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Robert Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 – January 4, 2005) was an American economist. The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
Heilbroner grew up in New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1940. During World War II, he served in the United States Army. In 1963, earned a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research, where he subsequently became a professor and remained for some fifty years.
Written as Heilbroner's doctoral thesis in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold nearly four million copies -- the second-best-selling economics text of all time. The seventh edition of the book, published in 1999, included a new final chapter entitled "The End of Worldly Philosophy", which included both a grim view on the current state of economics as well as a hopeful vision for a "reborn worldly philosophy" that incorporated social aspects of capitalism.
He also came up with a way of classifying economies, as either Traditional (primarily agriculturally-based, "primitive"), Command (centrally planned economy, often involving the state), Market (free market capitalism), or Mixed (a mixture of the previous three).
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