Book review: The Worldly Philosophers

I just finished reading Robert Heilbroner's excellent book The Worldly Philosophers. I forget who recommended it to me, but perhaps it was a mention in this blog by Dianne Coyle. Anyway, the book was first published in 1953 and has been through seven editions, with the last edition (which was the one I read) published in 1999. No doubt, Heilbroner would have written further editions, but he passed away in 2005.

The book is a great primer on the history of economic thought. It doesn't have as broad a coverage as New Ideas from Dead Economists (which I reviewed here) or The Economics Book (which I reviewed here). Heilbroner limits consideration to the truly big names in economics - Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Thorsten Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter. And there is a fairly large cast of supporting actors. But what the book lacks in breadth it more than makes up in depth, as well as in the sheer quality of the writing. Heilbroner writes in an easy and engaging style, and large parts of the book read more like a historical novel than an exposition of some of the great thinkers in economics. For example, consider this passage, part of a longer section introducing the reader to Keynes:

But this is only a sample of his many-sidedness. He was an economist, of course - a Cambridge don with all the dignity and erudition that go with such an appointment; but when it came to choosing a wife he eschewed the ladies of learning and picked the leading ballerina from Diaghilev's famous company. He managed to be simultaneously the darling of the Bloomsbury set, the cluster of Britain's most avant-garde intellectual brilliants, and also the chairman of a life insurance company, a niche in life rarely noted for its intellectual abandon. He was a pillar of stability in delicate matters of international diplomacy, but his official correctness did not prevent him from acquiring a knowledge of other European politicians that included their mistresses, neuroses, and financial prejudices. He collected modern art before it was fashionable to do so, but at the same time he was a classicist with the finest private collection of Newton's writings in the world. He ran a theater, and he came to be a Director of the Bank of England. He knew Roosevelt and Churchill and also Bernard Shaw and Pablo Picasso. He played bridge like a speculator, preferring a spectacular play to a sound contract, and solitaire like a statistician, noting how long it took for the game to come out twice running. And he once claimed that he had but one regret in life - he wished he had drunk more champagne.

As you can see, Heilbroner gives much insight into the private lives of the great economists (or worldly philosophers, as the book is titled), which you wouldn't normally see in a book on the history of economic thought. Heilbroner does a good job of linking together the key sites of agreement and disagreement, as well as the development of economic theory and philosophy over time. However, he is efficient enough in his writing that the economists' lives outside of economics can be given far more colour. Indeed, he makes them come alive in a way that I hadn't appreciated before, and it was those parts of the book that I especially enjoyed. Of course, that could just be because the history of economic thought was mostly not new to me.

The book is not without its flaws though. He repeats a discredited idea that Thomas Carlyle labelled economics the 'dismal science' after reading the work of Thomas Malthus, when in fact Carlyle was decrying that economists were not in favour of reintroducing slavery in the West Indies (see Wikipedia on this point). Also, I wonder about this point:

Purely by way of curious illustration, it is reported that among the New Zealand Maoris you cannot ask how much food a bonito hook is worth, for such a trade is never made and the question would be regarded as ridiculous.

Heilbroner is relying there on the doctoral work of the ethnologist Raymond Firth from the 1920s (I have Firth's book on the economics of Māori, but haven't read it as yet), but I strongly suspect that work has not aged well, and trade was certainly not unknown to Māori even earlier than Firth's writing.

Nevertheless, I did really enjoy this book. If you are looking for a nice gentle introduction to the history of economic thought, with a bit more history and biography, and a bit less of the economics, this would be a great book to try.