Kenneth Ewart Boulding (January 18 1910 - March 18 1993) was born in Liverpool, England, graduated from Oxford University, granted United States citizenship in 1948. Kenneth Boulding was a founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. Kenneth Ewart Boulding, "a polymath for all systems," was an economist, educator, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He published over three dozen books and over one-hundred dozen articles. Current Contents found him to be one of those rare authors of a "Citation Classic ." Indeed, even more rare, he was the author of two Citation Classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (1956) and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962).

Boulding was president of numerous scholarly societies including the American Economics Association , the Society for General Systems Research , and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was not only a prolific writer and a creative integrator of knowledge, but an academician of world stature -- indeed, a magisterial figure in the discipline of social science. For Boulding, economics, sociology, etc. where not social sciences -- rather, they were all aspects of a single social science devoted to the study of human persons and their relationships (organizations). Boulding spearheaded an evolutionary (instead of equilibrium) approach to economics. See Kenneth Boulding's Evolutionary Perspective.

Boulding emphasized that human economic and other behavior is embedded in a larger interconnected system: To understand the results of our behavior, economic or otherwise, we must first research and develop a scientific understanding of the ecodynamics of the general system, the global society in which we live. Boulding believed that in the absence of a committed effort to the right kind of social science research and understanding, the human species might well be doomed to extinction. But he died optimistic, believing our evolutionary journey had just begun.

Quotations

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.

External links

• An overview of Boulding's major contributions by David Latzko