Galbraith’s Integral Economics (1933–1983)

My dissertation studies the genesis, construction, and reception of John Kenneth Galbraith’s integral economics. This term refers to his theoretical project—thought of as an alternative to conventional economics—which proposes integrated ‘pattern models’ of the functioning of the economic system of post-war American industrial society. Galbraith’s notion of “conventional economics” combines highly diverse economic analyses. But they share three core postulates: (i) the hypothesis of consumer sovereignty, (ii) the hypothesis of citizen sovereignty, and (iii) the hypothesis of profit maximization (Galbraith 1973a, 5). These postulates lead to the exclusion of power outside economics; and it is against these that Galbraith has built his own theories of corporation, competition, and consumption. My dissertation studies these issues in four separate parts. The first part of the dissertation accounts for Galbraith’s participation in original institutional economics from intellectual, theoretical, and epistemological points of view. This allows me to situate his integral economics within the secular “struggle” (Yonay 1998) between original institutional economics and neoclassical economics (Rutherford 2011) and to show that his theory of the corporation, which lies at the center of his