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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW 
 
Published by EH.NET (January 1999) 
 
Michael C. Carroll. _A Future of Capitalism: The Economic Vision 
of Robert Heilbroner_. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ix + 117 pp. 
$59.95 (cloth).  ISBN: 0-312-17754-2. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Ross B. Emmett, Department of Economics, 
Augustana University College.  <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
               A Unified Vision for the Future? 
 
Let me begin with two admissions. First, I would not be a historian 
of economics today if it were not for Robert Heilbroner. Encountering 
_The Worldly Philosophers_ in my first-year "history of western civ" 
course, and then again (with the same professor!) in my fourth-year 
"modern intellectual history" course, convinced me that the 
"economic mind" was central to modernity. I avidly consumed some 
of his other books as an undergraduate student: _The Future as 
History_, _The Great Ascent_, _An Inquiry into the Human Prospect_, 
_Beyond Boom and Bust_, and _Marxism: For and Against_. Questions 
regarding the relation between modernity and economics have 
dominated my career since. I thought it somehow fitting that my first 
opportunity to hear Heilbroner speak in person came only hours 
after I defended my dissertation. 
 
Second, the more I reflect on the questions regarding modernity 
and economics that Heilbroner first raised for me, the less my 
reflections look like those Heilbroner himself offers. Reading _A 
Future of Capitalism_, by Michael Carroll (now teaching at West 
Virginia State College), confirmed my suspicions regarding the 
central differences. We will get to those differences in due 
course, but first, comments about Carroll's treatment of 
Heilbroner. 
 
The key to understanding Heilbroner's work, Carroll tells us, is 
to construct out of his various works a systematic presentation 
of his ideas. This is what Carroll sets out to do. After a basic 
intellectual biography, he uses Heilbroner's criticism of 
standard economics to set up the key components of Heilbroner's 
"system": a hermeneutic, multi-dimensional approach aimed at 
uncovering the hidden unifying structure of capitalist society. 
Carroll argues that Heilbroner combines Marx's socioanalysis with 
a psychoanalytic perspective on human behavior and an economics 
focused on how power and social organization intersect in the 
material provisioning of humankind (informed by the work of 
Adolph Lowe, Heilbroner's friend and colleague at the New 
School), in order to reveal the internalized institutions and 
values which comprise the capitalist system. Carroll moves freely 
among Heilbroner's writings spanning several decades to show how 
his analysis focuses on the interlocking nature of, and tensions 
among, three central internalized institutions and values in 
capitalism: the drive to accumulate capital, the market, and 
division between private and public realms. 
 
Once we appreciate Heilbroner's understanding of the underlying 
structure of capitalism, Carroll then asks what Heilbroner's view 
to the future would be: uncovering the central contradictions of 
capitalism allows some tentative conclusions about its further 
development. Can the system sustain the drive to accumulate? 
Probably not, but capitalism has proven remarkably resilient; it 
has the capacity to transform itself even though changes may also 
create constraints for the system. The system's real enemies, 
therefore, are the disruptions which reveal its endemic self- 
contradictions: structural unemployment, for example, which 
emerges from the drive to accumulate and the market's organizing 
features, yet undermines future productivity, aggregate demand, 
and people's hopes for their future. Or globalization, which by 
extending the market's organization around the world in the 
absence of a global institutional base, jeopardizes the system's 
separation of the public and private worlds in the drive to 
"accumulate, accumulate, accumulate." In these, and other 
disruptions, Heilbroner sees the evolution of capitalism 
continuing. The role of an economist like Heilbroner, Carroll 
argues, is not to sketch out the particular features of the 
future, but to trace "future visions": potential outcomes of the 
evolution of the relations among capitalism's central elements. 
 
As you may perhaps see from the previous paragraphs, Carroll's 
attempt to uncover the unifying structure of Heilbroner's ideas 
parallels Heilbroner's own hermeneutics of capitalism. For the 
hermeneuticist, interpreting texts and interpreting societies are 
similar problems. Unlike Heilbroner, however, Carroll's stance 
toward Heilbroner's system is not critical. He is in fact 
enamored with Heilbroner's ideas; and not the kind of affection 
Marx had for capitalism! The net result is a book remarkably like 
those that appear all too frequently in the history of economic 
thought -- studies of little-known or long-forgotten economists 
which seek to convince us of their place in the pantheon. Far 
more interesting would be a serious effort to seek out the 
reasons why Heilbroner's ideas have had such little impact on the 
modern economics profession, or to examine the way his work has 
been shaped by, and has itself shaped, modernism in the social 
sciences. 
 
And make no mistake, Heilbroner is a modernist, despite his 
criticism of the type of modernism inherent in 20th century 
economics. Heilbroner's modernism appears in the search for the 
underlying unity of capitalism, the effort to give it a singular 
meaning, and the quest to identify its future. Like Marx before 
him, and numerous other hermeneutic scholars of the mid-twentieth 
century, Heilbroner searches for unity beneath the fragmentation, 
even if only to reveal the nature of the fragmentation. 
 
The hermeneuticist's approach to unity and fragmentation has been 
at the center of my attention over the past couple of years, as I 
have been engaged in a series of discussions on hermeneutic 
theory with a number of my colleagues in other disciplines. One 
of the key issues we have identified as a source of division among 
us is the difference between those who believe that hermeneutic 
theory provides the capacity for creating meaning and unity in 
the midst of a fragmented social system, and those who believe 
that hermeneutics provides a means of uncovering meaning, unified 
or fragmented. The former group identifies the difference between 
hermeneutics and science with the distinction between the unity and 
the fragmentation of knowledge--despite epistemological claims 
for science's unique role in creating knowledge, science 
fragments, while hermeneutics unites. (Carroll makes much the same 
claim in his chapter on Heilbroner's critique of modern 
economics.) The latter group, myself included, identified 
hermeneutics with the uncovering of meaning/s, and sees the quest 
for unity (in either hermeneutic theory or science) as a peculiar 
attribute of modernism. In this latter way of thinking, texts 
such as Heilbroner's are the sites of multiple meanings, and 
their interpretation may gain more from trying to locate those 
different meanings (contextually, or in terms of various 
interpretive communities) rather than the quest to render them 
coherent and consistent. In a similar fashion, capitalism is 
over-determined: a social framework being pulled in various 
directions by a host of competing self-contradictions and 
tensions; generating multiple meanings and an array of present 
realities and future possibilities. 
 
I appreciate hermeneutic theory because it reminds me of things 
my training in economics attempted to make me forget, and urges 
upon me a humility in regard to the appreciation of the work of 
others that modernity encouraged me to ignore. Reading Heilbroner 
provided much the same experience. In the end, however, I see no 
more reason to look for a unified account of the future of 
capitalism than I do a systematic treatment of such a wonderful 
writer's lifetime of work. 
 
 
Ross B. Emmett 
John P. Tandberg Associate Professor of Economics 
Augustana University College, Camrose, Alberta, Canada 
 
A scholar of American economics during the interwar years, Ross 
Emmett has focused on Frank H. Knight and Chicago economics. Two 
articles will appear shortly: "The Economist and the 
Entrepreneur: Modernist Impulses in Frank H. Knight's Risk, 
Uncertainty and Profit," forthcoming in _History of Political 
Economy_  (Spring 1999); and "Entrenching Disciplinary 
Competence: The Role of General Education and Graduate Study in 
Chicago Economics," forthcoming in _From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar  
Neoclassicism_, edited by Malcolm Rutherford and Mary Morgan. A two-volume 
selection of essays by Frank H. Knight will appear from The 
University of Chicago Press in the next year 
 
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