Robert Heilbroner on Human Agency in Social History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 24 March 2024 is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Robert L. Heilbroner (24 March 1919–04 January 2005), who was born in New York City on this date in 1919.
Heilbroner’s best known book is his history of economic thought The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), which has probably been used in countless economics courses, and which begins like this:
“This is a book about a handful of men with a curious claim to fame. By all the rules of schoolboy history books, they were nonentities: they commanded no armies, sent no men to their deaths, ruled no empires, took little part in history-making decisions. A few of them achieved renown, but none was ever a national hero; a few were roundly abused, but none was ever quite a national villain. Yet what they did was more decisive for history than many acts of statesmen who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing than the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kings and legislatures. It was this: they shaped and swayed men’s minds.”
The method of this book, like Will Durant’s very successful The Story of Philosophy (1926) from a generation earlier, is to write the history of economic thought as represented in a sequence of exemplary individuals. This is Carlyle’s great man theory of history transposed into economic thought. I doubt either Will Durant or Robert Heilbroner would have explicitly endorsed Carlyle, but they nevertheless implicitly follow a Carlylean methodology.
Another way to look at this is through the lens of one of the economists covered in Heilbroner’s book. A famous quote from John Maynard Keynes runs thus:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
It would be possible to derive from this a great ideas theory of history, analogous to Carlyle’s great man theory of history, as well as to what I called the great cities theory of history in my episode on Ferdinand Gregorovius and Rome. This is, approximately, what conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), mentioned in my episode on J. G. A. Pocock, is about. All of these — great men, great ideas, great cities, and conceptual history — constitute distinctive regions in the conceptual mapping of history.
I’m not suggesting that Heilbroner’s work can be reduced to Carlyle’s methods. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, Heilbroner’s work, like that of Herman Kahn, points to the expansion of historical consciousness to the future. In my episode on Karl Jaspers I characterized Jaspers’ work as bringing historical concepts to bear on the present, and the next step beyond that is to bring historical concepts to bear on the future.
Every present is a past’s future. Our present today was our future yesterday. The churning of the present is continually transforming future into present and present into past. Somehow we need to make sense of how time is bound together in a larger whole. One philosophically familiar way to do this is that of J. M. E. McTaggart. McTaggart was part of the tradition of British idealism, and he explicitly denied the reality of time, but his analysis of time, especially his distinction between the A-series and the B-series, has been adopted by many who do not share his metaphysics.
The A-series is the sequence past-present-future, while the B-series is the sequence earlier-later, though I would prefer to employ before-during-after, as this gives us a one-one correspondence with past-present-future. Either of these series gives us order in time. McTaggart also postulated a C-series:
“We have come to the conclusion that there is no real A series, and that therefore there is no real B series, and no real time-series. But it does not follow that when we have experience of a time-series we are not observing a real series. It is possible that, whenever we have an illusory experience of a time-series, we are observing a real series, and that all that is illusory is the appearance that it is a time-series. Such a series as this — a series which is not a timeseries, but under certain conditions appears to us to be one — may be called a G series.” (J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Volume II, section 347)
This resembles Plato’s poetic formulation that time is the moving image of eternity, which I quoted in my episode on Philosophy of History before Augustine, but we should probably distinguish eternity from McTaggart’s C-series.
While we don’t find any elaborate analysis of time like this in Heilbronner, the point is that time, however we conceive of it, is a whole that requires a uniform methodology that applies equally to different times. In McTaggart’s A-series, we find ourselves in the present, looking back at the past and forward into the future. In McTaggart’s B-series, relationships of before, during, and after are eternally true (a contemporary philosopher might say they are tenselessly true), so there is no past, present, and future, but there are still temporary relationships between separated times, some of which occur earlier and some of which occur later. In McTaggart’s C-series, there is some non-temporal order that is the reality behind the appearance of both the A-series and the B-series. In all of these analyses, time is comprehended as a whole, and this means that principles that are applicable to any one time — whether a past or future time, or an earlier or later time — are applicable to other times.
Even if we attempt to avoid metaphysical entanglements of the kind that interested McTaggart, conceptualizing the past is the first step outside the eternal present of naïve cognition. This first step was taken in antiquity, though the conceptualization of the past remains incompletely and imperfect in our time, more than two thousand years later. Conceptualizing the future is another great leap beyond our naïve immersion in the present, and this began only very slowly with the scientific revolution, and experienced its inflection point in the twentieth century.
We can find intimations of this development early in the twentieth century. Henri Pirenne gave a definition of history — the development of human societies in space and time — that does not explicitly invoke the past; of course, there’s no consensus among historians or philosophers of history on a definition of history. But Pirenne’s definition is unusual, and it represents a higher level of abstraction and generality than is usually the case among historians. It also offers an opportunity to justify the extension of historical methods to include the totality of time — past, present, and future — within the proper scope of history, as defined by at least one prominent historian. Heilbronner was among those who contributed to the extension of historical methods to the study of the future, along with thinkers like Herman Kahn, whom I mentioned earlier.
In addition to his books on economics, Heilbroner also wrote a couple of books that take an historical view of the future, The Future as History (1959) and Visions of the Future (1995), as well as various occasional pieces that could be characterized as futurism. In his book The Future as History: The Historic Currents of Our Time and the Direction in which They are Taking America, Heilbronner postulated that a new conception of history appeared with modernity:
“With the change in the reality of mankind’s situation, there came as well a new conception of ‘history’ itself. Previously, as we have seen, the word mainly connoted to its contemporaries the course of the dynastic and military, the political and personal fate of the heroes of society. What lay beneath this pageant was deemed essentially uninteresting, ‘unhistoric’ — except insofar as the masses responded to stimuli from above. But now the meaning of history changed in the consciousness of those who were experiencing it. In a very real sense, ‘society’ discovered itself. The content of history — which is to say, the matters that concerned those who were thoughtful about history — expanded to include aspects of human life which had never heretofore merited the historian’s glance. ‘The thing I want to see,’ wrote Carlyle in the first flush of this new perspective, ‘is not Red-Book lists of Court Calendars and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England’.”
What Heilbronner is writing about here is the rise to dominance of social history. Surprisingly, he quotes Carlyle in a strikingly non-Carlylean moment, reflecting not on great men, but on the life of the ordinary man. Even Carlyle, it seems, was not immune from the influence of social history, which was only to grow. And even though Heilbroner implicitly followed Carlyle’s methods in his history of economics, we can see that his interest is not in great men, but in great forces that shape history.
Heilbroner connects the new history to many other manifestations of modernity beside social history. In particular he highlights the role of optimism about the future, the hope for a better tomorrow, belief in progress, and how historical forces seem to take on a life of their own. And this new conception of history that is primarily social history, and moreover social history inflected with hope, optimism, and progress, points to an interesting contrast of perspectives on history and modernity. In my previous episode on Wars and Rumors of Wars I quoted Hannah Arendt on the emergence of mass man in history, and how she saw this emergence of mass man as constituting a definitive break in history between the traditional past and the modern present.
Heilbroner also sees a discontinuity in history between the old history of tradition and the new history of modernity. Of the distant past Heilbronner wrote:
“…throughout the vast extent and varied forms of the Distant Past, religion serves as consolation for a changelessness that is beyond reach or hope in its earlier societies, or as a warning against violating codes of behavior, which in all later societies preach the acceptance of things as they have always been and must always remain.” (Visions of the Future, pp. 8–9)
And of the future Heilbronner wrote:
“…the forces that have established the differences of Yesterday from the Distant Past, and that still shape Today’s world, will continue to exercise their role Tomorrow. Hence, rather as in the case of the Distant Past, we are assuming that the conditions of the present will be the dominant realities of what is to come. More to the point, our task rests on the assumption that one can make reliable pronouncements about the feasibility of efforts to control the forces of change themselves.” (Visions of the Future, pp. 95–96)
Here we see not only the idea of a rational scientific grasp of forces shaping the future, but also the possibility of human agency in controlling these forces. Heilbronner’s conception of social history is, in a sense, Arendt’s mass man seen through a more optimistic lens, with the possibility of human agency shaping the future. Arendt connects the appearance as mass man with totalitarianism; Heilbronner connects the masses whose story is that of social history with scientific predictability and foresight, in which the historical forces unleashed by modernity give us insight into the future that is not prophecy or divine illumination. Heilbronner sees a cautious and skeptical optimism in Adam Smith’s vision of a rationally comprehensible economics:
“…optimism, despite its celebration of personal striving, does not reject the idea of the future ‘as history.’ Rather, it stems directly from an historic view of the future. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of an optimistic philosophy which does not draw its faith from the ongoing momentum of historic forces. What optimism does assume about the future is not an absence of historic influence, but a congeniality of influence. Or to put it differently, a philosophy of optimism assumes that the direction in which we seek to venture as the heroic steersmen of our destiny will be compatible with the currents and tides set in motion by history’s impersonal forces.” (The Future as History, p. 34)
Both Arendt and Heilbroner are considering the future of mass man, but for Arendt it is a future of men in dark times, while for Heilbroner it is a future pregnant with hope if we align ourselves with the forces of history. That is to say, Heilbroner had his own idea of what constitutes being on the right side of history (on which cf. my episode on James Fitzjames Stephen), and for him it entailed optimism, hope, and progress.
Heilbroner’s work points to the need for an historiography of the future, situating the future as part of history and as a legitimate object of knowledge for the philosophy of history and adjacent conceptual engagements with history. Heilbroner begins this process of historicizing the future, and others have contributed to the same process in various ways, but the bulk of the work still remains to be done.
It could be argued that speculative philosophies of history have always thematized the future, but the way in which speculative philosophy of history has been widely repudiated implies that there are no analytical or formal philosophical problems in thematizing the future as a part of history, or, one could say, philosophically thematizing the historical future (or the deep historic future). That, or the implication is it is not worth doing. Given that little or no work has been done as been done on this, it may well be the perception of its futility or lack of interest, but the field is wide open to those who will claim it for their own.
