A Man for All Systems: Talking with Kenneth Boulding

Abstract

Kenneth Boulding has always been one of my heroes, so it was reassuring to find out, when I spent Sunday 25 May 1982 talking with him in Melbourne,¹ that he really is a hero; it was even more reassuring to find that he has two Achilles’ heels. He thinks sports are boring and he does not like Marx and Marxism, neither entirely unprejudiced judgements, he readily admits. Bom in 1910 in Liverpool, the only son of a plumber and an only grandson — Elise Boulding says he had three mothers — Boulding was the first in the family for 300 years to go on to secondary and then tertiary education. He had a brilliant undergraduate record at New College, Oxford (1928–32), went to Chicago as a Commonwealth Fellow in 1932, and subsequently taught at Edinburgh (1934–7), Colgate (1937–41), Iowa State (1943–9), Michigan (1949–67) and Colorado (1967–81). Now a vigorous 72-year-old, he is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Colorado, and is about to do a stint at Swarthmore following an extraordinary itinerary as R. I. Downing Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He still packs more illumination into his famous one-liners than most of us get into even a Marshallian-type footnote.

Reprinted from Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, V, Fall 1983, pp. 143–54; and O. F. Hamouda (ed.) Controversies in Political Economy, Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt, Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books, 1986, pp. 46–69.