Richard L. Brinkman, Cultural Economics

I just found out this morning that Richard L. Brinkman is retiring. He was the professor at Portland State University who convinced me to pursue graduate work in economics. "This is your opportunity to be in on the early development of a new science." Brinkman taught at PSU for over 40 years and published his magnum opus, Cultural Economics, in 1981 (my last year at PSU and as CEO of Thunder & Visions [I had graduated with a double major in 1979 and in 1980-1981 was taking grad courses and teaching Philosophy of Economics in the Philosophy Department and Economic Development in the Caribbean in the Black Studies Department, in addition to the work we were doing in Thunder & Visions] and the same year I entered the graduate program in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Cultural Economics elaborated a new theory of economic development, grounded in a synthesis of ideas from economics, anthropology, sociology, and biology. It made use of prior work by such social scientists as Edward B. Tylor, Leslie A. White, William F. Ogburn, Simon Kuznets, and Thorstein Veblen. Brinkman's work is sui generis. Heterodox, yes, but, in many ways, it goes well beyond the scope of most heterodox work in economics or any of the other social sciences. It breaks down barriers in the social sciences that have, oddly, kept intellectual inventions and innovations in the various branches of the social sciences from cross-fertilization, cross disciplinary critiques, and working towards a unified knowledge of social change. I suspect that Brinkman will be another of those great thinkers who was so far ahead of his time that it will take major social transformations (and a great deal of time) before he is fully appreciated. This seems to be the way it works in the social sciences, in particular. This may be a consequence of the strong vested interests that some in the society have for blocking critical analysis of (and the posing of alternatives to) existing social relationships and institutions.

I recently met one of Brinkman's more recent students who is currently studying at UMass, Gul Unal, and was reminded, once again, of how powerful this man's effect on us can be. It's too bad that the next generation of students won't have the experience that Gul and I shared.