Copyright © 1953, 1961, 1967, 1972, 1980, 1992, 1999 by Robert L. HeilbronerCopyright renewed © 1981, 1989, 1995 by Robert L. HeilbronerContinues…Excerpted from The Worldly Philosophersby Robert L. Heilbroner Copyright © 1999 by Robert L. Heilbroner. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is without question one of the finest popular introductions to any subject written in the past several decades. Heilbroner does not intend this as a full-fledged introduction to economics and certainly could never serve as an introduction to the subject in a classroom setting, but it is an exceedingly well-written, highly informed, enormously entertaining first-dip into what Carlyle called “the dismal science.” Although Heilbroner does not neglect either historical context or the ideas driving the worldly philosophers, the account is distinguished by great attention to the lives of the leading economists. He is throughout as concerned to have us get to know the men behind the ideas as the ideas themselves.I suspect that part of Heilbroner’s motivation in focusing so much on the lives of the great economists is that so many of them were such interesting individuals that their very existences dispel some of the stereotype of economics being dull and dry. Mind you, not even Heilbroner’s lively pen can enliven some of these individuals’ lives. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall lived remarkably uneventful lives. But Heilbroner is at his best depicting the marvelously odd friendship of Malthus and Ricardo, the quirks of Saint-Simon and Henry George, the wonderful eccentricity of Thorstein Veblen, and the easy genius of John Maynard Keynes. Not that Heilbroner neglects the ideas. He writes wonderfully about many of the key ideas driving the thought of each of these thinkers, but he neither tries to be exhaustive (he barely touches on the highpoints of Marx, for instance) nor attempt to detach them from the context of particular individuals living at a particular juncture in history.I have to say something about Heilbroner’s style. Today, unfortunately, too many scholars simply cannot write. This has always been true to an extent, but fewer and fewer academics seem to foster the ability to write mellifluous sentences. Heilbroner does not belong to their ranks. He resembles fellow scholars such as Lewis Thomas and Simon Schama in his ability to write memorably, cleverly, and clearly. The degree to which this enhances the value of the book as a whole cannot be overemphasized.Finally, because today virtually all talk of economics passes easily into political economy, I should say something about Heilbroner’s own point of view. I say “point of view” rather than “bias” simply because the latter is one of–if not THE–most abused terms in the United States today (it is not abused in other countries). Talk of “bias” rather than truth or falsity arose in the early 1970s when many conservatives realized that they had lost the debates of the sixties. Unable to win arguments on a level playing field, conservatives wanting to infiltrate the mass media concocted the plan of redefining discussion of contemporary issues in terms of bias rather than truth. Instead of an idea being discussed in terms of its ultimate rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, the Right (largely in response to the famous Powell memo–just Google “Powell” and “memo”–for a world of resources on this–Lewis Powell, by the way, late in life while still on the Supreme Court came to feel that his position in the memo was mistaken) wanted to change the terms of the debate to the particular points of view of the individuals involved (he said, she said). Part of this involved the invention of the myth of the liberal media. The media, they argued, was biased, it was liberal (though it certainly was not liberal). My point is this: having a point of view does not equate to bias, and even having a bias does not mean that one warps the facts to fit one’s position. I do not think that Heilbroner is “biased.” But his positions do place him at a particular point on the political spectrum. He is very far to the left. Though not perfect, he thinks the reforms of the New Deal were a very good thing indeed. But he is far more to the left than that: he thinks socialism has much to recommend, but he is a realist in that he believes we are, for good or ill, stuck with a capitalist system. At least for now. Thus we do not find a near worship of the ideas of Adam Smith (though in fact most on the Right who bring up Smith actually are talking about the Vienna School’s imaginative recreation of him and not the historical Adam Smith) nor a knee jerk dismissal of Keynes or even Marx. I would, in fact, say that throughout Heilbroner, though a leftist, treats all the major figures rather fairly. Had he in later editions of his book extended his book beyond Schumpeter, who ends the book, to include von Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, Samuelson, Arrow, Friedman, Sen, and others, he might have found some he would have found more (Polanyi, Samuelson, Arrow, and Sen) congenial and others he would have found less (von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman). What I want to emphasize he how balanced Heilbroner is.I heartily recommend this to anyone wanting an introduction to the history of economic thinking. It is hard to find a more successful popular introduction to an intellectual discipline than this. Although first published in the early 1950s, Heilbroner revised it repeatedly during his lifetime, the final time in the late nineties. For a highly readable introduction to the first two hundred years of economic thinking, it can hardly be surpassed.

⭐This is still one of the best written, easy-to-follow storybook of the philosophers who shaped the world’s economic thinking. Every economics student should have it on their bookshelf (and every instructor ought to blow off the dust and re-read it once in a while).

⭐If you are looking for a heavy on info read, this is your book. The info provided is why I’m giving 4 stars. Its great and plentiful.I took away a star because it isn’t necessarily a page turner for me. I find myself often checking how many more pages are left in the chapter until I can read about someone new, usually a lot of pages left.

⭐Great book for those needing a quick glance at the “who’s who” of economic philosophy, perfect if you are about to take a class and would like a quick read to get you better acquainted with the greats you will learn more about.

⭐I often buy books on AMZN (a great American company) and just browse a chapter or two, or read the conclusion and this book was worth the $9, so I won’t throw it away. I’ll paraphrase:”I started off on this project in the 50s and had to read up on Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Mill, Schumpeter etc. (edit: all of whose wiki page I have read, of course) It was fascinating and the book has been a success beyond my dreams. But when I open Mankiw book, it’s all math. Not economics. And when I open Stiglitz book, it is 997 pages and doesn’t contain the word “capitalism” in it. That doesn’t sound quite right”He concludes: “…but leadership will lack for clear directions without the inspiration of an enlightened as well as an enlarged self-definition of economics. Assuredly such a new economics will incorporate knowledge from the domains of other branches of social inquiry…” etcBut economics is simple: …and there should be no such thing as “an economist”. They are worse than lawyers…. Just let the economy alone – don’t mess with it, or you disrupt it and hurt it. This has been known for hundreds of years!! –what have we just done? C’est la vieHad to deduct a star because he was a Marxist pleb for most of his life but then added that star it back because he conceded to Hayek, Friedman and Mises per wiki that socialism been an abysmal failure. Unfortunately it’s coming back with a vengeance. “We are all communists now”

⭐I loved this book. A very readable account of the lives and theories of great economist’s.

⭐This is an older edition, but stil very good.

⭐Sehr interessant zu lesen. Die Druckauflage an sich ist nicht sehr hochwertig. Allerdings super für Wirtschaftsinteressierte, vor allem da die deutsche Ausgabe eingestellt wurde und nicht mehr auffindbar ist.Liest sich allerdings zäh für Ungeübte. Wenn ihr jmd. fordern wollt, dann drauf zu.Fantastic book. I am an econ major and this has given me plenty of insight and context for some of the things I am learning, as mentioned by many others – this book serves a need that economics teaching often lacks. The book is divided up so each chapter covers a different economist and time in history, which makes it easy to read at your own pace. It is written to be understood by a wide audience and the author does a great job explaining economic concepts in terms everyone could understand.

⭐Heilbroner has an easy writing style which seems as though he is talking to you. It has the essentials of the theories as they developed from Smith through to Shumpeter, but also great anecdotes about how extraordinary many of these thinkers were.

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