A Return to Theory

Abstract

Back in Cambridge, Kaldor soon resumed old friendships. ‘For many years’, Ferdinando Targetti records, ‘the Kaldors, Sraffa, [Joan] Robinson and Kahn spent their summer holidays together in the Alps and the Scandinavian mountains: with long walks for the Kaldors and adventurous climbs for the others’ (Targetti 1992, p. 13). Inevitably economics was discussed, abroad and at home on the regular Sunday walks from Cambridge to Grantchester. It would be a slight exaggeration to say that when Kaldor took up his fellowship at King’s he had been away from economic theory for almost a decade. For one thing, he had continued to lecture on the theory of employment, and also on value and distribution theory, on which he applied the ‘history of thought’ perspective that was common then. Hugh Dalton was told that his lectures were ‘a Box Office draw’, comparable to those of the celebrated Noel Annan (Dalton 1986, p. 576).