Polish Marxian Political Economy and US Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review

Abstract

From the viewpoint of orthodox economists, macroeconomics has no significant historical antecedents prior to the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. Theories of aggregate demand before Keynes, such as those associated with Lauderdale, Malthus, and Hobson, were generally weak theoretically. A number of important mainstream economic thinkers raised what would be considered macroeconomic questions in the context of business cycle analysis.¹ But it required Keynes to construct a monetary theory of production that broke decisively with Say’s Law (the notion that supply creates its own demand) before economic orthodoxy was able to address macroeconomic questions in a significant way.