Heilbroner's One-Armed Philosophers; M. Skousen

I am not surprised that The Worldly Philosophers has gone through multiple edi tions since 1953. Heilbroner has written a col orful and entertaining masterpiece. And no one has come up with a better title about the lives and ideas of the great economic thinkers. Challenge also interviewed the 70-year-old professor. One question they failed to ask, however,is, "Why have you doggedly refused to acknowledge the success of twentieth-cen tury freemarket schools of economics?" Heilbroner's Bias Yes, it's a sad commentary: Robert Heil broner, the masterful stylist, suffers from one Mark Skousen (http://www.mskousen.com; mskousen @aol.com) is an economist at Rollins College, Department o/Economics, Winter Park, FL 32789, a Forbes columnist, and editor of Forecasts & Strate gies. His textbook, Economic Logic, is now available from FEE. 43 serious defect-a highly prejudicial, unbal anced view of economics. After revising and updating his book seven times, he still never mentions the Chicago school of Milton Fried man and the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (although he does have a chapter on Joseph Schumpeter, the enfant terrible of the Austrians).

Heilbroner's resolve is a tragic reminder of the one-sided way economics was taught a generation ago: Give Adam Smith his due, and then spend the rest of the time patronizing Keynes, Marx, Veblen, and the socialists. Meanwhile, the Chicago school, the Austrians, the supply-siders, the public choice school, and other freemarket propo nents are poured down an Orwellian memory hole. Heilbroner's bias reminds me of Stalin's rewriting of history when he would have his enemies' pictures erased from official pho tographs. In Heilbroner's photograph of the "great economic thinkers," he has erased men like 1. B. Say, Carl Menger, Eugen Bohm Bawerk, Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, Frank H. Knight, Henry Simons, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Robert Lucas, and James Buchanan, among others. Heilbroner writes as if the Nobel Prize in economics hadn't existed for the past 25 years!

44 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • DECEMBER 1999 Both Mark Blaug and James Tobin regard Irving Fisher as the greatest American econo mist. A year ago, Time magazine's editor-in chief, Norman Pearlstine, named Milton Friedman "economist of the century," ahead of Keynes.2 Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanis law wrote in The Commanding Heights: "In the postwar years, Keynes's theory of govern ment management of the economy appeared unassailable. But a half century later, it is Keynes who has been toppled and Hayek, the fierce advocate of free markets, who is pre eminent."3 Yet you wouldn't know anything about Fisher, Friedman, or Hayek after read ing The Worldly Philosophers. No one is objecting to Heilbroner's right to favor Keynes over Friedman, but to ignore Friedman (whose name does not even appear in the seventh edition) is a travesty. Why the Sins of Omission? All editions of The Worldly Philosophers have purposely hid the background of the author, and with good reason. His mentors are Marxists Paul Sweezy at Harvard and Adolph Lowe at the New School for Social Research.

No wonder he wrote so sympathetically toward Marx.4 Heilbroner has been a dedicat ed "democratic socialist" for most of his life and was for many years the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics at the New School. He is perhaps the only economist in the Unit ed States who holds a chair named after a socialist political leader. He has long favored a large public sector and Keynesian deficit spending. He hates the term "free market," adding, "Markets aren't free. They depend on government."5 He prefers the Marxian term "capitalism." Several years ago, I met Bob Heilbroner in his New York apartment and asked him why he ignored Friedman and Hayek. He felt that Friedman had not advanced economics beyond Adam Smith, and as for Hayek, he said, "I tried reading Hayek but could never follow him." Yet 1 give Heilbroner high marks for condemning abstract mathematical mod eling in economics as generating "rigor, but, alas, also rigor mortis," and for being the only socialist to publicly give credit to Mises and Hayek for correctly anticipating the collapse of Soviet central planning.6 Galbraith and Buchholz: More Balanced Views Heilbroner could learn a lot from his friend John Kenneth Galbraith. Although Galbraith's title isn't as dramatic, Economics in Perspec tive (Houghton Mifllin, 1987) bends over backwards to be fair to freemarket econo mists. Sure, Galbraith>gives full space to his favorite writers (Keynes, Veblen, Marx), but he also devotes major portions of his book to Say's law and the French laissez-faire school, the Austrians' critique of socialism, Fisher's quantity theory of money, and Friedman's monetary counterrevolution to Keynesian economics.

Heilbroner's rewriting of history is one rea son more and more instructors are turning to more balanced histories of economic thought such as Todd Buchholz's New Ideas from Dead Economists (Penguin, 1989 and revised in 1999). Like Heilbroner, Buchholz has chapters on Smith, Marx, Veblen, and Keynes, but then gives equal time to Alfred Marshall and the marginalist revolution and the twentieth-century counterrevolution of Fried man and Buchanan. Buchholz leaves out the Austrians because, he says, he was never taught anything about Mises or Hayek when he attended Harvard. D 1. Interview with Robert Heilbroner, Challenge, May-June 1999, p.62. 2. Time, December 7, 1998, p. 35. However, when Time pub lished its "The Century's Greatest Minds" special issue, the editors gave top billing to Keynes. Pearlstine acknowledged a disagreement between him and his editors. "This is not the first time that the edi tors of Time have chosen to disagree with me.... I still think Fried man is the economist of the century." (Private correspondence, April 20, 1999.) 3. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 14-15.

4. In the 1961 edition I used in college, Heilbroner wrote that Marx was a "devoted husband and father" (p. 124), but after it was revealed that he had an illegitimate son from his housemaid, Heil broner dropped the approving reference. 5. Challenge interview, p. 61. 6. Robert Heilbroner, "The Triumph of Capitalism," The New Yorker, January 23, 1989, and "Reflections After Communism," The New Yorker, September 10,1990.

Zip _ Have you heardthe latestfrom Washington? These days it seems as if everybody is crying for the truth. But how often do you actually feel that you can believe what you hear or read? If pureed truth and strained journalism makes you want to scream, we'd like to invite you to subscribe to The WashingtonTimesNationalWeekly Edition,the only nationally circulated newspaper in the country with the courage and conviction to cover the news honestly. Every week, we'll bring you a fresh, honest, unbiased look at the people and events that shape the news in Washington D.C. and around the world. No liberal spin. No hidden agenda. Just vigorous, unapologetic journalism and clean, crisp writing. Anything less would be downright childish. --------- ~~~~~~~~...-L Try It FREE! Call today and order 4 weeks of The Washington Times National E ton free of charge! If you like it, you'll receive 48 more issues, for a total of 52 and pay only $59.95. If you decide not to subscribe, simply write "cancel" on your invoice and owe nothing at all! The 4 sample copies will be yours to keep!

Name _ Address _ City State Credit Card # Exp. Date _ Signature Phone _ Make checks payable to: The Washington Times NWE. Clip and mail with payment to: PO Box 96601, Washington, DC 20090 For lightning-fast delivery, call 1-800-363-9118 (Mention express code: 2055) 46 BOOKS Individualism in Modern Thought from Adam Smith to Hayek by Lorenzo Infantino Routledge • 1998 • 248 pages • $85.00 Reviewed by Andrew I. Cohen S ome social theorists believe that moral, political, and economic order must be imposed according to some central plan. In their view, only constant management can generate and sustain the complex, mutually supportive norms of advanced societies. Another tradition in social thought defends an "open society"-one founded on respect for voluntarism and individual freedom. Thinkers in that tradition believe social order can and should emerge spontaneously. Lorenzo Infantino, a professor of sociology in Rome, embraces methodological individu alism, which understands complicated social phenomena in terms of their simpler compo nents, namely, individual human actions.