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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:45 2006 |
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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
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