The Worldly Philosophers

“Yet what they did was more decisive for history than many acts of statesmen who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing than the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kings and legislatures. It was this: they shaped and swayed men’s minds.” 

Heilbroner argues that economics is not cold, impersonal, and difficult to understand, but rather an exciting field with world-changing impact. Despite its reputation as “the dismal science,” and the way modern mathematization of economics makes it seem too complex to understand, Heilbroner asserts that everyone can—and should—understand economics because it has just as much, if not more, impact on history than political and military events.

“Thus it was neither their personalities, their careers, their biases, nor even their ideas that bound them together. Their common denominator was something else: a common curiosity. They were all fascinated by the world about them, by its complexity and its seeming disorder, by the cruelty that it so often masked in sanctimony and the success of which it was equally often unaware. They were all of them absorbed in the behavior of their fellow man, first as he created material wealth, and then as he trod on the toes of his neighbor to gain a share of it.” 

The thinkers Heilbroner calls “the worldly philosophers” were united by their desire to understand how market society solved (or didn’t solve) the problem of survival, as well as their drive to grapple with what the future of capitalist society would look like. Heilbroner is attracted to thinkers who challenged the economic orthodoxy with radical theories, many of which later became accepted as common sense. 

“When men and women no longer work shoulder to shoulder in tasks directly related to survival—indeed when two-thirds of the population never touches the earth, enters the mines, builds with its hands, or even enters a factory—or when the claims of kinship have all but disappeared, the perpetuation of the human animal becomes a remarkable social feat.”

The problem of survival is central to the emergence of the market system and to economics as a discipline. Under the tradition or command systems, it was obvious how humanity survived, and a field known as economics was unnecessary. When the market system evolved, generating a world on which society survived despite its members’ pursuit of self-interest, the field of economics spawned in an effort to understand it.