Envisioning Provisioning: Adolph Lowe and Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophy

Mathew Forstater Envisioning Provisioning: Adolph Lowe and Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophy The authors [of The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg] also under­ stand deeply the influence ofthegreat masters ofour trade—Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, and Heilbroner’s ownmentor, Adolph Lowe. Lowe would have heartily approved ofthe tasks which the authors want us to do for they were in large part created by his own substantial but much neglected contributions and insights. — GEOFFREY h a r c o u r t (1997:1922-1923) DEDICATED READERS OF ROBERT HEILBRONER’S WORK WILL RECALL THE name Adolph Lowe, Heilbroner’s professor, and later his colleague, at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research. Heilbroner invoked Lowe’s name and ideas in numerous books and articles throughout his career. Often it was a dedication or acknowledgement; at other times a brief mention of one of Lowe’s ideas; occasionally an entire article or chapter exploring in depth his m entor’s latest work; and in Lowe’s later years—and there were many, for he lived to be 102—a number of memoirs and celebra­ tions. This is not to say that the two always agreed—often Heilbroner social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2004 399 departed from Lowe’s positions. Their audiences and writing styles also often diverged. Nor did the influence flow in only one direction: Lowe took Heilbroner’s work very seriously. Despite all this, it still may be the case that in some respects Lowe’s impact and influence on his best known student’s thought remains largely overlooked and underappreciated. This is not the place for a comprehensive analysis of the pair’s relationship and intellectual connections. Instead, what follows is a looser, but in many respects more substantial, situation of Lowe and his outlook within the larger scheme of Heilbroner’s themes and ideas. ADOLPH LOWE AND HEILBRONER’S WORLDLY PHILOSOPHY As readers of The Worldly Philosophers (1953) may recall, Heilbroner becam e interested in “the lives, tim es, and ideas o f the great economic thinkers” after registering for a graduate course taught by Adolph Lowe on Smith, Ricardo, and Marx at the New School’s Graduate Faculty in the mid-1940s. But it was not simply that Lowe inspired an interest in the history o f economic doctrine; Heilbroner adopted Lowe’s basic vision as outlined in the latter’s Economics and Sociology (1935), his article “The Classical Theory o f Economic Growth” (1954), and related writings. This included not only the interpretation o f the great classical political econom ists such as Smith, Ricardo, and Marx (both Lowe and Heilbroner considered Marx in many ways the zenith o f classical political economy), but the reading of later writers such as Keynes, Veblen, and Schumpeter (despite their own stated distance from the classical school) as fundam entally in this sam e tradition of viewing the economy as historically and institutionally situated, and the sharp contrasting of this tradition with that o f neoclassical economics. For Lowe, the static equilibrium models of neoclassical econom­ ics were inadequate to analyze the “dynamic chain of reciprocal causa­ tion” at work in industrial capitalism (Lowe, 1935:138-39). Instead, what 40 0 social research was required was a theoretical approach that could endogenize the structural factors taken as given in standard presentations. Economic analysis must be accompanied “by a theoiy of the evolution of its . .. data” since “[t]he essential variations of those data [are] effected” by economic processes themselves (93-96). Lowe was even dissatisfied with twentieth-century work on economic dynamics precisely due to the fact that the “time honored distinction between dependent and indepen­ dent variables—that is, between an economic process and the underly­ ing meta-economic forces which drive it on and change it—is generally m aintained” (Lowe, 1954: 128). Even “dynamic process analysis” was “but a dim reflection” of what is found in the classics and Marx (128). In fact, Lowe argued that it is the “issue of endogeneity versus exogene­ ity, rather than conflicting theories of value” that separates “genuine Classical theoiy” from...