An Appreciation: Kenneth Boulding

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

I think I first ran across Kenneth Boulding's writings doing research for a paper in a library-school class.  His insights went quite beyond the scope of whatever my paper was about, and I had to rush on and finish the paper.  But I went back to read more of Boulding afterwards, very surprised I'd never heard of someone who seemed such a seminal thinker.

I remember mentioning some of Boulding's ideas to my friend Mike Baker, who lived in Colorado Springs.  To my astonishment, Baker had met him a few times at Quaker meetings.  Boulding was still alive at the time, and teaching at the University of Colorado. His faith was central in his thought throughout his life, and he was a dedicated Quaker and proponent of peace.

Boulding repeatedly took public stands for peace.  When the Edinburgh Friends meeting petitioned the Prime Minister in 1936 to disclaim the "war guilt" clauses of the Versailles Treaty in the interests of a more just peace with Germany, Boulding, a new professor at the University, was chosen to draft the document.  His Wikiquote page says he "... regarded his involvement in the founding of the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the International Peace Research Association as important lifetime achievements" (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Boulding).

Though he became one of the leading economic theorists of the twentieth century, Boulding's undergraduate work had been cross-disciplinary, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.  His thinking remained cross-disciplinary throughout his life.

Even as he rose to the top of that field, Boulding criticized "economics" for its autonomous purview.  The trouble with economics, he wrote, is that “economics deals with the behavior of commodities rather than with the behavior of men.”  (He also memorably criticized "pure" economics with his observation that "Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.”)

His lifelong effort was to lay a foundation for models that would allow us to integrate our thinking about man's political and social behavior with economics.  In that effort, Boulding became an early practitioner of, and influence on, systems-theory and what we now call cybernetics.

In his last book, Three Faces of Power, Boulding brought together his thoughts about the structure of human power.  He saw "threat" power as directive, the decision-making power of societies, primarily through politics and institutions.  Supporting it is the "economic" power of society's production and exchange of commodities, by which it supplies its material needs. 

Boulding's third power he called "integrative," the power of relationships.  In his thinking, it is the context in which human power originates, and for which it operates. He wrote that “integrative power [is] the ultimate power…[and} the most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.”  (Three Faces of Power, pp. 109-10).  That sentence captures perfectly the deeply humanitarian and deeply Christian essence of all of Boulding's thought.

Boulding's own work was notable for the integrative power he valued.  He was twice nominated for the Nobel Committee's consideration: once for his work in economics, and once for the peace prize.