Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Ewart Boulding (; January 18, 1910 – March 18, 1993) was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. Boulding was the author of two citation classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962). He was co-founder of general systems theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to sociologist Elise M. Boulding.

Early life and education

Boulding was born and raised in Liverpool, England, the only child of William C. Boulding and Elizabeth Ann Boulding. His father was a gas fitter and a lay preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and his mother was a housewife. Boulding's middle name Ewart came from William Ewart Gladstone, of whom his father was a great admirer. In his adolescent years Boulding became interested in pacifism and joined the Religious Society of Friends.

After attending Liverpool Collegiate School on a scholarship, Boulding won a chemistry scholarship to Oxford University at New College in 1929. He soon transferred to Philosophy, Politics and Economics. were interrupted by a spontaneous pneumothorax ('collapsed lung'). After recovery he spent the last six months of his Commonwealth Fellowship in Chicago, writing articles on capital theory. Academic life at the university seemed very dead to him, and he made himself unpopular with a speech to students that was published in The Scotsman with the headline, "Scottish University Sitting on Haunches for the last Fifty Years."

In those days Boulding was actively involved in the Quaker community, writing a pamphlet on nonviolent methods in 1936 and drafting a letter for the Friends to the prime minister, asking Britain to disclaim the "war guilt" clauses in the Treaty of Versailles and move toward a more just peace.

US academic life, 1937-1975

In the summer of 1937 Boulding returned to the US to attend a world congress of Quakers in Philadelphia. He obtained a faculty position in upstate New York at Colgate University. Fontaine (2010) summarized his stay:

In a state of spiritual crisis Boulding managed to finish his textbook, Economic Analysis, which he had started in the free summer semesters at Colgate in the previous two years. This work would become a bestseller the Society for General Systems Research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1980, the International Studies Association, the Peace Research Society, and the Association for the Study of the Grants Economy. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1957), the American Philosophical Society (1960), and the United States National Academy of Sciences (1975).

Personal life In 1941 Boulding met his wife Elise. They had 5 children and were active members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. He took part in Quaker gatherings, served on committees, and spoke to and about the Friends. The two were members of meetings in Nashville, Ann Arbor, and Boulder. Although he usually stuttered, when he ministered at a Friends meeting, he spoke fluently.

Boulding was instrumental in organizing the first Vietnam War teach-in at the University of Michigan in March, 1965. He later spoke on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library at the university and was pelted with snowballs by a group of disagreeing students.

In March 1977, he conducted a silent vigil at the headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia to protest what he considered its distancing itself from Quakers. He penned the widely circulated "There is a Spirit", a series of sonnets he wrote in 1945 based on the last statement of the 17th century Quaker James Nayler.

Work Boulding was widely recognized in academia as a prolific writer and an integrator of knowledge. For Boulding, economics and sociology were not social sciences— rather, they were all aspects of a single social science devoted to the study of human persons and their relationships (organizations). Boulding spearheaded an evolutionary (instead of equilibrium) approach to economics.

Boulding emphasized that human economic and other behavior is embedded in a larger interconnected system. To understand the results of our behavior, economic or otherwise, we must first research and develop a scientific understanding of the ecodynamics of the general system, the global society in which we live, in all its dimensions spiritual and material. Boulding believed that in the absence of a committed effort to the right kind of social science research and understanding, the human species might well be doomed to human extinction. But he was optimistic, believing our evolutionary journey had just begun. According to Millikan:

For some years there has been a yawning gap in the literature of economic theory between the very elementary text designed for beginning students and the clutter of specialized monographs and periodical articles accessible only to the fully trained economist. The teacher attempting to lead his charges over this difficult and dangerous terrain has had to choose between two unsatisfactory alternatives. He could devote all his time to formal lecturing about a subject that requires informal discussion and problems for its proper comprehension; or he could assign and discuss a hodgepodge of advanced books and articles in the hope, usually vain, that some fraction of the class would struggle through to a comprehension of some fraction of the material.

Looking back in 1989, Boulding explained, that "the first edition fundamentally followed Irving Fisher and Keynes's Treatise on Money. Even though I had read Keynes's General Theory by that time, I think I had not really understood it. I am not quite sure that I do now. The second edition, however, in 1948, was a thoroughly Keynesian general theory." Boulding stated in "Agricultural Organizations and Policies: A Personal Evaluation" (1962), which nevertheless was published as a national policy program for US agriculture by the influential Committee for economic development:

Boulding argued to abolish the USDA because he felt it was a special interest group for an industry that did not need one. He advised to see earth´s ecosystem best represented as a stock of assets.

Publications Boulding published some thirty books and more than eight hundred articles.

Books 1940s to 1960s 1941, Economic Analysis, Harper & Brothers; 3rd single edition, 1955;4th ed. part II, 1966 1942, A Peace Study Outline: The Practice of the Love of God, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Book Committee 1945, The Economics of Peace, Prentice Hall. 1945, There is a Spirit: The Nayler Sonnets, Fellowship Publications. 1950, A Reconstruction of Economics, J. Wiley. 1953, The Organizational Revolution: A Study in the Ethics of Economic Organization, Harper & Brothers. 1956, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, University of Michigan Press. 1958, The Skills of the Economist, Cleveland: Howard Allen. 1958, Principles of Economic Policy, Prentice-Hall, 1958. 1962, Conflict and Defence: A General Theory, Harper & Bros. 1964, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: the Great Transition, Harper & Row. 1966 The Impact of the Social Sciences, Rutgers University Press 1966, "The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics". American Economic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1/2, March 1, 1966: 1–13 1968, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics, (University of Michigan Press) 1969, "The Grants Economy", Michigan Academician (Winter)

1970s 1970, Economics as a Science, (McGraw-Hill, 1970). 1970, A Primer on Social Dynamics: History as Dialectics and Development, (Free Press, 1970). 1971, Economics, Colorado Associated University Press, 1971. 1973, Political Economy, Colorado Associated University Press, 1973. 1973, The Economy of Love and Fear: A Preface to Grants Economics, Wadsworth. 1974, Toward a General Social Science, Colorado Associated University Press. 1975, International Systems: Peace, Conflict Resolution, and Politics, Colorado Associated University Press. 1975, Sonnets from the Interior Life, and Other Autobiographical Verse, Colorado Associated University Press. 1978, Stable Peace, University of Texas Press. 1978, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution, Sage.

1980s to 1993 1980, Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms: A Collection of Writings, Transaction Books. 1981, Evolutionary Economics, London: Sage. 1981, A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear. New York: Praeger. 1985, Toward the Twenty-First Century: Political Economy, Social Systems, and World Peace, Colorado Associated University Press. 1985, Human Betterment, Sage. 1985, The World as a Total System, Sage. 1986, Mending the World: Quaker Insights on the Social Order, Pendle Hill Publications. 1989, Three Faces of Power, Sage. 1992, Towards a New Economics: Critical Essays on Ecology, Distribution, and Other Themes, Edward Elgar. 1993, The Structure of a Modern Economy: the United States, 1929–1989, Macmillan.

Selected articles Some of his most cited works: Boulding, Kenneth E. "General systems theory—the skeleton of science". Management Science 2.3 (1956): 197–208; Online at panarchy.org, 2000–2017. Boulding, Kenneth E. "National images and international systems", Journal of Conflict Resolution 3.2 (1959): 120–131.

Boulding, Kenneth E. "The economics of the coming spaceship earth", Environmental Quality Issues in a Growing Economy (1966). Boulding, Kenneth E. "Economics as a moral science", The American Economic Review 59.1 (1969): 1–12. Boulding, Kenneth E. "Evolutionary economics", Journal of Business Ethics 2 (2):160–162 (1983).