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The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, Seventh Edition Paperback – August 10, 1999
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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.
- Length
368
Pages
- Language
EN
English
- Publication date
1999
August 10
- Dimensions
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.4
inches
- ISBN-109780684862149
- ISBN-13978-0684862149
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—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
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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Worldly Philosophers
The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic ThinkersBy Robert L. HeilbronerTouchstone
Copyright © 1999 Robert L. HeilbronerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 068486214X
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.
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. Heilbroner
Copyright renewed © 1981, 1989, 1995 by Robert L. Heilbroner
Continues...
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.
Product details
- ASIN : 068486214X
- Publisher : Touchstone; 7th Revised edition (August 10, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780684862149
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684862149
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.92 x 8.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #35,406 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Comparative Economics (Books)
- #20 in Theory of Economics
- #42 in Economic History (Books)
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About the author

Robert Heilbroner is the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at The New School for Social Research. He is the author of over twenty books, among them The Worldly Philosophers. He lives in New York City.
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Now the book: With an exquisite, elegant and appealing style, Robert Heilbroner goes along three centuries or so in which economics has lived with us in the modern sense of the word. To make the difference he explains the emergence of the politics, markets and the capital as connected phenomenons. Never before the world had seen something like this. That's why Adam Smith wrote "An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations" on 1776 and not before. I would say that this is the first important lesson that Mr. Heilbroner gave me, a very layperson in this topic.
The book is organized in ten chapters that covers from mid eighteenth century to mid twentieth century. Every chapter transmit the context and the predominating ideas of some worldly philosopher about the changes and disruptions that economics has undergone. The underlying idea of the book is to tell the tale through the heroes of the story rather than the processes. In this sense every reader could disagree with the selection that the author made to tell the story. Why not this or that economist, but in this sense I would remain the sentence that J. L. Borges used to settle the point: there is no anthology that doesn't begin well and doesn't end bad. And this selection --like any other-- is not an exception.
Every economist is presented with his history together with his legend. All of them were really strange and freaky guys. All of them were smart and clever enough to grasp the contents of a world --our world-- which is very introspective and it doesn't speak so much about itself. So they explain the world and then they say what would happen to it in the next future if it follows the same path.
I would say that every philosopher had an explanation to show how the machinery of economics worked. And I would add that all of them --even Adam Smith-- had a prophecy about the future of that machinery. This is what the book does. It gives you the character, then the ideas and, finally, the prophecies of this heroes. In a sense, all of them were right and all were wrong. The thing is that philosophy is neither a science nor a discipline that gives you a recipe for not committing mistakes. Philosophy is a discipline that gives you the tools for explaining the world showing --at the same time-- the underlying foundations that makes you feel sure about what you say. That's why our worldly philosophers could attack and criticize each other with very dangerous and lethal (i.e., intellectual) weapons.
What do we find at last? We find an unforgettable last chapter that speaks about the future, as did the philosophers, of economics. The title of the chapter is "The end of the worldly philosophy?" so you you have to notice the subtle pun between philosophers and philosophy that hides with a hussy smile the last and important message of Heilbroner. I'm not going to talk about that because it would be like revealing the name of the murderer in a detective story so this will be your task as a reader if you make the decision of reading the book.
This book!
One with highly deserved five stars.
The greatest thinkers (limited to Western/economic thinkers of the last three centuries) were people of flesh and blood, and in general most scientific (/and economic) texts ignore the persona behind the idea, principle or axiom. Every philosopher who has contributed to the unraveling of the mystery cult of market where profit is a virtue is revisited and celebrated as a prophet in The Worldly Philosophers. Prophets, not soothsayers, bring insight into existing situations/problems by providing perspectives that are either not available before them or are not pronounced with the same authority or clarity. Yet not all philosophers are ready for the realities of the world, just as not all the societies are mature or conducive for arrival and survival of their philosophers. The last ones are nevertheless worth being aware of, and the book introduces a remarkable cast of such characters as well.
Reading the book makes one realize that a few fundamental questions remain unanswered in the field of economics: What is good and bad (in terms of choices, decisions, profit: personal vs labor force vs society? Where does the profit arise from: is it always causing injury to someone somewhere? Are market forces ever seeking profits for a marginal few? Can capitalism survive the contradictions brought about by rational or irrational self-interest versus welfare of humanity or society? Does capitalism always lead to imperialism, the nineteenth century version or the new one where multinational companies play a similar role? Is the customer always the king or is it only a ploy to rob the customer of his rightful profits? Can socialism exist unless many of the economic problems are first solved so that there is enough labor and enough work and enough food in the system? Will technocrats take over the world one day (or should they)? Does a perfect economic system exist only as a utopia?
The book emphasizes how the current economic system is in fact only a century or so old, and is ever evolving, increasing in complexity, and when it comes to the distribution of wealth, the present times are no different in the West than were the days of the mediaeval Europe. We are forced to examine our notions of progress, property and propriety, and we are forced to admit that we have evolved varied ways of exploitation of masses and resources for achieving gains for a select few. Yet by its very nature, such a book provides an example of why intellectuals, why philosophers, why scholars are so central to directing and controlling human activity. In the clamor for justice in distribution of wealth we sometimes forget that we humans value things differently in different times, and equality and justice require equal opportunity for receiving any reward (material or spiritual). Perhaps we need a new worldly philosopher who will inspire a mode of production and distribution that allows education and opportunity to everyone when they are growing up, care and medicine to all old people after their share of tasks are done and sensible distribution of necessities to enable humans to live with honor, dignity, honesty and health. Before such a philosopher takes the center stage, he or she will find this book as a useful guide to the lives and works of thinkers before him/her, and I am sure he/she will nod and say, reading this made damn good economic sense!
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Liest sich allerdings zäh für Ungeübte. Wenn ihr jmd. fordern wollt, dann drauf zu.












