Heilbroner and Polanyi: A Shared Vision

Robert W. Dimand Heilbroner and Polanyi A Shared Vision INTRODUCTION: A SHARED VISION OF ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF HIS INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF debates among Marxist historians and economists over The Transitionfrom Feudalism to Capitalism that were initiated by Dobb (1946), Rodney Hilton (1976:9) recalled that Karl Polanyi (1948) “thought that Dobb had retained from Marx what was bad (the labour theoiy of value) whilst discarding what he, Polanyi, thought was Marx’s 'fundamental insight into the historically limited nature of market organisation.’” Beyond condescend­ ing praise of Polanyi’s review for “a serious attitude to the problems of a Marxist analysis” and passing mention in the next paragraph that R. H. Tawney’s review of Dobb “did not raise any of the general theoretical problems which Polanyi hinted at,” Hilton (and the other contributors reprinted in the volume) proceeded to ignore Polanyi’s challenge as thor­ oughly as any mainstream neoclassical economist could have done. In contrast, Robert Heilbroner shared the fundamental insight that Polanyi derived from Marx, and brought it to the attention of millions of readers. Over four decades and in 11 editions of The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner examined the replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing soci­ ety and production during the Industrial Revolution, while in seven editions of The World Philosophers that spanned nearly half a centuiy he explored the accompanying changes in how economists thought about the economy. In his vision both of how the economy had changed and social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 385 how economic thought had interacted with these changes, Heilbroner stood shoulder to shoulder with Polanyi. The varied intellectual inspirations of Heilbroner’s approach to “political economics” are indicated in The Worldly Philosophers, written while he was a graduate student at the New School for Social Research. He dedicated the book to his teacher, Adolph Lowe, whose “particularly fascinating seminar on Adam Smith” Heilbroner was taking when he thought of writing his book (see also Heilbroner, 1970b: 165-91, review­ ing Lowe, 1965). “The Inexorable System of Karl Marx,” “The Savage Society of Thorstein Veblen” (one ofthe New School’s founding faculty), “The Heresies of John Maynard Keynes”, and “The Contradictions of Joseph Schumpeter” (who taught at Harvard while Heilbroner was an undergraduate there)1each received a sympathetic and insightful chap­ ter, with Henry George and John Hobson appearing in a chapter on “The Victorian World and the Underworld of Economics.” Citations in The Worldly Philosophers and the first edition2of The Making ofEconomic Society indicate that, among his contemporaries, Heilbroner paid close atten­ tion to the writings on American corporate capitalism ofJohn Kenneth Galbraith (Heilbroner, 1961: 269-70, 288-89, 299; 1962: 136-39, 144n, 229) and of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, both as coauthors and individually (Heilbroner, 1961: 258-61, 266, 268-70, 299; 1962: 124-27, 137,139, see also Heilbroner, 1970b: 52-54, 225-35 reviewing Galbraith; Heilbroner 1970b: 213-23 reviewing Berle; and excerpts from Galbraith in MacEwan and Weisskopf, 1973: 64-68,133-37,198-202). The enthusiastic chapter in The Worldly Philosophers on “The Wonderful World of Adam Smith” and Heilbroner’s later anthology of The Essential Adam Smith (1985) may appear more surprising in light of Heilbroner’s sympathy for dissenters from free market orthodoxy, but, like Spencer Pack and Emma Rothschild among recent Smith scholars, Heilbroner has long been concerned to rescue Smith from the embrace of the hard right.3 Another clear intellectual affinity, not only in the opening chapter on “The Economic Revolution” but throughout both The Worldly Philosophers and The Making of Economic Society, is with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, an intellectual affinity at least as close as any of the others just listed. 386 social research Heilbroner argues that the emergence of “that special field of study called economics” followed from the development of a histori­ cally novel means of handling the problem of provisioning and mate­ rial survival: the market system. Although the societies of history have shown the most astonishing economic diversity, although they have exalted kings and commoners, used dried codfish and immovable stones...