John Kenneth Galbraith: The Economic Legacy

One hundred years after his birth, J. K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 is again on the bestseller lists. And in the current financial and economic tumult, familiar Galbraithian concerns—such as the power and dominance of overweening corporations, national and global poverty, and the careless destruction of the natural environment—once again loom large in the public consciousness.

Galbraith’s contemporaries included such towering intellects as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Milton Friedman, Wassily Leontief, Simon Kuznets, James Meade, Nicolas Kaldor, and Joan Robinson. These intellectual giants took Galbraith and his ideas seriously. Today, however, Galbraith remains professionally unpopular, and many economists have either forgotten his contribution, or fail sufficiently to acknowledge their intellectual debt to him.

This new four-volume collection from Routledge remedies this failing by highlighting Galbraith’s centrality to the crucial economic debates of the second half of the twentieth century. The collection has been designed to acquaint the user to Galbraith’s economics and his vision of the economic process; to contribute to the long overdue re-evaluation of Galbraith’s place in the study of economics; and to help establish new directions for future research in the Galbraithian tradition.

The collection reproduces J. K. Galbraith’s major theoretical economic contributions including: Galbraith’s original—but largely ignored—contribution to the theory of the firm, which shares many similarities with the work of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson; his monetary economics (which embodies elements of both Keynes and the new consensus in macroeconomics); and Galbraith’s exploration of financial euphoria, which predates Robert Shiller’s analysis of ‘irrational exuberance’.

The set also brings together the critical and professional reactions to American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Economics and the Public Purpose, with an additional focus on more recent assessments which identify Galbraith’s deeper theoretical contributions and highlight its contemporary relevance.

J. K. Galbraith: The Economic Legacy is edited by Stephen P. Dunn, a leading scholar in the field. The collection is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.