The “economy ” is an abstraction from the social totality, and thus the defining of the subject matter of economics is a task that influences the nature and direction of analysis. For Heilbroner, this meant that the very object of inquiry cannot be presumed self-evident. Biases are always present, at times lurking just beneath the surface, but often emerging in the form of assumptions that determine the content of analytical categories and the direction of prognostications.Īlthough Heilbroner ’s explicit self-identification with a “hermeneutic ” approach came relatively late, he had always emphasized that inquiry necessarily has an interpretive dimension. ” Whereas for Schumpeter, analysis had a kind of “cleansing ” effect, which prevented the necessarily ideological nature of the “pre-analytical cognitive act ” from tainting the scientific endeavor, for Heilbroner, economic theory is inescapably value-laden. In these investigations, Heilbroner adopted his own versions of Schumpeter ’s (1954) notions of “vision ” and “analysis.
Heilbroner ’s initial fascination with the worldly philosophers ’ prognoses led to his own analyses of the economic, political, cultural, and sociopsychological drives, motivations, and propensities underlying production, distribution, and exchange. In other words, the trajectory of the system is inseparable from both the wider sociopolitical context within which the economy is situated and the subjective drives and behavioral tendencies of historical agents, which both shape and are shaped by changing socioeconomic and political structures.
Underlying the system ’s movements were a variety of factors, both economic and noneconomic. The classical scenarios depict the almost inexorable movement of the capitalist economic system, with its “laws of motion, ” its systematic tendencies leading to some “future immanent in the present ” (1992, p. In what became one of the best-selling books in the discipline, Heilbroner outlined the dramatic scenarios of the classical political economists, especially the work of Adam Smith (1723 –1790), David Ricardo (1772 –1823), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 –1834), Karl Marx (1818 –1883), and John Stuart Mill (1806 –1873), as well as Joseph Schumpeter (1883 –1950), Thorstein Veblen (1857 –1929), and John Maynard Keynes (1883 –1946), whom he regarded as continuing the classical tradition of viewing the economy as historically and institutionally situated. Robert Louis Heilbroner was an economist and public intellectual best known for his popular book The Worldly Philosophers (1953).
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