Obituary of Anwar Shaikh

October 6, 2026

Anwar Shaikh, a towering figure in political economy and Professor Emeritus of Economics at The New School for Social Research, died on October 6 in New York. He was 80. Shaikh was born in Karachi, Pakistan. Because his father served in the Pakistan Foreign Service, he spent many of his formative years in Asia, the Middle East and Turkey. He completed his higher education in the United States, earning an engineering degree from Princeton University in 1965 and a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1973. Shaikh was one of his generation's foremost economists, working in the tradition of classical political economy and drawing on Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Within that broad framework for understanding capitalist economies, he made important contributions in many fields. These included the dynamics of competition among firms; the conflict between business owners and workers over the distribution of wages and profits; macroeconomic policy on unemployment and inflation; international trade; the workings of financial markets; national and global inequality; and the causes and consequences of recessions and depressions. He developed his approach to these questions over a teaching career of five decades at The New School for Social Research, where his courses were always filled to capacity and brimmed with both moral passion and relentless scholarly rigor. He also served as visiting professor at Cambridge University, the University of London and Bard College, among others. In 1994, Shaikh published Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (Cambridge University Press), coauthored with his former student E. Ahmet Tonak, which showed how national income accounts could operationalize economic categories. In 2016, Oxford University Press published the culmination of his lifelong research, his 800-page magnum opus Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Writing in New Left Review, John Grahl observed: “Both the range and depth of Shaikh’s book, covering in detail mainstream and heterodox, micro- and macroeconomics, are without parallel in contemporary literature. The scope and scale of Capitalism are such as to invite comparison with Marx’s Capital itself, and it is a measure of Shaikh’s accomplishment that it appears by no means absurd to apply that standard.” Professor James Galbraith, Chairman of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, wrote: “An amazing feat. Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism covers exchange, production, costs, competition, money, macro-dynamics, profit, wages and trade, with theory, history and evidence complete. Deeply erudite and beautifully written, it is at once a stunning renovation of classical and Keynesian economics and a relentless demolition of sophistries. A book to savor and to teach; there hasn't one like it for 150 years." Shaikh is survived by his wife, Maria Jose Montalva; his brother, Asif Shaikh; his stepdaughter, Paula Astorga; and his nephew, Mikal Shaikh.

Funeral Services