Nisbet, Robert A. "The Quintessential Liberal." Commentary Magazine. 1981.

Abstract:

More than anyone else I can think of, including the late Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., George McGovern, and James McGregor Burns, among others, John Kenneth Galbraith is the nearly perfect exemplar of American liberalism as we have come to know it since World War II. No one else comes close to Galbraith in the exquisite fit of his mind and its limitations to the essential theme and the varied idols of the liberal cause in our times. He is the very model for those now in school or college who want to do good things on the grand scale, and also to do well in life.

Galbraith is not and never will be noted as an economist, save among non-economists of liberal persuasion—journalists, television producers, social workers, book reviewers, and sundry others. This fact seems not to bother him at all—on the contrary, it provides further evidence of his superiority over the Mises, the Hayeks, the Friedmans, Haberlers, and Fellners of this world, whom he characterizes as archaists, worshippers of dead bones, and obfuscators all. For Galbraith the whole truth about economics lies at midpoint in a triangle formed by the names of Marx, Veblen, and Keynes. Although there is little evidence of Marxist writ in his recently published autobiography1—apart from dedicated opposition to the system of free private enterprise and a certain fondness for genteel socialism—nevertheless individual Marxists, from his graduate-school days onward, seem to have excited Galbraith’s most devoted encomiums…

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