Abstract
When I read this, I thought: ‘Karl, that you should have lived to see this hour’. So, when I was asked by Michael Szenberg to contribute to the volume in honour of Paul’s 90th birthday, I thought it would be interesting and certainly appropriate to sketch Samuelson’s views on Marx as an economist, and any changes in them, over Samuelson’s working lifetime (to date, of course).1 As well as rereading some of his papers on Marx, I went through the references to Marx and topics related to him cited in the indexes of the various editions of Paul’s famous introductory textbook (since the 14th edition of 1992, Samuelson and Nordhaus) in order to trace both the waxing and waning over time of the space given to Marx, to see whether and, if so, how his views have changed. Because, with Prue Kerr (see Harcourt and Kerr, 1996; Harcourt, 2001), I have tried to explain to business people and managers what we think the essence of Marx’s legacy is, I have taken our evaluations as the backdrop against which to assess agreement and disagreement with Samuelson’s interpretations and evaluations. I hope he will find the chapter topic acceptable, not least because his contribution (Samuelson, 1997a), to volume I of the Festschriften for me was on Marx.
… around 1955 I volunteered mentally … to investigate whether [Marxian economics] was truly as lacking in merit as seems to be thought the case. (Mark Twain: Wagner is not as bad as he sounds) … colleagues and friends thought it strange of me to waste good tennis time on so irrelevant a subject.
(Samuelson, 1997a, p. 190)
Originally published in Michael Szenberg, Lall Ramratten and Aron A. Gottesman (eds), Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 127–41.
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Harcourt, G.C. (2012). Paul Samuelson on Karl Marx: Were the Sacrificed Games of Tennis Worth It? (2006). In: The Making of a Post-Keynesian Economist: Cambridge Harvest. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230348653_4
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