Joan Robinson, Rent, and the Limits of Cambridge Synthesis
Published:
Joan Robinson occupies a peculiar position in twentieth-century economic thought. She is widely cited, frequently invoked, and often celebrated as a founding figure of heterodox economics. Yet she is just as often domesticated: reduced to a Keynesian popularizer, a critic of neoclassical capital theory, or a transitional figure on the road from Marshall to Sraffa. What tends to disappear in these readings is Robinson’s deeper intellectual project: a sustained attempt to confront the internal incompatibilities of Cambridge economics. That confrontation never yielded a synthesis, and this was not accidental.