In a review of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, J Bradford DeLong wrote that Galbraith’s lifelong sermon of social democracy was destined to fail in a land of “rugged individualism”. He compared Galbraith to Sisyphus, endlessly pushing the same rock up a hill that always turns out to be too steep.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen maintains Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Parker’s book recounts, Sen said the influence of The Affluent Society was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted. “It’s like reading Hamlet and deciding it’s full of quotations,” he said.

Other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views. “The distinctiveness of his contribution appears to be slipping from view,” Stephen P Dunn wrote in The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics in 2002. Criticism did not sit well with Galbraith, who would respond his critics had rightly recognised that his ideas were “deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy.” “As a matter of vested interest, if not of truth,” he added, “they were compelled to resist.”

A major influence on Galbraith was the caustic social commentary he found in Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Galbraith called Veblen one of American history’s most astute social scientists, but also acknowledged that he tended to be overcritical.

“I’ve thought to resist this tendency,” Galbraith said, “but in other respects, Veblen’s influence on me has lasted long. One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.” Galbraith completed two books in 1952, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power and A Theory of Price Control. In American Capitalism, he set out to debunk myths about the free market economy and explore concentrations of economic power. He summarized the lessons of his days at the Office of Price Administration in A Theory of Price Control, later calling it the best book he ever wrote. “The only difficulty is that five people read it. Maybe 10. I made up my mind that I would never again place myself at the mercy of the technical economists who had the enormous power to ignore what I had written.” His two next books were aimed at a large general audience. Both were best sellers.

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