G.C. Harcourt (1931—)

K. Vela Velupillai

The Thirteenth Tribe: Harcourt's Humane Visions

We all know that Alfred Marshall said that the Mecca of economists was biology even though he was never able to solve his own dilemma of theorizing in terms of concepts derived from classical physics while having a ‘vision’ of capitalism as an evolving organic system (Harcourt 2011: 263).

Geoff Harcourt’s visions were, ultimately, grounded in the humane concerns that characterized Hume and Smith, Ricardo and Wicksell, and his near Oxbridge contemporaries, Hicks and Dobb. Harcourt² is a scholar

• 1 I have chosen the titles of Arthur Koestler’s various books as the headings of the first four sections of this ultra-brief essay on Geoff Harcourt’s extraordinarily deep, sustained, and prolific contributions to economics. The concluding section should have been titled ‘Arrival and Departure’—but is not, due to the needs to comply with the publisher’s convention. However, nothing in this essay implies any endorsement of Koestler’s changing and controversial views and philosophies, nor is there any implication that Harcourt approves either my choice of Koestler-based headings, or that he adheres to the changing ideological underpinnings of Koestler.
• 2 I shall, in the rest of this chapter, refer to Harcourt as GCH, for simplicity, and Post-Keynesian Economics, for the same reason, as PKE. GCH writes faster than mortals like me can read (certainly in one human lifetime). In Harcourt (2014), GCH estimates ‘over 360 articles, etc., and 17 books’; the most

K.V. Velupillai (*)

Formerly Professore di Chiara Fama, University of Trento, Italy

Formerly Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research, USA e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1003

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_45

of impeccable integrity, unrivalled dedication, and admirable courage, all iempered by kindness and generosity, even—perhaps, especially—to those who did not, or could not match him in these noble virtues. That I consider GCH the bearer of the traditions of Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Wicksell, Hicks, and Dobb, is my way of characterizing his wide and deep scholarship of classical, Marxian, and neoclassical economics^{[1] [2]} and philosophy. There is no doubt whatsoever that he forged, out of the economics of Keynes and Kalecki, a wholly new path of enlightened theory and theoretically sound policy; that he was the scholar par excellence of the deep economic contributions of his Cambridge mentor—Joan Robinson; and that he was the pioneer—at least in my opinion—who fashioned a Post Keynesian Economics (PKE), out of the works of these three outstanding economists.^[3]

Justice, fairness, equality, and sympathy for the less privileged characterized the economic policy proposals—always grounded in the enlightened economic theory of classical, neoclassical, and PKE—that made GCH an unquestioned inheritor of the noble traditions of the triple triptych. That he enhanced, generalized, and finessed these traditions, with his own visions, tempered and determined by the new challenges posed by an increasingly virulent orthodoxy, is a tribute to his intellectual, political, and personal courage, in the face of obdurate adversaries.

The bare bones of his personal life^[4] (Harcourt 1995a) indicate he was born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 June 1931, as one of twins,^[5] to Marjorie and Kenneth Harcourt, who were ‘right-wing, assimilationist, agnostic, Jews’, making up a household ‘in the stuffy, snobby, sectarian environment which Melbourne was then’. He, and his brother, experienced ‘anti-semitism^[6] at the private school to which [they] were sent in 1945’.

He, therefore, felt ‘liberated’ that his initial university education was at a Methodist institution, Queen’s College (a constituent college of the University of Melbourne). He married Joan Bartrop, who has graced GCH’s life as his wife, now, for over 60 years, on 30 July 1955. They were blessed with four children, Wendy, Robert, Timothy, and Rebecca, and now, as grandparents to Caterina, Emma Claire Sardoni, and Yunshi and Jhen Huie Harcourt. Wendy’s husband is the distinguished Italian economist, Claudio Sardoni, who carries on the Marx-Keynes-Kalecki^[7] (see Sardoni 2011) aspects of PKE I have come to associate with GCH.

I have to mention that GCH considered Rothschild’s Price Theory and Oligopoly (Rothschild 1947), as ‘the single most influential article of [his] undergraduate years’, but was also introduced to Stone (1945)^[8]—all 107 pages of it—by ‘Don Cochrane (of Cochrane and Orcutt fame)’, in the fourth year as an undergraduate at Melbourne (Harcourt 2012a: 27). These, coupled with a serious reading of Hicks’s classic on Value and Capital and Swan’s—in my opinion—acid review article of Hicks’s Trade Cycle book (Swan 1950), gave GCH that grounding in Hicksian economics which made me include the great Oxford economist in the formation of the Cambridge stalwart GCH was to become.

(1995a, 1999, 2012a).

GCH was awarded a travelling scholarship to continue doctoral studies at King’s College, Cambridge University, from September 1955, where he obtained his PhD, in I960. His contemporaries, as graduate students in Cambridge in the late 1950s, read like a veritable ‘who’s who’ of economics in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Amartya Sen, Luigi Pasinetti, Pierangelo Garegnani, John Whitaker, and a whole host of Australians, of whom I shall only mention Hugh Hudson.

The work and path towards the applied work that became his Cambridge doctoral thesis has left, in my opinion, an indelibly felicitous mark on almost all the outstanding theoretical works by GCH. It is, therefore, useful to quote him on how this work came about (Harcourt 2006a: 146):

[K]aldor went on leave for a year and I had Ron Henderson [as my supervisor] from then on ... He immediately sent me to London to work at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) on the soon-to-be-published combined accounts of all quoted public companies in the United Kingdom for the period 1949—53 ... The data I examined became the raw inputs into my dissertation, Harcourt (1960). It was, in effect, Mathews and Grant on inflation and company finance.. .with Joan Robinson’s Accumulation of Capital (1956) thrown in.

Those ‘in the know’ will understand now, how and why GCH’s two most cited papers, Harcourt (1965a, 1969a), are intimately related. GCH has always walked on two feet—sometimes with theory and applied work in harness; at other times with ethics and economics, or policy and poetry, just as much as he remains an Australian Patriot and a Cambridge Economist (Harcourt 1995a)—always well anchored on two feet.

GCH has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and even more awards and distinctions—ranging from the D.Litt. at Cambridge to the recent Veblen-Commons Award by the Association for Evolutionary Economics.^[9] He is currently a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales—having been a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Adelaide, between 1958 and 1988. At Cambridge he was a ‘young’ University Lecturer and Fellow and Director of Studies at Trinity Hall in 1964-1966, a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall in 19721973 and, in his later ‘incarnation’, Fellow and College Lecturer at Jesus College (1982-1998), Emeritus Fellow (1998—) and University Lecturer (1982-1990), Reader (1990-1998) and Emeritus Reader (1998—) at Cambridge University, in 1964-1966 and 1988-1998. In between, he served in the distinguished capac?ity as the President of Jesus College, Cambridge, twice (in 1988-1989 and 1990-1992), equally many times as the Secretary of the Faculty of Economics and Politics, Cambridge University, and eight years on the University Council.

The rest of the chapter¹¹ is structured as follows. In the next section, there is a discussion of what I consider to be four of the great classics to emanate from the fertile pen of GCH. They provide a Golden Bridge between the empirically loose, yet important world of the accountant, and the mythical Kingdom of the Golden Age. In Section 3, a further six classics by GCH, based on five themes, are the subject matter of discussion. Section 4 tries to provide a basis for the type of macroeconomics GCH has made his own. The concluding Section 5 is an attempt—perhaps a lame one—to outline the way GCH has tried to propagate the ideas of the pioneers via his expository and review articles. It tries, also, to pay homage to the philosophy of GCH.

The interested or curious reader—that elusive creature—should remember Paul Davidson’s most handsome characterization of GCH (Davidson 1996: 911): ‘Through [Harcourt’s writings], one finds an author who is indefatigable in fighting the “good fight” for a civilized system, but is also, as Mark Perlman has noted, “unusually courteous” in a world where that virtue is rare’.

There is no doubt he was continuing the Cambridge tradition of ‘fighting the good fight for a civilized system’, but many who did so, at Cambridge, some of whom were his teachers, mentors, colleagues, or friends (and many became all of these, eventually), could not be characterized as being ‘unusually courteous’, even to each other—and, in the case of two celebrated Cambridge economists, by no stretch of the mind, could such courteousness even be imagined.

• [1] recent CV I had access to, sent me by GCH about six months ago (Harcourt 2015a) lists 260 articles,notes, chapters in books and review articles, and thirty-seven books (not counting second editions, translations into non-English languages, and reviews)—and this does not include his correspondence, reports asan examiner, and letters to newspapers (the latest of which was one published in the Financial Times (FT),just a few days ago!). Whether there is a meaningful discrepancy between the two numbers, ‘over 360’ and297, and between seventeen and thirty-seven books, is, I think, a moot question, especially since a closefriend, collaborator, and authority on GCH lists, ‘29 books and over 360 articles and book chapters, notcounting numerous notes and non-academic publications’ (Blankenburg 2014: 1,295). Given, therefore,the word constraint, coupled to the more mortal ones of time and ability, cannot but imply that this papercan only be an outline of GCH’s amazingly wide, deep, and varied contribution—even only to economics.
• [2] I am well aware that the world of macroeconomics is proverbially many faceted—even without beginning to classify varieties of microeconomics. For the limited purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to workwith these four enduring ‘schools’. If ‘push comes to shove’, it is easy to include, for example, NewKeynesian or New classical macroeconomics as subclasses of neoclassical economics. On the other hand,the other, microeconomic, divide, between partial and general equilibrium systems is of relevance inconsidering, even summarily, GCH’s contribution to economics. This is obviously because he was a dedicated scholar of Marshall and Pigou.
• [3] Had either Keynes or Kalecki displayed the mastery of Marxian or neoclassical economics, respectively,or if only Joan Robinsons impressive scholarship was ‘tempered by kindness and generosity’, especially toadversaries, I would have had no hesitation to include them in the class of Hume, Smith, Ricardo,Wicksell, Dobb, and Hicks—and, hence, forming the triple triptych of the fountainhead of the coreeconomic philosophy and methodology of GCH’s sympathetic and outstandingly original theoreticaland policy framework. GCH himself was greatly influenced, both with regard to economic theory application and policy, and proper behaviour as a teacher, and as a university and Australian citizen, by EricRussell, his greatest Australian friend and mentor at Adelaide (see Harcourt 1977).
• [4] Much of the material here is available in much greater detail, and placed in the context of the social,political, and religious environment in which GCH lived through his formative years, in Harcourt
• [5] He refers (ibid.: 225) to his twin brother John as ‘a distinguished academic dentist’ and one who ‘Keyneswould have approved’. This reference to Keynes’s ‘approval’ is, of course, to the famous last lines of Keynes(1930b [1972] 332; italics added): ‘If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humblecompetent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid’. There is no doubt at all, at least in mymind (and I share this view with GCH, I am sure), that Keynes the economist was supremely competent,but humble!
• [6] During a light-hearted conversation in Cambridge, in the early 1980s, GCH told me he may well be theonly ‘Methodist-Jew, who was also a socialist’—I was not sure, then, whether the statement was to betaken with an appropriate ‘pinch of salt’!
• [7] MKK, as I refer to this trio, are as uneasy bedfellows as that other, perhaps more famous trio, referred toas MKS (Marx-Keynes-Schumpeter). I am not sure that the popularization of MKS due to the events of1883—one death and two births—is a cogent reason for finding commonalities.
• [8] Surely, Harcourt and Pesaran (2000) and, partly, Harcourt and Kitson (1993) reflect these earlybackground influences.
• [9] See Harcourt (2015a) for a full list of degrees, appointments, and awards.