I was saddened to hear of Bob Heilbroner's death and the disease that 
plagued him these past few years. When I was in NY I got to know Bob and he 
participated in our NYC history of thought group (which under the leadership 
of Roger Koppl, Gary Mongiovi and Steve Pressman met for 2 years or so), he 
spoke at NYU to our Austrian group and he also spoke to my students at 
Manhattan College when I taught there for 1 year before I moved to GMU in 
1998.  He wrote a comment on a paper of mine that was published in a 
symposium in CR that included Thomas Mayer and Dan Hausman and he 
participated in a symposium that I organized on his wonderful book with Will 
Milberg.  My experiences with Bob Heilbroner were always joyful occasions 
for he was a man who cared about ideas passionately. In fact, I was 
absolutely thrilled when I was asked to co-author with Bob the entry on 
comparative systems in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 
Despite our ideological differences, Bob was an amazingly kind person to me 
and encouraged me in my work in the history of thought and methodology. When 
we were writing the Encyclopedia piece (I was basically updating and 
revising aspect of earlier entries that had been written by him, which in 
turn was originally written by John Kenneth Galbraith --- so how about that 
for the changing of ideas?!) we spoke on the phone a few times. 
 
Anyway, our discipline is far poorer because the likes of scholars like Bob 
Heilbroner are not being reproduced.  When I started my intellectual career 
like many who have strong ideological priors I tended to divide the world 
neatly into those who are evil, those who are stupid and those fortunate 
souls who think rightly like me.  I was fortunate to be exposed at an early 
stage to Kenneth Boulding, Warren Samuels and Robert Heilbroner --- who all 
disabused me of that neat division.  Here were brilliant men, with the 
kindest of spirits and best of intentions, who simply disagreed with the 
libertarian positions that I held (and still hold).  Each of these 
individuals was also willing to discuss at length these ideas with someone 
who was apart from them and to not get frustrated (or at least not show any 
visible signs of frustration and kept talking to me for years to come).  I 
fear that we don't have broad minded social theorists in our discipline 
being replicated any more (certainly not of the breadth and talent of those 
three) and to the extent that is true the "worldly philosophy" is less rich 
in insight and promise than it should be. 
 
Peter J. Boettke