A Great Light Appears

Business Civilization in Decline By Robert L. Heilbroner Norton, 127 pp., $6.95 cloth, $2.95 paper No short essay destined to restore our skepticism about the good sense of academia’s titans can be all bad. Professor Heilbroner has managed this restoration with impeccable skill in a very few pages. He has produced a testament of orthodox-liberal Bourbonism, showing us that university economists have forgotten little and learned nothing since the days, forty years ago, when secondhand book stores began to fill up with volumes not unlike the one before us, arguing that capitalism is, deservedly, on its last legs and that a more just, humane, and exalted social order is waiting around the corner to take its place. The framework of the professor’s analysis is a survey of “the system’s” prospects during its next (and, we’re assured, its last) hundred years. Variations on the theme, though, have been played ever since the Depression, and we come away from this latest discussion with a heavy sense of déjà vu (or maybe déjà lu).

In the next ten years “an increasingly planned system in which the drift of business society will be toward a business-government state” is unavoidable, Heilbroner contends. Regulation, indeed, helps (it doesn’t subvert) economic activity; and conservatives err if they fail to see that government intervention is absolutely necessary “if capitalism is to be kept alive at all.” Just what college students hear without letup: New Deal interventionism alone saved capital and property from the doom that hovered near in the 1930s.

JF

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J. D. Futch

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Business Civilization in Decline By Robert L. Heilbroner Norton, 127 pp., $6.95 cloth, $2.95 paper No short essay destined to restore our skepticism about the good sense of academia’s titans can be all bad. Professor Heilbroner has managed this restoration with impeccable skill in a very few pages. He has produced a testament of orthodox-liberal Bourbonism, showing us that university economists have forgotten little and learned nothing since the days, forty years ago, when secondhand book stores began to fill up with volumes not unlike the one before us, arguing that capitalism is, deservedly, on its last legs and that a more just, humane, and exalted social order is waiting around the corner to take its place. The framework of the professor’s analysis is a survey of “the system’s” prospects during its next (and, we’re assured, its last) hundred years. Variations on the theme, though, have been played ever since the Depression, and we come away from this latest discussion with a heavy sense of déjà vu (or maybe déjà lu).

In the next ten years “an increasingly planned system in which the drift of business society will be toward a business-government state” is unavoidable, Heilbroner contends. Regulation, indeed, helps (it doesn’t subvert) economic activity; and conservatives err if they fail to see that government intervention is absolutely necessary “if capitalism is to be kept alive at all.” Just what college students hear without letup: New Deal interventionism alone saved capital and property from the doom that hovered near in the 1930s.