The end of the worldly philosophy - interview with Robert Heilbroner - Interview

Challenge ,  May-June, 1999

• Email
• Print

Interview with Robert Heilbroner

The noted author deplores the lack of a broader vision in economics today.

Q You have raised a disturbing question in the new edition of your book The Worldly Philosophers. The title of the last chapter is "The End of the Worldly Philosophy?" What do you mean by that?

A. I wanted to alert the reader at the beginning of this edition that it has a more disconcerting ending than previous ones. I do so in a new preface, but then do not say much more about it. I simply advise the reader not to look ahead. It would be like turning to the end of a mystery story to see who committed the murder. Then when we come to this last chapter, it is called "The End of the Worldly Philosophy?" And I point out that the word "end" has two meanings. One is termination and one is purpose. So, there is a double meaning or suggestion here. Is this the termination of the worldly philosophy? Or are we asking what the purpose of the worldly philosophy really is?

Q. You came up with the term "worldly philosophy" in the first edition of your book, now nearly fifty years ago. What do you mean by worldly philosophy?

A. It was partly the child of necessity. I wanted a word other than economics. At the time, as I often say in the book, I thought that the word "economic" was death at the box office. I thought the word "philosophy" was more appropriate. But what kind of philosophy? Material philosophy? Then I had lunch with Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, and he said, "You mean worldly." I said, "I'll buy lunch," because it was a wonderful word. And it is still a wonderful word. By worldly philosophy I mean the vision of the problem to which a rather technical apparatus we call economics has long been directed. In other words, what is meant by the worldly philosophy is what Adam Smith saw, what Schumpeter saw. Not the division of labor as such. Not the various technical pieces of the gross domestic product. For example, very early in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he tells us what his vision is. The question he wants to answer is, how can a society of "perfect liberty" hang together once it has left the period of history in which its boss at the top, called a king, looks over things and autocratically allocates goods and territory and status. Suddenly in this world of perfect liberty, it is every person for himself, more or less. How can all this hang together? That is not the only theme of the book, but it is the central theme. He shows that the market system has an internal discipline. He does not go into issues such as equilibrium, where prices determine the balance between supply and demand. He does not go into all sorts of things that we know about these days. Later on, other themes come to the surface. But Smith focuses on a central theme in the market. The market encourages a new way of producing things through the division of labor. He talks at great length about how this affects pin manufacturing. Incidentally, he never points out the possibility that the division of labor can be applied in a store or in the factory next door where they make wool fabric. Smith has no concept of how the economy grows. When he talks about growth, he means the growth of cities. You would think that Adam Smith was the father of this concept, but he is not. He is the father of this interesting concept about productivity with pin production. He also says of the factory discipline to which the individual is subjected that, in his words, it makes a man as ignorant and stupid as it is possible for a human being to become. So the worldly philosophy to him is not only a technical improvement; it also involves a moral deterioration. That is precisely what separates worldly philosophy from economics.

I know a lot of economists who have written about productivity effects. But they do not write about moral effects or about how the mind might be dulled. The worldly philosophy means that, in the early days when the greats were expounding on it for the first time, they did not hesitate to point out that these "economic" changes had moral, political, sociological repercussions. In other words, the worldly philosophy was very much a mixture of sociology, psychology, and political consequences as well as the production and distribution consequences that we now call economic.

Q How has that changed in recent years or recent decades?

A. There is an increasing reluctance to go from a technical discussion of production and distribution to a discussion of the political and social side effects of these matters. We never use the word "capitalism" these days. It is apparently not scientific enough. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw is the author of a popular, well-written textbook, and he is a very bright guy. He talks about the need to use scientific language, but he never uses the word "capitalism."

Q. Let's clarify this. Greg Mankiw says in his textbook that economics is very much like a science, that economists must pursue the scientific method and scientific analysis.