Political Economy and the Galbraithian Legacy

Abstract

These epigraphs suggest the essential legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith and the challenge he has laid before progressive modern liberals: organization, institutional change, emancipation, subordination of making a living to a life worth living, explicit confrontation of the commodity-oriented, growth-is-all culture. Attention must be paid to large organizations, the power they deploy, and its consequences. In an era of ‘ rapid and powerful social and economic transformation… [t]he transforming influence is organization’ (Galbraith, 1982a, p. 5). This will require a self-consciously critical heterodox political economy. But criticism alone is not enough, political organization must be employed to challenge the configuration of power and promote institutional change. Institutions are the pathways of human existence; present institutional tendencies or biases must be understood, criticized, and judiciously redirected.

Work and consumption thus share the same ambiguity: while fulfilling the basic needs of survival, they increasingly lose their inner content and meaning.

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, 1966

We must confront explicitly the ideology of insatiable want and the social practice that sustains it.

W. Leiss, 1976