25 Robert Heilbroner Quotes About Economic History and Philosophy

There are lots of different perspectives on socialism and capitalism.

Pick one of these Robert Heilbroner quotes and share your perspective with us.

Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian who studied the economic thoughts of famous economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

Heilbroner authored around 20 books and was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953).

It chronicled the lives and contributions of other famous economists.

It’s no surprise that there are many Heilbroner quotes about socialism, communism, and economics.

Keep reading to learn more about Heilbroner and his thoughts!

Heilbroner was a great mind who graduated from Harvard University in 1940 with a Summa Cum Laude degree in philosophy, government, and economics.

He served in the United States Army during WWII and worked at the Office of Price Control under John Kenneth Galbraith.

After the war, Heilbroner tried being a banker briefly.

However, he soon entered academia in the 1950s, becoming a research fellow at the New School for Social Research.

During this period, the German economist Adolph Lowe, who was a foremost representative of the German Historical School, had a significant influence on Heilbroner.

In 1963, Heilbroner earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research.

Enjoy these Robert Heilbroner quotes and sayings!

Don’t forget to also check out these Adam Smith quotes from the father of modern economics.

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Robert Heilbroner quotes on socialism, communism, and capitalism

1. “Socialism has been a great tragedy this century.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

2. “Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

3. “The cure for capitalism’s failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

4. “Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

5. “Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the twentieth century.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

6. “But despite the clarion words of the Manifesto, the demonic note was not a call for a revolution of communism; it was a cry born only of frustration and despair.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

7. “To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

8. “Today and over the foreseeable future, traditional capitalism throughout most of the world has been thrown on a defensive from which it is doubtful that it can never recover.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

9. “If socialism failed, it was for political, more than economic, reasons; and if capitalism is to succeed, it will be because it finds the political will and means to tame its economic forces.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

10. “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won… Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

11. “Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

12. “Communists talked to the masses and urged violence, if necessary, to encompass their ends; the Socialists appealed to their own kind—to the intelligentsia, the petit-bourgeois, the freethinking middle-class citizen, or the intellectually emancipated aristocrat—for adherents to their schemes.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

Robert Heilbroner quotes about Marxism and democracy

13. “We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

14. “Marx wrote only a few pages about socialism, as either a moral or a practical blueprint for society.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

15. “The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

16. “As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

17. “For one who has read the works of Marx, it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

18. “Karl Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary, he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

Robert Heilbroner quotes and sayings on economics

19. “Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

20. “If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

21. “It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

22. “If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodox.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

23. “Nevertheless, these first readings will give us a chance to think about a matter that we would certainly consider to be at the heart of economics—the drive to gain wealth.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

24. “The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

25. “The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment.” ― Robert L. Heilbroner

What did you learn from these Robert Heilbroner quotes?

After he completed his doctoral studies, Heilbroner was appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971, a post he held for over twenty years, teaching mostly History of Economic Thought courses at the New School.

Heilbroner, an outspoken socialist for most of his life, was viewed as a highly unconventional economist.

In fact, he regarded himself as more of a social theorist and “worldly philosopher.”

He desired to integrate history, economics, and philosophy.

However, his peers recognized Heilbroner as a prominent economist, electing him Vice President of the American Economic Association in 1972.

In 1992, he published an article in Dissent, a left-wing intellectual magazine published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, that “capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure.”

He complimented Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises on their views that the free market was superior, emphasizing that “democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist.”

However, Heilbroner’s preferred capitalist model was the states of Scandinavia.

Scandinavia has a high redistributionist welfare system, and he stated that his model society was “a slightly idealized Sweden.”

What do you think about these Robert Heilbroner quotes and sayings?

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