Eliot Janeway - Legacy and Evaluation

Legacy and Evaluation

In the 2004 book, The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power From FDR to LBJ, Janeway's son Michael recounted his father's place in history. In reviewing this book for the New York Times, the historian Michael Beschloss concluded: "What Eliot Janeway excelled at was keeping himself in the limelight and latching onto people who were going places. He did both of these things better and longer than most...During the 1970s and 80s, when men like (Abe) Fortas and (Felix) Cohen had faded into the past, the high-flying Janeway was starring in television commercials for Mazda and Glenfiddich Scotch and slipping economic ideas to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton."

Another reviewer of Michael Janeway's book, Christopher Caldwell, saw Eliot Janeway in less flattering terms: "Michael Janeway writes that his father carried a boyish love of conspiracy into the New Deal, working through 'backdoor channels, off-the-books agendas, manipulation of the system, sponsorship by powerful patrons,' even when he didn't have to... Janeway is, again and again, honest about things that it is hard to be honest about, above all his father's gradual abandonment of the life of the mind for the life of influence, and his progress down the well-traveled road from political insider to political hanger-on."

Janeway's consistent pessimism also sometimes misled him in economic forecasts. In 1984, for instance, with a strong economic recovery in place that would continue for a number of years, Janeway asserted that the U.S. economy was "jammed into stoppage" and expressed his usual bearish opinions on its future course.

In honor of Janeway's contributions as an economic historian, Princeton University endowed the Eliot Janeway lectures on historical economics. These have included James Tobin's 1972 lectures, "The New Economics a Decade Older," published in 1974, and Albert O. Hirschman's "Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action," first published in 1982.