Enlivening the Dismal Science
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
Enlivening the Dismal Science Annals of an Abiding Liberal By John Kenneth Galbraith Houghton Mifflin. 371 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies,...
...About half of the book encompasses economics—the subject in which the graduate of Ontario Agricultural College (with a degree in animal husbandry) first gained fame...
...Large but unprofitable companies have already been observed asking Washington for loan guarantees and bail-out funds anyway...
...A vision of life that denies the promise of variousness and plenitude, or that stresses its harshness and sadness, is not likely to be widely persuasive...
...For an academic so often accused of breaking the commandment against popularization, it is noteworthy how anxious Galbraith is to correct the theories of pedagogues rather than the illusions of laymen...
...Much of the theoretical apparatus is similar to that of The New Industrial State (1967), particularly the claim that the American economy barely conforms to the neoclassical model of the market...
...Readers, perhaps especially those of us who are not economists, have been the winners...
...He still deplores the grave imbalance between private luxury and public undernourishment...
...He continues to argue that Washington must go for the jugular...
...In practice I have been a writer —as generations of Harvard students have suspected...
...Since Galbraith is not as numerical as many of his colleagues, it helps that he has a canny insightfulness about human conduct, an eye for ironic detail, an ear for the words or phrases that will at once be surprising and exact, and a sardonic wit that is as dry as driftwood...
...His appeal in Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) that esthetic needs must be satisfied as well as the requirements of productive efficiency, that leisure must be given deeper consideration along with the work ethic, is unaltered...
...The dilemma of inadequate aggregate demand that afflicted the economy during the Great Depression, and that massive Federal spending was designed to correct, has been displaced by a conundrum Keynes did not foresee...
...His own progressivism is abiding in that Galbraith remains hostile to current levels of defense spending, shows distaste for military adventurism and for confrontations with apparatchiks and guerrillas, and concedes that he is not "deeply anti-Communist...
...Or take his own justification for a collection like Annals of an Abiding Liberals: "Some of the things that I have labored to make worth publishing once should be worth publishing again...
...Gal-braith presents their ideas with a lucidity and a skepticism that have made him a splendid historian of the science his own force of personality has made less dismal...
...Some of the essays evaluate the legacies of economists like Smith and Thorstein Veblen...
...In its pricing and planning, in its acquisition of supplies and its distribution of goods, and in its flair for advertisement, it exercises a formidable measure of control over the market and over the State as well...
...Such power is not seriously threatened by unionized labor, whose demands can be satisfied by passing on the cost to consumers...
...One of the most trenchant sentences in his American Capitalism (1952) ran as follows: "The foreign visitor, brought to the United States, visits the same firms as do the attorneys of the Department of Justice in their search for monopoly...
...They, in turn, lack the sovereignty ascribed to them in the capitalist paradigm, which has the advantage of internal consistency and the disadvantage of being false...
...If the ideal of a competitive, self-regulating market is a phantom, if the thousand or so largest firms do actually exercise a high measure of control over their own prices, then—so Galbraith asserts—only Federal administration of prices can restore a semblance of stability to a system damaged by the determinations of the corporate "tech-nostructure...
...author, "Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism " "Nominally 1 have been a teacher," John Kenneth Galbraith acknowledges in this latest collection of his essays...
...The second half of the collection consists of travel pieces, critical appreciations of other writers, reflections on the subordination of women and the anguish of being rich, a commentary on his bizarre and appalling FBI file, brief accounts of contemporary swindling, and reviews of Watergate-related books...
...Galbraith's agenda, like his own curiosity, long ago transcended economics...
...In fact, most readers should find these essays as disarming as the author himself does, however unlikely that may seem...
...The affirmation of public purpose thus requires more direct and unembarrassed governmental control, and the effect on profits leaves Galbraith undismayed...
...Less than three decades later those companies have often become multinational...
...If Socialism ever comes to America, it will not be through revolution, which inspired some historic adversaries of abiding liberals, but because "the government inherits the turkeys...
...and the global tours he records for posterity are presumably not made in the company of those whom liberals ordinarily champion...
...While the State has attempted to regulate the economy with an impact unprecedented in peacetime, and while the acolytes of a truly free market address their audiences in the manner of aggrieved victims, the penalties imposed by double-digit inflation and extensive unemployment have coincided...
...Annals of an Abiding Liberal does not attempt to reconcile or explain the supposed disjunction between social criticism and social position...
...Engels' affluence hardly annoyed Marx...
...Despite his not being burdened with self-doubt or exhausted by the effort to understand the perspectives of his opponents, Galbraith is unexcelled in marshalling distinctive arguments...
...Two citations can serve as examples...
...Though he is the economist laureate of American liberalism, pleading that industries not be allowed to distort public purposes or to frustrate urban needs in particular, he respects the achievements of big business and has urged liberals to accommodate their programs to the benefits of size...
...The very comfortable, whose economic and political views he satirizes, happen to be his neighbors in Gstaad, Switzerland...
...Indeed, he has been mocked (most recently in R. Emmett Tyrrell's Public Nuisances) for expressing dissatisfaction with an economic system that has not obstructed his own ascent into the higher brackets...
...For the organizational imperatives of the large firm have amputated the invisible hand proclaimed in The Wealth of Nations, and have rendered the competitive ideal irrelevant...
...But it is now clearer that little can be done to improve the quality of public life without the solution of economic problems that bedevil even the victors of the Keynesian revolution...
...He is right...
...and Annals of an Abiding Liberal highlights their virtues—their economies of scale, their contribution to enhanced living standards, their col-lectivist complexity, their "reduction of international friction...
...and though he obviously enjoys being controversial, he remains unruffled and urbane even in polemic...
...Nixon never did anything wrong unless someone else had done it first...
...Faced with the choice of spending time on the unpublished scholarship of a graduate student or the unpublished work of Galbraith, I have rarely hesitated...
...Yet Galbraith—a theorist rather than an empiricist—is strangely diffident about making larger claims for the thematic unity of his book, nor does he meditate upon the elusive meaning of contemporary liberalism...
...Galbraith himself is not nostalgic...
...Reviewing a recent Presidential memoir, Galbraith noticed a certain habit of exculpation: "A central theme of this book [is that] Mr...
...While no Galbraith book can be expected to outstrip Ihe influence of The Affluent Society (1958), now beyond Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) in sales, his new work displays undiminished acumen, shrewdness and wit...
...Galbraith is at the very least making his political creed more attractive by suggesting that liberalism need not be synonymous with asceticism...
...In the aftermath of his experience as an Office of Price Administration official during World War II, Galbraith broke early with Keynesian orthodoxy in his emphasis on the danger of inflation...
...Yet Gal-braith retains his credentials as a liberal because of his insistence that such power be tamed to serve general, not managerial goals...
...It is nevertheless hard to resist the suspicion that conservatives would find Galbraith's ideas repugnant even if he were penurious, and such opponents are not known to believe that wealth is a disqualification for the expression of opinion...
...But for all the freshness of his views, he is never eccentric merely for the sake of being provocative or perverse...
...What has subverted belief in a self-regulating mechanism is the large corporation...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 19
