Kalecki and the Americans

Abstract

My title is, of course, borrowed from Marjorie Turner’s valuable book on Joan Robinson, who made several visits to North America towards the end of her life and had a significant impact on the evolution of Post Keynesian thought in the United States (Turner 1989). Unlike Robinson, however, Michal Kalecki actually lived in America for almost ten years. Yet, she wrote in a review of Axel Leijonhufvud’s On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes, he ‘had very little influence on American doctrines’ (J. Robinson 1969, 582). As will be seen below, this is something of an exaggeration. But it does contain an important element of truth.

I do not think that it is necessary, if one would advance Keynes’s claims to greatness, to argue that we might not have reached the same destination by other routes or at a later date; to name only one other, Michal Kalecki was independently approaching the same goal (A. Robinson 1946, 42).

Mr. Kalecki’s discovery of the General Theory independently of Keynes was a classic example of the coincidences of science. His version of the analysis led directly (which Keynes ‘did not) to a model of the trade cycle. Based upon the same conception of short-period equilibrium, his theory fitted naturally into Keynes’ scheme, and became absorbed into it in the subsequent development of the General Theory. By now it is impossible to distinguish what one has learned from which (J. Robinson 1952, 159).