William James

Lore & Background

William James was born into a wealthy New York family in 1842. His father was a Swedenborgian theologian, his brother a famous novelist, and his sister a noted diarist. Though he trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, James never actually practiced medicine.

Instead, his career shifted toward psychology and later philosophy. He wrote extensively on subjects like epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. His most influential books include The Principles of Psychology, a landmark text in psychology; Essays in Radical Empiricism, a key philosophical work; and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which explored different forms of religious experience and ideas about mind-cure. With Charles Sanders Peirce, James founded the philosophical school of pragmatism, and he is also recognized as a founder of functional psychology.

He developed the philosophical viewpoint called radical empiricism. A 2002 analysis ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, while a 1991 survey placed his reputation second only to Wilhelm Wundt. His work influenced thinkers such as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Early life and education

James grew up with an eclectic education that included time in Europe, where he became fluent in German and French. He initially wanted to be a painter and apprenticed in a studio in Newport, Rhode Island, but his father pushed him toward medicine. James said he wanted to specialize in physiology, then changed his mind to focus on the nervous system and psychology. In 1861, he switched to scientific studies at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School.

As a young adult, he suffered from various physical ailments—problems with his eyes, back, stomach, and skin—along with tone deafness. These were diagnosed as neurasthenia, and he experienced periods of depression so severe he contemplated suicide. His relationship with his sister Alice was close, and some have argued it included eroticism; he wrote her sonnets and painted her. His younger brothers fought in the Civil War, but James himself was a peace advocate who suggested youth serve the public instead of the military.

In 1864, he began medical studies at Harvard, but took a break in 1865 to join a scientific expedition to the Amazon, which he cut short after eight months due to seasickness and smallpox. Illness interrupted his studies again in 1867, and he traveled to Germany seeking a cure, staying until 1868. There he realized his true interests were in philosophy and psychology, not medicine.

He later wrote that he drifted into these fields by fate, having never received formal instruction in them. He began publishing reviews in literary periodicals during this time. His “soul-sickness” resolved in 1872 after a long philosophical search. He earned his medical degree in 1869 but never practiced.

Career

James interacted with many writers and scholars, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Mark Twain, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud. He spent nearly his entire academic career at Harvard, starting as an instructor in physiology in 1873, then moving through positions in anatomy, psychology, and philosophy, eventually becoming an endowed professor of psychology in 1889 and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907.

Academic Life and the Worldly Philosopher

After the war, Heilbroner spent a brief stint in banking before turning toward academia in the 1950s. He joined the New School for Social Research in New York as a research fellow, where he encountered the work of Adolph Lowe, a leading figure of the German Historical School, an influence that would shape his thinking for decades. In 1963 he completed his doctorate in economics at the same institution, and by 1971 he had been named the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics, a position he held for more than two decades. His primary teaching focus was the history of economic thought, a subject that allowed him to weave together history, philosophy, and economics in a manner he felt pure economic analysis could not.

He saw himself less as a conventional economist than as a social theorist and what he called a "worldly philosopher"—someone preoccupied with how economic structures actually function in the real world. Despite this self-description, his peers recognized his standing: in 1972 he was elected vice president of the American Economic Association. He also devised a now-standard four-category framework for classifying economies—traditional, command, market, and mixed—that remains a staple in introductory courses.

The Worldly Philosophers and Its Enduring Reach

Published in 1953 by Simon & Schuster, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers went on to sell nearly four million copies, making it the second-best-selling economics text in history, trailing only Paul Samuelson's university textbook. The book traces the intellectual lineage from Adam Smith through Malthus and Ricardo, the utopian socialists including Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, Karl Marx, the Victorian-era economists such as Marshall and Bastiat, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter.

What distinguished Heilbroner's approach was his insistence on treating each thinker as a living person embedded in a particular historical moment rather than as a disembodied source of propositions. The seventh edition, released in 1999, added a final chapter titled "The End of Worldly Philosophy?" in which Heilbroner offered both a sobering assessment of economics as a discipline and an optimistic vision for a renewed "worldly philosophy" that would fold the social dimensions of capitalism back into economic analysis. The book's broad, narrative-driven style made complex economic history accessible to general readers and students alike, securing its place as a gateway text for generations.

From Socialist Conviction to a Scandinavian Ideal

For nearly his entire professional life, Heilbroner identified as an outspoken socialist, a position that colored his teaching, his writing, and his public commentary. Yet in a 1989 essay published in The New Yorker, written just before the Soviet Union collapsed, he declared that the decades-long contest between capitalism and socialism had ended, with capitalism the clear victor. He argued that capitalism organized the material affairs of humanity more satisfactorily than its rival system. Two years later, in the journal Dissent, he went further, calling capitalism "as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure" and paying tribute to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises for their defense of free markets.

He also observed that democratic liberties had never durably taken root in any nation that had declared itself fundamentally anticapitalist. Crucially, however, Heilbroner did not embrace laissez-faire capitalism. His preferred model remained the heavily redistributionist welfare states of Scandinavia, and he described his ideal society as "a slightly idealized Sweden."

A New York Life: Origins, Service, and Family

Robert L. Heilbroner was born in 1919 in New York City into a wealthy German Jewish family. His father, Louis Heilbroner, was a businessman who founded the men's clothing retailer Weber & Heilbroner, giving the young Robert a childhood steeped in commercial enterprise. He went on to graduate from Harvard University in 1940 with a summa cum laude degree spanning philosophy, government, and economics—a triple focus that foreshadowed his lifelong interdisciplinary approach. During World War II he served in the United States Army, where he was assigned to the Office of Price Control and worked under the institutional economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an experience that likely deepened his interest in how governments manage economic life.

After the war he briefly worked as a banker before committing to academia. Heilbroner died in New York City in 2005 at the age of 85, leaving behind two sons, David and Peter, and four grandchildren—Quentin, Katrina, Henry, and Sam. His life, from a Manhattan clothing dynasty to the lecture halls of the New School, was itself a kind of economic narrative.

Reader's Guide

James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He received an eclectic and transatlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Initially he wished to pursue painting, apprenticing in the studio of William Morris Hunt, but his father urged him to become a physician. In 1861, James switched to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard College.

In his early adulthood, he suffered from physical ailments and periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide. His two younger brothers fought in the American Civil War; James himself was an advocate of peace. In 1864, he took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School.

In the spring of 1865, he joined naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months due to seasickness and smallpox. His studies were interrupted again due to illness in April 1867. Aged 26, he traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained until November 1868. In June 1869, James earned his MD degree, but he never practiced medicine.

What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. James spent almost all of his academic career at Harvard, teaching his first experimental psychology course in the 1875–1876 academic year. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research.

In 1882, James joined the Theosophical Society. In 1884 and 1885, James became president of the British Society for Psychical Research. In 1898, James joined the Anti-Imperialist League. He gained widespread recognition with The Principles of Psychology (1890).