IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/gtechp/978-0-230-30244-0_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Political Economy and the Art of Controversy

In: John Kenneth Galbraith

Author

Listed:
  • James Ronald Stanfield
  • Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield

Abstract

This chapter examines Galbraith’ s work in the 1950s before the monumentally important The Affluent Society (1958). The books in question are a far cry from the integrated model of mature democratic capitalism that later emerged in the trilogy consisting of that classic plus The New Industrial State (1967a) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973a), but the mature Galbraithian vision begins to take shape. A substantial portion of the chapter is devoted to Galbraith’ s first effort at constructing a broad picture of the American economy, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1956), which greatly enhanced Galbraith’ s standing outside the profession. Second, in The Great Crash (1954) Galbraith analyzed the hysterical euphoria that tends to emerge in periods of sustained economic prosperity; this interest in manias and panics was to concern and entertain him for all of his professional life. His now classic treatment of the spectacular collapse of asset values in 1929 has often been reprinted; indeed it has remained continuously in print. One suspects it is probably selling rather well of late given its pertinence to the financial excess and Great Recession of our time. Third, we take our chapter title from Economics and the Art of Controversy (1955), in which Galbraith displayed his keen appreciation of the nature of American political culture and the political context of economics.

Suggested Citation

  • James Ronald Stanfield & Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield, 2011. "Political Economy and the Art of Controversy," Great Thinkers in Economics, in: John Kenneth Galbraith, chapter 3, pages 61-93, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-0-230-30244-0_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230302440_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-0-230-30244-0_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.