Great Men, Part II: John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

John Kenneth Galbraith died last night at 97:

Some suggested that Galbraith's liberalism crippled his influence. In a review of "John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics" by Richard Parker (Farrar, 2005), J. Bradford DeLong wrote in Foreign Affairs 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.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that 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.