Word: galbraith
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JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH wanted to make not only his views but also his tone emphatically clear: "I consider myself a part of the liberal majority," he said in a recent interview at his home on Francis Avenue. And he obtains exactly the reaction he seeks, Liberal majority in the age of Reagan? Galbraith, intimidated neither by the President nor the latest news from Gallup, then proceeded to a lucid and convincing evocation of liberalism as the true doctrine of most Americans--"a pragmatic adjustment to circumstance"--and conservatism as the ideological dogma of unrealistic purists...
There are other liberals but few approach the subject in the style of Harvard's best-known faculty member. When stating his case, with regard to the current political climate or Vermont wildlife or psychiatric advice, Galbraith takes what he know to be his audience's assumptions and uses them to draw converts to his cause. This instinct, a sort of intellectual pass key, turns this economist into a writer...
Perhaps it is fitting that the Galbraithian phrase most permanently woven into the fabric over everyday life is "the conventional wisdom," which he defines as "the beliefs that are at any time assiduously, solemnly and mindlessly traded between the pretentiously wise." Galbraith's radar for the "conventional wisdom" always makes his observations ring with that extra measure of clarity. When he wrote in a recent edition of The New York Review of Books that "Solar energy attracts people with an indifferent commitment to personal hygience and a strong commitment to organic foods," the comment transcended mere economic analysis. Likewise, when...
...human burden. His memoirs present several outwardly damning facts about the author. But he faces squarely such problems as occasional reliance on sleeping pills or psychiatrists because, after all, no one can be expected to lead a life of unrelieved virtue. Certainly, the faults do not impinge upon Galbraith's fit-as-a-fiddle self-image; he notes, for example, that he has suffered from a life-long fear that arose not from being "more versatile, more diligent or perhaps more useful than my colleagues," but from the fear "that my superiority would not be recognized...
Throughout, Galbraith is as laconic as an Ontario plow jockey. He offers little about his private life; his wit is a bit too mechanical, as are mordant observations like "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Yet Galbraith's air of detachment is satisfying. It enables him to place himself in recent history without seeming more or less important than he was. He is one of the few contemporary memoirists who have held the line on inflation...