THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS: THE LIVES, TIMES, AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT ECONOMIC THINKERS (342 pp.)—Roberf L. Heilbroner—Simon & Schuster ($5).
The fraternity of economists is recent and exclusive. For the first 6,000 years of recorded history, no candidate presented himself, because economics in the modern sense did not exist. The production of food, the making and selling of goods, was thought subject to the laws of God, King or custom; no one suspected that such lowly economic activities might have laws of their own. That thought did not dawn until the late Renaissance, when trade and transport burst medieval barriers and began to claim all the world for a market place. Not until the 18th century was that new market place seen in a single vision and a single theory.
The man who had the vision and wrote down the theory, in a scholarly tome called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was an exceedingly odd Scotsman named Adam Smith. Most economists of note since then have been no less odd, and have influenced the affairs of men by reacting, in one way or another, to Adam Smith's vision. In The Worldly Philosophers, Robert L. Heilbroner, a successful magazine writer but no scholar, tells the stories and beliefs of these men, beginning with Smith himself. It is a sprightly popularization which makes the odd economists human, and humdrum economics fun.
A Wonderful World. Smith was a professor of philosophy whose absentmindedness was staggering. Once he left his home in a dressing gown and walked 15 miles before coming to. His speech was bumbling, his gait "vermicular," his appearance unfetching. "I am a beau," he once said, "in nothing but my books." When he first met Dr. Johnson in a heated argument, the lexicographer said: "You lie." Smith retorted crisply: "You are a son of a bitch!"
Confronted with the anarchic but enormously fruitful growth of early capitalism, Smith began by asking himself what caused that growth, and wound up by making a revolutionary statement about man: i.e., that the quest for gain is good. This had been said before by cynics, but never with the almost reverent seriousness of Smith. In his explanation of the economic life, the quest for gain provided needed goods and services as well as competition among their purveyors. Competition, and the changing pressures of supply & demand in the market place, forced each businessman to conform to the needs of the community. It would be a wonderful world, Smith thought, if the market mechanism were allowed to follow its unimpeded destiny in a soaring spiral of productivity; in that case, self-interest would result in riches even for the poor.