Luigi Pasinetti: The Senior Living Heir of the Cambridge School of Economics and the Last of the Great System-Builders

Abstract

Luigi Pasinetti and I were PhD students together in Cambridge in the 1950s. We met informally to discuss Joan Robinson’s magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1956), which she called ‘my big book’. Luigi was way ahead of me in his understanding of the intricacies of her analysis of, for example, Wicksell effects, the Ruth Cohen curiosum, and so on, but we were at one in our admiration of her overall performance in the book. (It was published when she was the same age as Keynes was when he published The General Theory.) Subsequently we were colleagues in the Cambridge Faculty in the 1960s. I read some of Luigi’s papers then in draft and I have continued to do so in subsequent years when I was in Australia and then back in Cambridge while he returned full time to Italy. He, in turn, was very kind to me, especially with his detailed, useful comments on certain key sections of my 1972 book on capital theory. Mauro Baranzini and I much enjoyed preparing the Festschrift volume for Luigi’s sixtieth birthday (Baranzini and Harcourt, 1993). (We started five years before his birthday and presented it to him three years after, vaguely right even if precisely wrong.)