Joan Robinson: The Beacon of Cambridge Economics
Date:
Workshop presentation & discussion at Historical and Political Economy Workshop, Amherst, MA, USA
This talk was delivered by Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, a leading historian of economic thought and Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society, known for her work on Cambridge economics, Keynesian theory, and monetary thought. She serves as Honorary Professor of Political Economy at Sapienza, Università di Roma and has held leadership roles in major international societies for the history of economics. You can find more about her career on her professional website.
In this session at the Historical and Political Economy Workshop at UMass Amherst, Prof. Marcuzzo’s presentation focused on the intellectual legacy of Joan Robinson and her central place in Cambridge economic thought.
My Discussion Contribution
Below is the full text of my intervention during the discussion, highlighting critical engagement with Prof. Marcuzzo’s talk and connecting Robinson’s contributions to broader debates in economic theory and political economy.
Discussion on Professor María Cristina Marcuzzo’s Presentation on Joan Robinson
I would like to begin by thanking Professor Marcuzzo for the lucid and intellectually disciplined reconstruction of Joan Robinson’s life and work. What is particularly valuable in this presentation is that it does not treat Robinson merely as a contributor to isolated debates, but as a unifying figure through whom the internal tensions of Cambridge economics become visible and analytically tractable.
As Professor Marcuzzo demonstrates, Robinson’s trajectory is structured by a persistent tension between two distinct Cambridge traditions. On the one hand, the Marshall–Keynes line, oriented toward demand, short-period analysis, uncertainty, and later Kalecki’s theory of pricing and employment (Keynes, 1936; Robinson, 1937a; Robinson, 1937b; Robinson, 1969). On the other hand, the Sraffian revival of classical political economy, centred on surplus, distribution, technique, and the critique of marginal productivity theory and capital measurement (Sraffa, 1926; Sraffa, 1960; Robinson, 1953a; Robinson, 1953b). Robinson emerges, in Professor Marcuzzo’s narrative, as the theorist who repeatedly attempts to reconcile these traditions, thereby revealing the depth of their incompatibility.
Professor Marcuzzo organizes this intellectual biography around three integration attempts. Rather than revisiting each in detail, I will treat them as a compact diagnostic:
- The early effort to respond to Sraffa by generalizing Marshallian tools through imperfect competition (Robinson, 1932; Robinson, 1933).
- The mid-century attempt to extend Keynes to the long period through accumulation theory, profit-rate reasoning, and Marxian reproduction (Robinson, 1942; Robinson, 1956; Robinson, 1960; Robinson, 1962).
- The early 1970s articulation of Post-Keynesian economics as an explicit research programme intended to draw simultaneously on Ricardo–Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Sraffa (Robinson, 1973).
Professor Marcuzzo’s conclusion is decisive: the two Cambridge strands were never fully integrated by Joan Robinson, an issue of which Robinson herself was fully aware. From a Lakatosian perspective, however, I would argue that Robinson’s achievement lies precisely in framing Post-Keynesianism as a research programme rather than a closed theory. What remains unfinished is not an accidental failure but an open theoretical project.
At this point, I would like to advance a stronger interpretation. My suggestion is that Robinson’s repeated failure of integration reflects not only incompleteness but an epistemological incompatibility. Once Sraffa’s critique of Marshall—beginning with the 1926 attack on the coherence of competitive supply under partial equilibrium (Sraffa, 1926) and systematized in the classical surplus framework of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa, 1960)—is taken seriously, the Marshallian apparatus can no longer serve as a foundation for a general theory of normal prices or competition.
It is worth recalling that, in the tradition of classical political economy, diminishing returns were primarily a law about land and rent, designed to explain rising agricultural costs and the social surplus. Robinson’s first attempt sought to preserve Marshall; her later work increasingly challenged equilibrium itself. Yet she never fully relinquished the Marshallian conceptual language, and this repeatedly blocked synthesis.
From this perspective, the coherent division of labour is the following. For the long period, Sraffa provides a framework in which normal prices and distribution are anchored in technique and the wage–profit configuration (Sraffa, 1960). For activity levels and instability, Keynes and Kalecki provide the logic of effective demand, monetary production, uncertainty, and mark-up pricing (Keynes, 1936; Robinson, 1937a; Robinson, 1937b; Robinson, 1969). Marshall becomes historically informative but theoretically non-essential for a classical–Keynesian reconstruction.
This brings me to Robinson’s engagement with Marx, which I take to be among the most productive elements highlighted in Professor Marcuzzo’s presentation. Professor Marcuzzo shows that Robinson rejected Marx’s theory of value insofar as it was treated as a theory of relative prices, and she regarded the transformation problem as a theoretical dead end (Robinson, 1942). Yet Robinson’s insistence on reproduction schemas and on the primacy of historical over logical time provides a powerful framework for understanding capitalist disequilibrium.
Recent work strengthens this intuition. Basu’s reconstruction of the architecture of Capital, together with Okishio’s work on accumulation dynamics, shows that Marxian expanded reproduction can generate smooth accumulation paths in logical time. Once analysis moves into historical time—where aggregate demand is politically managed and distribution is shaped by institutional conflict—those conditions are violated. Disequilibrium is not an exception, but the normal outcome of capitalist reproduction under historically specific constraints.
I would like to conclude with a question for Professor Marcuzzo. Should this history-of-economic-thought approach be understood not only as reconstruction, but also as methodology—that is, as a way of identifying what is structurally compatible or incompatible between the Keynesian and the Sraffian traditions? In this sense, is Robinson’s unfinished synthesis a historical contingency, or does it reveal the theoretical limits of integration themselves?
References
Basu, D. (2022). The Logic of Capital: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. Cambridge University Press.
Keynes, J. M. (1936). The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Macmillan.
Okishio, N. (1967). Technical changes and the rate of profit. Kobe University Economic Review.
Okishio, N. (1976). Choice of technique and the rate of profit. In J. Schwartz (ed.), The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism. Goodyear.
Okishio, N. (2022). Studies on Marx’s Theory of Capital Accumulation. (English edition).
Rieu, D. M., & Park, H. W. (2020). Unproductive activities and the rate of surplus value at the industry level in Korea, 1995–2015. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 50(2), 284–307.
Robinson, J. (1932). Economics Is a Serious Subject. La Trobe University, The Borchardt Library.
Robinson, J. (1933). The Economics of Imperfect Competition. Macmillan.
Robinson, J. (1937a). Essays in the Theory of Employment. Macmillan.
Robinson, J. (1937b). Introduction to the Theory of Employment. Macmillan.
Robinson, J. (1953a). The production function and the theory of capital. Review of Economic Studies, 21(2), 81–106.
Robinson, J. (1953b). On re-reading Marx.
Robinson, J. (1956 [2016]). The Accumulation of Capital. Springer.
Robinson, J. (1957). An Essay on Marxian Economics. Macmillan.
Robinson, J. (1962). Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. Macmillan.
Shaikh, A. (1984). The transformation from Marx to Sraffa. In E. Mandel & A. Freeman (eds.), Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa. Verso.
Sraffa, P. (1926). The laws of returns under competitive conditions. The Economic Journal, 36(144), 535–550.
Sraffa, P. (1960). Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Cambridge University Press.
Notes
- The slides from the talk are available above.
- My role was as Discussant, where I contextualized Robinson’s contributions and engaged with the arguments presented.