How many graduate students write a best-selling book while still in school? Robert Heilbroner did. “The Worldly Philosophers” has sailed through seven American editions, offering a wide-angle lens on the lives of the great economists. The word “economics” was “death at the box office,” Heilbroner noted, so he left it out of the title.

The life of the Norman Thomas Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Faculty of New School University, who died on January 4, will be celebrated at a public memorial this Saturday. It will be held at the Lang Center at 55 W. 13th St. from 1 to 3 p.m.

Heilbroner was influenced by such prodigious New School teachers as Adolph Lowe, and brought broad social interests to bear on economics. He made a “dismal” subject sparkle.

University of Texas at Austin professor James Galbraith, who co-authored a textbook with Heilbroner and is the son of famed Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, told the Knickerbocker, “To his larger audience, Heilbroner’s historical significance is that he reminded an entire generation it’s not only economics but economists who are worth reading, and that the subject is embedded in its own history.” Heilbroner showed that “there were no truly new ideas, and the wise economist is the one who knows where particular lines of thought come from,” Mr. Galbraith added.

William Milberg and Peter Bernstein are among the scheduled speakers at Saturday’s memorial. Both contributed to a special summer 2004 issue of the journal Social Research devoted to Heibroner, titled “The Worldly Philosophers at Fifty.” In his guest introduction to the volume, Mr. Milberg noted that Heilbroner described Adam Smith wandering outdoors in his dressing gown, Karl Marx amid “an eye-stinging haze of tobacco smoke,” and the “would-be” aristocrat Joseph Schumpeter lying about his wife’s noble background – in fact, she worked as a maid.

In the same issue, Mr. Bernstein called attention to one practical application of Heilbroner’s study of economics. The two taught classes at the New School and often drove home together. On the night of one of the great New York blackouts, their car sat in traffic crawling up Sixth Avenue. “When we finally reached 42nd Street, Bob said, ‘Let’s cut over to Park Avenue. The rich always take care of their own.’ As always, his worldly instincts were right.” The car sailed past voluntary traffic-directors at each intersection.

Heilbroner was appreciated during his lifetime. In 1998, the New School held a two-day conference called “The End of Worldly Philosophy?” that the Knickerbocker attended. The title bore a double meaning: the end (goal) of economics and end (demise) of economics as a means of explanation. With an eyeglass case neatly stowed in his right breast pocket, Heilbroner stepped up to the podium and lamented the death of the worldly philosopher concerned broadly with sociology, politics, and psychology. He said economics was an explanatory system inherently bound to societal issues and said economics today, in a rush to reduction, “has a love affair with science.”

While Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes weighed the long-term implications of capitalism, Heilbroner said that the very term “capitalism” had been disappearing from major economic textbooks. He searched the 800-page “Principles of Economics” by N. Gregory Mankiew, which used the word once. Joseph Stiglitz’s two volume 937-aged work “Economics,” whose pages, “I can barely lift with two hands,” Heibroner said, omits “capitalism” entirely.

At that conference six years ago, several distinguished economics professors paid homage to Heilbroner. Two of the speakers described below, MIT professor Charles Kindleberger and Yale University professor James Tobin, have since passed away.

Kindleberger said people want economists to have simple answers for complicated problems. He offered the example of President Truman, who requested a one-armed economist that couldn’t say “on the other hand.”

With a warm smile, Kindleberger said the answer to every question in economics is, “It depends.” He invoked “Kindleberger’s law of alternatives” which states: “Often after extended debate, those in power end up doing both.”

Tobin, who was named in the book “The Caine Mutiny” by Herman Wouk, said people often try to divide economists neatly into categories, such as fiscalists and monetarists. These are “oppositions that make headlines,” he said.

Addressing Heilbroner’s relatively philosophical approach to the social sciences, a professor from MIT, Paul Samuelson, spoke on “Two Gods that Failed.” He said in recent years, economists have gravitated toward “grimy data” like inventory cycles. By contrast, some worldly philosophers who attempted “big-picture economics” were themselves proven wrong. Schumpeter’s prediction that capitalism’s success would cause its doom was “a good try but no cigar.” Despite Marx and Engels’s, “ringing prose” their views resulted in Maoist and Leninist states that workers united to overthrow. It is an expensive joke, he said, to believe one man with the truth is a majority. But likewise, he said, the god of pure libertarian capitalism has also failed, as mixed economies have outperformed most others. Discussing the future, Mr. Samuelson said, “Who wants to wait for the long run in which certainly some of us will already be dead.”

John Kenneth Galbraith spoke at the gathering as well, where he towered over the microphone. “To say our debt to Robert Heilbroner is in economics is to reduce it,” the former diplomat said. “Heilbroner tells us of the world as it is.” Mr. Galbraith continued, “I found his account both informed and – something rather unusual in academic life – I found myself in agreement.”

Mr. Galbraith spoke of an “innocent fraud.” Like Heilbroner himself, he noted that the word “capitalism” has largely gone out of fashion – then added that the preferred term has become “market system.” Instead of owners of capital, one hears of “the admirably impersonal role of market forces.” A business bureaucracy, in which “compensation is set by those who receive it,” is not wholly innocent. He also said the “financial mind” (namely, Wall Street analyst) describing the future of financial markets is one of the most vivid frauds. “I now withhold the word innocent,” he said, grinning.