Robert Heilbroner, the prominent historian of economics whose best-selling book “The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers,” became a classic study of the great thinkers who shaped economics, has died. He was 85.

Heilbroner died January 4 at New York, the New School University announced.

Heilbroner spent his entire career with the New School, where he was emeritus professor. Originally written by Heilbroner as his doctoral dissertation, “The Worldly Philosophers” became his most prominent work. More than 4 million copies have been sold, and the book is required reading in college and university economics courses. It is the second-best-selling economics textbook after Paul Samuelson’s “Economics.”

The book tells of the contributions of economists from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, to John Maynard Keynes. Beyond their major contributions to the history of economic thinking, the book compiles sketches of the thinkers with anecdotes about their lives and times.

“I don’t think that anybody can enter into the study of economics without having read it,” Peter Bernstein, an economic consultant and author of “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Study of Risk,” said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News.

Bernstein, who attended Harvard with Heilbroner, called his boyhood friend “honest and affectionate, and the most warm and responsive human I have known.”

In a new chapter titled “The End of Worldly Philosophy” that Heilbroner added to the book’s seventh printing in 1999, he wrote that the word “end” refers to the purpose and limits of economics, and he expressed a concern that scientific economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics.

“Economics will not, and should not, become a political torch that lights our way into the future,” Heilbroner wrote, “but it can and should become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility and develop its social morale.”

Heilbroner was born March 24, 1919, and raised at Manhattan. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1940 with a degree in history, government, and economics and worked briefly for the Price Administration Office.

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he took a job as a business economist with a large commodity-trading house. He decided that he liked writing more than office work and took a leave. He never returned to business. He earned a Ph.D. from the New School in 1963.

Heilbroner considered himself a “philosophical historian” who sometimes found himself at odds with conventional economists, who, he believed, often disregarded the social and political contexts of economic problems.

“I am really not an economist,” he said. “I’m really – if I may use the term – an intellectual. I bring an economic point of view to social and political problems, but I’m not interested in the minutiae of economics, per se.”

Heilbroner’s other books include “Teachings from the Worldy Philosopher” (1996); “The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought,” co-written with William Millberg (1995); “Economics Explained” co-written with Lester Thurow (1982); “Inquiry into the Human Prospect” (1974); “The Limits of American Capitalism” (1966); “A Primer on Government Spending” with P.L. Bernstein (1963); and “The Making of Economic Society” (1962) with Mr. Milberg.

In “An Inquiry into the Human Prospect,” Heilbroner predicted the end of industrial society because the world was going to quickly run out of resources.

“Ultimately, there is an absolute limit to the ability of the Earth to support or tolerate the process of industrial activity, and there is reason to believe that we now are moving toward that limit very rapidly,” he wrote.

His first and second wives and two children survive him.