Political Economy

After retiring (sic) in 1971, she wrote, with John Eatwell, an alternative, political economy, undergraduate textbook of rather a different understanding of Keynes and capitalism than Samuelson’s standard (Robinson and Eatwell 1973). It was not a success, perhaps because the experience of the authors was with students in the Cambridge Tripos and its Cambridge Keynesian lecturers. Also, the audience whom Eatwell and Robinson had in mind was first year undergraduate students, particularly those in the USA, for whom a combination of their own lack of background knowledge of the content and of experience in argument and her own (typical Robinson) style, succinct and even obscure, discouraged it from widespread use. Robinson had optimistic expectations that this introductory text would make significant inroads into American universities and for (Cambridge-UK Keynesian) political economy to become part of standard economics courses; it would, at least, make students aware that they were being offered only one option, in the guise of being the only option, through which to analyse economic problems. There was during the 1970s much campus interest in her political views as a speaker, and in her theoretical challenges to the economics being taught, but these were complex critiques in terms of unfamiliar literary methods on which those sentiments were based. Nevertheless, for the better prepared, the book remains an excellent guide to the basic principles and developments of a Cambridge Keynesian political economy approach up to that time, and to its critique of the mainstream.

Her reputation as a significant theorist among American economists had been established with the publication of EIC and particularly noticed because of its coincidence with Chamberlin’s The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1933). However, her Essay on Marxian Economics (Robinson 1942) was met with scandal, and her outspoken views on socialism and even communism distanced her from the mainstream of economics in the USA during and after the war. From her point of view, America represented all that she disliked about capitalism. In the immediate post-war period, economists in both UK and USA were developing their own versions of growth theory. There were ‘Keynesians’ in both locations, but it took time to bring to notice that this label meant different things for each. The Cambridge-UK model argued that investment created the necessary savings while in the Solow-Swan model, for example, it was the reverse. The gap between the two was compounded by their separate methods of theorising: US economists used mathematical models, while Robinson used a more literary form of varying precision. This meant that debate between Robinson and leading US economists did not lead to many ‘conversions’. Solow and Samuelson, both Neo-Keynesians, nevertheless corresponded with Robinson, tolerating her impatient responses to the many disputed points.

She maintained a controversial profile in the USA during the ensuing capital debates of the 1960s and into the 1970s with complex theoretical contributions, in mainly UK and European journals. Her post-war books aroused interest and were reviewed in significant American journals, albeit often with hostility. Her excellent knowledge of Marshallian-based neoclassical theory made her an intimidating opponent in argument. Her confrontational style and unrelenting tenacity possibly compromised her acceptance even further than did her politics by many US conservatives. On the other hand, she was also attracting interest from scholars sympathetic to her critiques of both the irrelevance and the theoretical failings of the mainstream. Monthly Review, a well-regarded, left-wing US magazine which discussed issues of politics and economics, did publish her articles. She first visited the USA in 1961, invited by Robert Clower initially but also giving seminars and lectures at Harvard, MIT, and Chicago, among other universities, making new friends and more hostile critics.

In 1971, John Kenneth Galbraith, as the elected president of the American Economic Association, invited Robinson to deliver its annual and prestigious Richard T Ely Lecture. She met Galbraith in 1937 when he spent a year at Cambridge, and they had remained lifelong friends. Her lecture was ‘The Second Crisis of Economic Theory’ (Robinson 1972), and she used the opportunity to once again criticise the inadequacy of contemporary theory to address the crises associated with its free market objectives, a theme she revisits in both public lectures and well-placed essays. As her interests moved on from capital theory to developing a theory of growth and income distribution as an historical process, her arguments, always sound, took on an even less precise form with the introduction of ‘historical’ concepts. However, this made it easier for the bulk of the mathematicians-cum-economists to ignore her contributions. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, she gave more time to student requests, from both undergraduates and graduates, for her to visit and give seminars on the economic theory which could replace their standardised models and provide a meaningful basis for policy. Her hopes of making a difference to economic theory in the USA were now placed on younger economists who wanted to learn and away from the stalwarts with their vested interests.

Robinson often drew the attention of economists to their responsibility to recognise the ethical aspects of their arguments. In 1938, she became very ill. Her sensitivity and intensely felt horror of the persecution of war meant her views towards Britain’s role in opposing fascism on the Continent conflicted with the stance of her military family and Austin. In letters between Kahn, Austin, and Keynes at this time, her isolation and despair were considered to underlie her illness (although Keynes thought that the stress of intellectual work and babies together also contributed). The hopelessness of war as a solution seemed to her obvious. These were views which reappeared in her work at numerous times and places. She gave a lecture to students in 1941, beginning with a passionate plea to their humanity and moving on to consider the wastage of destruction and of resources used in producing armaments. In her writing on developing economies, she alerted them to beware that promised ‘aid’ should not in fact be tied to military contracts. In 1981, she delivered the Tanner

Lecture on Human Values at the University of Utah, her subject being the arms race and the supposed economic necessity for arms expenditure. She clarified the fallacies and errors in the frequently voiced economic j ustifications, which often deferred to empirical or theoretical support, even ‘proof’, for the continued pursuit of the broad-ranging dynamic of the military-industrial complex. Despite her clarity and ordered argument, her trust in human nature seemed in doubt.