Politics & Power Quote by Robert Heilbroner

Heilbroner’s line has the blunt confidence of someone who watched capitalism survive its own autopsies. The phrasing is deceptively technical, but the intent is polemical: capitalism’s “failings” aren’t treated as glitches you patch with smarter markets, they’re treated as structural pathologies that demand political power capable of disciplining capital itself. That’s a higher bar than most policy talk admits.

The subtext is a rebuke to the fantasy of a “neutral” state that simply referees economic life. Heilbroner implies the state is already class-situated; it routinely rises above the interests of labor, consumers, or the poor, just not above the interests of owners and managers. So the “cure” isn’t another tweak to incentives. It’s the creation of a government with enough autonomy, legitimacy, and muscle to resist capture by those who benefit most from the status quo. In other words: without confronting class power, reform becomes PR.

Context matters: Heilbroner came of age in the shadow of the Great Depression, saw the New Deal and wartime planning, then watched postwar prosperity harden into Cold War ideology that equated capitalism with freedom. He wasn’t arguing for naive central planning so much as pointing to the recurring rhythm: crisis exposes capitalism’s limits; elites accept reforms only when forced; then they work to roll them back once stability returns. His sentence is a dare: if you want capitalism “cured,” you need a politics that can inconvenience the powerful, not just administer the inevitable.