ABSTRACT

In a series of celebrated books published between the 1950s and the early 1970s John Kenneth Galbraith developed an account of American capitalism in the Fordist era reaching its most complete statement in Economics and the Public Purpose (Galbraith, 1974). The social, economic and political world has undergone major changes in the intervening years. Do we still have anything to learn from his considerations of how things worked in his America? We argue that we do. We identify in his ‘image’ a programme and approach which is realist yet humane and democratic. This remains valuable in our changed world: it suggests both a more accurate account of our recent origins and an approach to coping with our present predicaments. And Galbraith has continued to debate these issues.