The Provocative Joan Robinson science and cultural theory A Series Edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith & E. Roy Weintraub MaIkhoh\Zmbo ChZgKh[bglh# Ma^FZdbg`h_Z <Zf[kb]`^>\hghfb GZab]:leZg[^b`nb@nrHZd^l =ndNgbo^klbmrIk^ll =nkaZfEhg]hg +))2 © 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Photograph on previous spread: Joan Robinson. © reserved; collection Marshall Library of Economics, Cambridge. In memory of parvin aslanbeigui, m.d. 1 9 5 9 – 2 0 0 7 *) ** *+ *, *- *. */ *0 *1 *2 +) +* ++ +, +- +. +/ +0 +1 +2 ,) ,* ,+ ,, ,- ,. ,/ ,0 ,1 ,2 -) ` c o n t e n t s ` Acknowledgments ix Collage with Woman in Foreground 1 1. The Improbable Theoretician 17 Excursus: Robinson and Kahn 51 2. The Making of The Economics of Imperfect Competition 89 3. Becoming a Keynesian 161 “Who Is Joan Robinson?” 235 Notes 247 Bibliography 279 Index 295 ` acknowledgments ` Our warmest thanks to Geoff Harcourt, who read an entire draft and wrote elaborate notes, saving us, to paraphrase Joan Robinson, from our headlong errors. We are also grateful to Prue Kerr and Michele Naples, who read parts of a draft and offered helpful suggestions. Two readers for Duke University Press made valuable criticisms on which we acted. The usual caveats apply. For permission to quote unpublished copyrighted material, we ac- knowledge the following: Sir Nicholas Henderson for permission to publish from the papers of Hubert Henderson; David Papineau for per- mission to publish from the papers of Richard Kahn; John Elmen Taussig for permission to publish from the papers of Frank Taussig; Seymour Weissman for permission to publish from the papers of Evan Durbin; by kind permission of the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, to quote from the unpublished papers of Austin and Joan Robinson; King’s College for permission to quote from the unpublished writings of Edward Austin Gossage Robinson, Joan Robinson, and John May- nard Keynes, copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cam- bridge 2009; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for permis- sion to publish from the minutes of meetings of the Faculty Board of Economics and Politics and the General Board of the Faculties; and The Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library for permission to reproduce Ramsey & Muspratt photographs. We thank VS Verlag for permission to reproduce part of our essay “The Importance of Being at Cambridge” and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought for permission to reproduce in part two of our arti- cles: “Joan Robinson’s ‘Secret Document’: A Passage from the Autobiog- raphy of an Analytical Economist” and “The Twilight of the Marshallian Guild: The Culture of Cambridge Economics Circa 1930.” For archival assistance, we are grateful to the archivists and librarians of King’s College, the Marshall Library of Economics, the Cambridge University Library, and the Wren Library at Cambridge University and the National Library of Norway in Oslo. For research assistance, we thank Linda Fette Knox, Kristin McDonald, Andre Renaudo, and Linda Silverstein. Research on this book was supported by Grants-in-Aid-for Creativity and the Jack T. Kvernland Chair, Monmouth University. ` acknowledgments Collage with Woman in Foreground here’s to you, mrs. robinson Joan Robinson was one of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century and unquestionably the most important woman in the history of economic thought. In the latter regard, no one else comes close, not even the abundantly gifted Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist econo­ mist and political leader whose work she came to admire in the 1940s. Her publications in economic theory began in 1932 and ended two years after her death, in 1983. A comprehensive but incomplete bibliography compiled by Cristina Marcuzzo (1996) runs to 443 items, a body of work that covers most of economic theory: production, distribution, employ­ ment, accumulation, innovation, and economic growth as well as meth­ odological and philosophical reflections and contributions to the study of economic education. Since 1933, there has been an extensive and lively lit­ erature on Robinsonia. It has grown considerably since her death and the centenary of her birth in 1903.1 A book on her life and work by Geoffrey Harcourt, her Cambridge colleague and friend of many years, and Prue Kerr, her student and friend, is in preparation. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge University, where she made a career that lasted some fifty years. Her work falls into three re­ search programs, each a product of developments in economic theory at Cambridge: the innovations from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s that led to the theory of imperfect competition, the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to develop a general analysis of long-term economic growth. Her first book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933d), achieved international recognition. In the early 1930s, she also became an ardent follower of John Maynard Keynes’s new approach to economics. Soon after The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money appeared in 1936, she published Essays in the Theory of Employment (1937a), which refined and extended Keynes’s ideas. She fol­ lowed this book with the Introduction to the Theory of Employment (1937b), a Keynesian primer designed to revolutionize undergraduate pedagogy in economics. Shortly after publication of The General Theory, Robinson concluded that neither neoclassical nor Keynesian economics could account for long- term economic changes. However, she was convinced that if Keynes’s ideas were reformulated and generalized on the basis of supplementary assump­ tions, such an analysis would be possible. This was her last major effort: the development of a dynamic theory of capital accumulation that rested on the assumptions of historicity and historical temporality. Its result was The Accumulation of Capital (1956), a daunting work of uncompromis­ ing formalism and an important stimulus of the “capital controversy,” one of the most acrimonious disputes in the history of economic analysis. The debate spanned two decades, produced hundreds of books, articles, and notes, and consumed the energies of its antagonists.2 To Robinson’s dismay and consternation, neoclassical economists admitted the validity of her criticisms but dismissed them as empirically inconsequential and irrelevant. Thus the battle ended not with a bang but a whimper. Robinson ended her long career covered with honors. In 1971, she de­ livered the prestigious Richard T. Ely address of the American Economic Association. The year before, no less a figure than Paul Samuelson judged her “one of the greatest analytical economists of our era” (Samuelson 1970, 397). An honorary doctorate from Harvard followed in 1980. Through­ out, she remained enmeshed in controversy: denouncing neoclassical eco­ nomics for failing to address the most serious economic problems of the ` collage with woman in foreground time, censuring American economic theory for contributing to the nuclear arms race, attacking the government of Margaret Thatcher in Great Brit­ ain, and celebrating the communist regimes of China and North Korea. In surveying Robinson’s work, Samuelson concluded that a number of her accomplishments would merit the Nobel Memorial Prize in econom­ ics, which was created in 1969 (Samuelson 1970, 397). By the mid-1970s, she was under consideration by the Swedish Academy. Although appar­ ently short-listed for several years, she was repeatedly passed over. The reasons offered by her contemporaries varied considerably. Would she be considered on the basis of The Economics of Imperfect Competition, her best-known and most successful book? That seemed likely, in which case an award would have been awkward. Edward Chamberlin’s doctoral dis­ sertation at Harvard in 1927, revised and published a few months before her book appeared, covered the same ground (1933). But he had died in 1967. Moreover, Robinson had recanted much of the book’s argument and mode of analysis (see Robinson 1953). She was an unsparing critic of orthodox economics and rejected its dependence on mathematical models and quantification generally. She exhibited the public persona of a radical of the left, claiming to find virtues in both the Maoist Cultural Revolu­ tion and the North Korean totalitarian state of Kim Il Sung. Her writings often gave the impression that her greatest strength lay in polemics rather than in building original theories of her own. She was a woman in a dis­ cipline overwhelmingly dominated by men. Finally, she seems to have adopted, or perhaps affected, a Sartre-like pose toward the Nobel Prize by holding it in some contempt. If she did not want it and would not accept it, it would not be surprising if the Swedish Academy was reluctant to of­ fer it (Turner 1989, 214–21). After her death, Robinson achieved near canonization in the eulogies of numerous economists, including several perennial adversaries whose work was quite remote from the Cambridge tradition. The Robinsonian conduct of intellectual life as a mode of partisan warfare was interpreted as a mark of flinty integrity and selfless dedication to the pursuit of truth, uncompromised by academic ambition (Matthews 1989, 911–15; Goodwin 1989, 916–17). One commentator even saw in her “the stark and deadly simplicity of Antigone” (Walsh 1989, 881). Milton Friedman, not a cham­ pion of Cambridge economics, declared that economists would have achieved a rare consensus in judging Robinson the only woman to meet collage with woman in foreground ` the standards of the Swedish Academy (Friedman 1986, 77). She would not have taken the compliment. In her view, economic theory was an an­ drogynous enterprise, and her work transcended differences of gender.