Economic Philosophy

157 Pages·7.891 MB·English

by  Joan Robinson

Economic Philosophy
“Not just a great woman economist, Joan Robinson was a
brilliant public intellectual – something rarely produced by
contemporary British economics.”
The Guardian
“One of the greatest economic theorists of our time – and
probably the greatest woman economist ever.”
The New York Times
Joan Robinson (1903–1983) was one of the greatest economists of the twen-
tieth century and a fearless critic of free-market capitalism. A major figure in
the controversial “Cambridge School” of economics in the post-war period,
she made fundamental contributions to the economics of international trade
and development.
In Economic Philosophy Robinson looks behind the curtain of economics to reveal
a constant battle between economics as a science and economics as ideology,
which she argued was integral to economics. In her customary vivid and pel-
lucid style, she criticizes early economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and
neo-classical economists Alfred Marshall, Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, over
the question of value. She shows that what they respectively considered to be
the generators of value – labour-time, marginal utility or preferences – are
not scientific but “metaphysical”, and that it is frequently in ideology, not
science, that we find the reason for the rejection of economic theories. She
also weighs up the implications of the Keynesian revolution in economics,
particularly whether Keynes’s theories are applicable to developing economies.
Robinson concludes with a prophetic lesson that resonates in today’s turbulent
and unequal economy: that the task of the economist is to combat the idea that
the only values that count are those that can be measured in terms of money.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Sheila Dow.

Joan Robinson was born in 1903 in Camberley, England. She
taught economics at Cambridge from 1931 to 1971, becom-
ing a full professor in 1965. In 1979 she became the first
woman to be made an honorary fellow of King’s College.
Although she never won the Nobel Prize for Economics,
economists across the political spectrum thought she
deserved that level of recognition. Robinson established her
reputation in 1933 with the publication of The Economics of
Imperfect Competition (2nd ed. 1969), in which she coined
the term “monopsony”, a market situation where there is
only one buyer. In addition to teaching Keynesian theory,
Robinson wrote several books, study guides, and pamphlets
designed to introduce economic theory to the non-specialist.
In the early 1940s she began introducing aspects of Marxist
economics in books such as An Essay on Marxian Economics
(1942; 2nd ed. 1966) and Marx, Marshall, and Keynes (1955).
As Robinson aged, her left-wing sympathies grew, and ulti-
mately she became an admirer of Mao Zedong’s China and
Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, making several trips to China.
She died in 1983.
Routledge Classics contains the very best of Routledge
publishing over the past century or so, books that have,
by popular consent, become established as classics in
their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative
writing published by Routledge and its associated im-
prints, this series makes available in attractive, afforda-
ble form some of the most important works of modern
times.
For a complete list of titles visit:
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Classics/
book-series/SE0585
Joan
Robinson
Economic Philosophy
With a new Foreword by Sheila Dow.
First published in Routledge Classics 2021
by Routledge
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© 1962, 2021 Joan Robinson
Foreword © 2021 Sheila Dow
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First published in 1962 by Transaction publishers
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-54738-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-54087-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09037-3 (ebk)
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Contents
FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION viii
1 Metaphysics, morals and science 1
2 The classics: value 24
3 The neo-classics: utility 44
4 The Keynesian revolution 68
5 Development and under-development 92
6 What are the rules of the game? 115
INDEX 137
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
Joan Robinson’s Economic Philosophy was eagerly received in the 1960s
by those seeking an alternative to the current economic orthodoxy
and its support for the pro-market status quo. The original volume was
launched in a period of high controversy in economics (and in society
at large). This new issue should be received equally eagerly now, given
that the orthodox approach still holds sway and yet the real economic
problems facing economists are becoming ever-more urgent. It was a
recurring theme for Joan Robinson that orthodox economics was not
addressing what she saw as the most important questions.
This volume identifies ideology as the source of questions. Joan
Robinson was explicit about her own ideological focus – on employ-
ment and income, their growth and distribution, and the processes
that generate them. But she expected no less of other economists. Here
she zeroes in on a core misrepresentation of economics by the ortho-
doxy, that it is a positive discipline, separate from moral judgement.
Rather she argues that economics is inevitably ideological. It is not
just that economics has consequences which can be judged by moral
FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION ix
standards, but that the very form and structure of any approach to
economic theory presumes a particular moral stance. Ideology imbues
our understanding of the real world and how we build knowledge
about it as well as what motivates our enquiries. As long as this is rec-
ognised, the content of the ideology can be brought to the surface, ex-
plored and debated. The resulting increase in clarity should then limit
the extent to which theoretical debate proceeds at cross-purposes.
If anything, Joan Robinson’s argument about the ideology of eco-
nomics has gathered force with the increased claims to science made
by mainstream economics relative to alternative approaches. She herself
often found her work dismissed on the grounds that it was ideological,
as if orthodox economics were not. The importance of her argument
has increased too as tumultuous developments in health, the environ-
ment, finance and the economy have provoked challenges on explicitly
moral grounds to traditional pro-market policy stances. Joan Robinson
argued forcefully that the orthodox argument, that market forces ensure
that optimising agents pursuing self-interest generate the best outcome
for society, is ideological. Even where mainstream economics addresses
current problems in terms of deviations from that model, the continu-
ing focus on equilibrium and allocation according to marginal utility
and marginal returns to factors is what she argued was itself ideological.
Joan Robinson’s innovative theoretical contributions, which sprang
from critique of orthodox theory, are legion.1 According to Pasinetti
([1996] 2018, p. 11766) she was “the greatest Nobel Prize winner
that never was”. She is probably best known within economics as a
whole for the publication in 1933 of her pioneering Economics of Im-
perfect Competition. But she went on to distance herself from that work
in order to focus on analysis of economic processes in historical time
rather than on equilibrium. Having thus played a key role in the im-
perfect competition revolution, she went on to play a key role also in
the Keynesian revolution and in the critique of the marginal theory of
capital (notably in her 1956 book The Accumulation of Capital), cementing
her position as one of the most influential heterodox economists of
the twentieth century (Pasinetti [1987] 2018, Marcuzzo 2003).