Guest Editor’s Introduction

William Milberg Guest Editor’s Introduction T H IS SPECIA L ISSU E OF SOCIAL RESEARCH CELEBRATES THE FIFTIETH anniversary of the publication of Robert Heilbroner’s classic work, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas ofthe Great Economic Thinkers. The book, now in its seventh edition, has sold more copies in the United States than any other book on economics, with the exception of Paul Samuelson’s undergraduate text Economics. Heilbroner’s book remains popular because of his wonderfully flowing and accessible writing style and the colorful detail he provides about the lives of the otherwise face­ less giants in the history of “the dismal science” of economics. We learn, for example, that Adam Smith, who lived with his mother until she died at 90 and then continued his “bachelor’s life in peace and quiet,” was so absentminded that “on one occasion he descended into his garden clad only in a dressing gown and, falling into reverie, walked fifteen miles before coming to.” Karl Marx was “not an orderly man; his home was a dusty mass of papers piled in careless disarray in the midst of which Marx himself, slovenly dressed, padded about in an eye-stinging haze of tobacco smoke.” And Joseph Alois Schumpeter was a “would-be aristo­ crat” who lied to friends about his young wife’s background: “when she was away for a year before their marriage, he explained that she was being properly educated in French and Swiss schools. In fact she was earning her living in Paris as a maid” (Heilbroner, 1999: 45,140, 298). These amusing tidbits might be enough to sell the book to one generation. But TheWorldlyPhilosophers has now inspired several. Its stay­ ing power comes from its compelling rendition of the great efforts to understand the dynamics of capitalism. These dynamics include shortsocial research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 vii run economic fluctuations and long-run tendencies, wealth accumula­ tion and its devastating “side effects” in terms of income inequality, poverty, government corruption, business collusion, industrial concen­ tration, and, finally, the connection between these turbulent dynamics and the social, political, ethical, and technological issues of the day. What bubbles up from the pages of The WorldlyPhilosophers is the tumul­ tuous evolution o f capitalist societies over the past two and one-half centuries, and the creativity o f the “great economic thinkers” in captur­ ing these complex dynamics. Moreover, Heilbroner shows that such dramatic narratives are of profound relevance to contemporary society and its prospects for the future. The book has given a sense of purpose and hope to generations of young students of economics. At a recent academic conference session devoted to Heilbroner’s work, a number of audience members-all now professional econom ists- spoke of how The Worldly Philosophers had affirmed their feeling that there was more to economics than the diy and politically conservative material they were being fed in textbook form in their college classes. This reaction reflects the multiple layers of The WorldlyPhilosophers. For all its lightness of style, the book’s subtext is the grand role for economic thought in social progress. Subtext became text in the seventh, and most recent, edition of the book published in 1999, in which Heilbroner added a new and final chapter with the ambiguous title “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Heilbroner clearly intended a play on the dual meaning of the word “end”: purpose and termination. Let me consider each of these mean­ ings as I introduce the essays in this special issue of Social Research. The chapter begins with the modest claim that economics is not science and not even theory, but instead an “explanation system” of capitalism. It is notable that Heilbroner resists the notion of theory (we will see why later), but more important is his argument that the substance of economic theory is not individual choice or the study of markets, but capitalism. Capitalism, for Heilbroner, is a socioeconomic system that cannot simply be reduced to markets, but must consider also the acquisitive drive for wealth and the interdependence of the viii social research private and public sectors. With this broad and interdisciplinary scope for economic thought...