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Robert Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 – January
4, 2005) was an United States|American economist.
The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was
best known for The Worldly Philosophers (1953),  a
survey of the lives and contributions of famous
economists, notably  Adam Smith,  Karl Marx, and
John Maynard Keynes. 

Heilbroner grew up in New York, and graduated from
Harvard University in 1940 with a summa cum laude
degree in philosophy, government and economics.
During World War II, he served in the United
States Army and worked at the Office of Price
Control under John Kenneth Galbraith, the highly
celebrated and controversial Institutionalist
economist. After the war, Heilbroner worked
briefly as a banker and entered into the academia
in the 1950s as a research fellow at the New
School for Social Research. During this period, he
was highly influenced by the German economist
Adolf Lowe who was a foremost representative of
the German Historical School.

In 1963, Heilbroner earned a Doctor of
Philosophy|Ph.D. from the New School for Social
Research, where he was subsequently appointed
Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971 and
remained for some fifty years.

Although a highly unconventional economist, who
regards himself more of a social theorist and
"worldly philosopher" (philosopher pre-occupied
with "worldly" affairs, such as economic
structures), and who tends to integrate the
disciplines of history, economics and philosophy,
Heilbroner was nevertheless recognized by his peer
as a prominent economist. He was elected Vice
President of the American Economic Association in
1972.  

Written in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold
nearly four million copies -- the
second-best-selling economics text of all time
(the first being Paul Samuelson's "Economics," a
highly popular university textbook.) The seventh
edition of the book, 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. 

He also came up with a way of classifying
economies, as either Traditional (primarily
agriculturally-based, "primitive"), Command
(centrally planned economy, often involving the
state), Market (free market capitalism), or Mixed
(a mixture of the previous three).


== External links ==

*
http://www.newschool.edu/gf/econ/faculty/heilbrone
r/home/index.htm Robert Heilbroner's home page at
the New School for Social Research