书名：The Worldly Philosophers几位著名经济思想家的生平、时代和思想

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1470L

作者：Robert L. Heilbroner

出版社名称：Touchstone

出版时间：1999

语种：英文

ISBN：9780684862149

商品尺寸：14 x 2.2 x 21.4 cm

包装：平装

页数：368

The Worldly Philosophers《几位著名经济思想家的生平、时代和思想》是一本经济思想史。曾被译成24种文字，既有思想解剖又有历史陈述，颇值一读。

这本书写的是少数几位博得奇特声誉的人物。从所有的供学童读的历史课本的标准看，这些人是从来不提起的——他们既不统帅军队，不掌握生杀予夺之权，也不统治国家，在有关永垂历史的那些事件的擘划中很少参与。他们的多作所为，比之许多政治家的光辉业绩，往往具有更大的决定性意义，比之敌军的出入国境，往往更使人心慌意乱，比之国王或立法院的出于善意或出于恶意的法令，往往具有更加有力的作用。这是由于他们的所作所为，会影响舆论，会动摇人心。

他们究竟是些什么人呢？这里所说的就是那些知名的经济学家。

本书是美国经济学家及经济思想史学家Robert L. Heilbroner所著的英文原版，着重介绍了斯密、李嘉图、马尔萨斯、欧文、傅立叶、圣西门、马克思、凡勃伦、凯恩斯、熊彼特等经济思想家的生平、时代和思想学说。作者特别对这些经济思想家各自的问题意识和理论针对性有着清晰地分析。这为我们全面深入地了解经济理论背后的思想提供了可能。 

The Worldly Philosophersisone of the bestsellingeconomics books of all time. For more than half a century, it has not only enabled us to see moredeeply into our history but has helped us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbronerunearths a theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas—namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.

In a bold concluding chapter entitled “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Heilbroner reminds us that the word “end” refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today’s increasingly “scientific” economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. This timeless classicprovides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.

Review

“A brilliant achievement.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

“Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers is a living classic, both because he makes us see that the ideas of the great economists remain fresh and important for our times and because his own brilliant writing forces us to reach out into the future.”  —Leonard Silk

“If ever a book answered a crying need, this one does. Here is all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish by a man who writes with immense vigor and skill, who has a rare gift for simplifying complexities.”  —The New York Times

“The Worldly Philosophers, quite simply put, is a classic... None of us can know where we are coming from unless we know the sources of the great ideas that permeate our thinking. The Worldly Philosophers gives us a clear understanding of the economic ideas that influence us whether or not we have read the great economic thinkers.”  —Lester Thurow

“Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith inspired several readers to become Nobel laureates in biology. Robert Heilbroner’s new edition of The Worldly Philosophers will inspire a new generation of economists.”  —Paul Samuelson

The bestselling classic that examines the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Karl Marx—“all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish” (The New York Times). 

I Introduction

II The Economic Revolution

III The Wonderful World of Adam Smith

IV The Gloomy Presentiments of Parson Malthus and David Ricardo

V The Dreams of the Utopian Socialists

VI The Inexorable System of Karl Marx

VII The Victorian World and the Underworld of Economics

VIII The Savage Society of Thorstein Veblen

IX The Heresies of John Maynard Keynes

X The Contradictions of Joseph Schumpeter

XI The End of the Worldly Philosophy?

A Guide to Further Reading

Notes

Index

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919-2005 )studied the great economists ever since he was introduced to them atHarvard University in 1936. Hegraduated summa cum laudeand Phi Beta Kappa and went on to practice economics in government and business and then to complete his graduate studies at the New School for Social Research.The Worldly Philosophers, his first book, achieved an immediate success at its publication in 1953 and has been translated into three dozen languages and become astandard introduction to economics in scores of colleges and universities. Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Visions of the Future have also reached a wide public, both academic and general. Dr. Heilbroner, Norman Thomas Professor of Economics at the New School,lectured before many business, government, and university audiences, and received numerous honors including election as vice president of the American Economic Association and nomination as Scholar of the Year by the New York State Council of the Humanities. He was a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security. Heilbroner died in 2005 in New York City at the age of eighty-five. 

Since he came down from the trees, man has faced the problem of survival, not as an individual but as a member of a social group. His continued existence is testimony to the fact that he has succeeded in solving the problem; but the continued existence of want and misery, even in the richest of nations, is evidence that his solution has been, at best, a partial one.

Yet man is not to be severely censured for his failure to achieve aparadise onearth. It is hard to wring a livelihood from the surface of this planet.It staggers the imagination to think of the endless efforts that must have been expended in the first domestication of animals, in the discovery of planting seed, in the first working of surface ores.It is only because man is a socially cooperative creature that he has succeeded in perpetuating himself at all.

But the very fact that he hashadto depend on his fellow man has made the problem of survival extraordinarily difficult. Man is not an ant, conveniently equipped with an inborn pattern of social instincts. On the contrary,heseems to be stronglyendowed with a fiercely self-centered nature. If his relatively weak physique forces him to seek cooperation, hisinner drives constantly threaten to disrupt his social working partnerships. 

Inprimitivesociety, the strugglebetweenself-centeredness and cooperation is taken care of by the environment;when the specter of starvationcanlook a community in the face—as with the Eskimos—the pure needto secure its own existence pushessociety to the cooperative completion of its dailylabors.Under less stringent conditions, anthropologists tell us, men and women perform their regular tasks under the powerful guidance of universally accepted norms of kinship and reciprocity: in her marvelous book on theAfrican Bushmen, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas describes how a gemsbok is divided among relatives and relatives’ relatives, until in the end“no person” eats more than any other.” But in an advanced community, this tangible pressure of the environment, or this web of social obligations, is lacking.When men and women no longer work shoulder to shoulder in tasks directly related to survival—indeed when two-thirds of thepopulation never touches the earth, enters the mines, builds with its hands, or even enters a factory—orwhenthe claims ofkinship have all but disappeared, theperpetuation of the human animal becomes a remarkable social feat.

So remarkable, in fact, that society’s existence hangs by a hair. A modern human community is at the mercy of thousand dangers: if its farmers should fail to plant enough crops; if its railroad men should take into their heads to become bookkeepers or its bookkeepers should decide to becomerailroad men; if too few should offer their services as miners,puddlers of steel, candidates forengineering degrees—in a word, if any of a thousand intertwined tasks of society should fail to get done—industrial life would soon become hopelessly disorganized. Every day the community faces the possibility of breakdown—not from the forces of nature, but from sheer human unpredictability.