Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/45bfa7f0-62ac-11d9-8e5d-00000e2511c8.html 
 
Inspiration to generations of economists 
Published: January 10 2005 02:00 
 
Robert Heilbroner, author of Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and  
Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers and among the most influential  
economic historians of the 20th century, has died in New York. He was 85. 
 
Dr Heilbroner, who had suffered for the past three years with Lewy Body  
disease, a rare Alzheimer's-like illness, died of a stroke last Wednesday,  
according to his son, David. 
 
A professor at the New School in New York for five decades and author of  
more than 20 books, Dr Heilbroner remains best known for his first book,  
Worldly Philosophers, an engrossing account of the lives and contributions  
of economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes.  
Written as his doctoral thesis in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold  
nearly 4m copies - the second best-selling economics text of all time  
(after Paul Samuelson's Economics)-and remains required reading in the  
economics departments of virtually every American college. The book is  
also credited with inspiring the careers of generations of economists. 
 
In his later years, Dr Heilbroner became a critic of the modern economics,  
cautioning that the focus on mathematics and esoteric models to the  
exclusion of any societal factors diverged from the great strides made by  
his Worldly Philosophers. This failure of vision, he warned, threatened to  
render the field irrelevant. In 1996's The Crisis of Vision in Modern  
Economic Thought, co-authored with Will Milberg, he noted that "the high  
theorising of the present period [in economics] attains a degree of  
unreality that can be matched only by medieval scholasticism". 
 
"Bob Heilbroner was a man of very strong and sincere feelings about the  
world," said Peter Bernstein, economic consultant and author of Against  
the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Mr Bernstein attended Harvard with  
Dr Heilbroner and the two remained lifelong friends since boyhood. 
 
Born in 1919 and raised in Manhattan, Dr Heilbroner attended Harvard in  
the late 1930s, studying under Worldly Philosopher Joseph Schumpeter and  
other luminaries at a time of great ferment and upheaval in economics  
caused by the Great Depression as well as the revolutionary theories of  
John Maynard Keynes. After graduating, Dr Heilbroner worked for a  
commodities trading firm before leaving to serve as an intelligence  
officer in the Pacific in the second world war. 
 
After returning to the business world at the war's end, Dr Heilbroner  
turned to writing and the study of economics, enrolling at the New School  
in New York City under the mentorship of Adolph Lowe. It was during this  
time that Worldly Philosophers was born. 
 
"He was clear about how he wanted to describe, not only the lives and  
ideas of each man, but the crucial linkages between them," Mr Bernstein  
wrote in a tribute to his friend in the Summer 2004 edition of Social  
Research. "The result was this extraordinary, and apparently immortal,  
history of economic thought." 
 
Dr Heilbroner's other prominent works include A Primer on Government  
Spending, a influential treatise in favour of President John F. Kennedy's  
income tax cuts co-authored with Mr Bernstein; and Economics Explained,  
written with Lester Thurow. 
 
Dr Heilbroner is survived by first wife, Joan, second wife, Shirley, and  
his two sons, Peter and David. 
 
Dr Heilbroner stopped writing three years ago but he remained a prolific,  
passionate and controversial voice well into his late 70s. The seventh  
edition of Worldly Philosophers, published in 1999, included a new final  
chapter entitled "The End of Worldly Philosophy", which included both a  
grim view on the current state of economics as well as a hopeful vision  
for a "reborn worldly philosophy" that incorporated social aspects of  
capitalism. 
 
"Economics will not, and should not, become a political torch that lights  
our way into the future," he wrote in the new coda, "but it can and should  
become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure  
can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility and develop its  
social morale." 
 
Steve Schurr 
Financial Times 
***** 
 
 
Humberto Barreto