The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics

Abstract

Why post-Keynesian economics, and who were its Cambridge pioneers? Maynard Keynes, Richard Kahn, Richard Goodwin, Nicholas Kaldor, Luigi Pasinetti, Joan Robinson, and Piero Sraffa all started initially, at least in some degree, within the mainstream of their time. They all moved well and truly outside it, attempting to create either a revolutionary alternative or to rehabilitate the classical Marxian tradition, in most cases in the light of the Keynesian revolution. The one exception is Michal Kalecki, whose personal history and independent mind combined to place him virtually always outside the mainstream. This chapter, though, is not principally concerned with why and how the discontents that led them to change their minds arose. Rather, its principal object is to set out the structures of their alternative approaches in order to suggest modes of thinking about theoretical and policy issues in political economy.²

This was the keynote address at the July 2006 HETSA Conference at Ballarat. I am most grateful (with the usual disclaimer) to the conference participants and two anonymous referees for their comments.

This chapter was originally published in History of Economics Review (No. 45, winter 2007, pp. 95–105).

The title is also the title of Harcourt 2006. In writing the book, I had in mind two sets of readers: first, undergraduate and graduate students who may be looking for alternative approaches to thinking about theoretical, applied, and policy issues in economics; second, teachers and researchers in economics, not so much perhaps for the details of the analysis, with which many would be familiar, but for the way in which one person at least sees the interconnections and interrelationships that have emerged as our discipline has evolved and developed.