A Revolution Yet to Be Accomplished: Reviewing Luigi Pasinetti, Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians: A ‘Revolution in Economics’ to Be Accomplished (2009)

Abstract

Two of Luigi Pasinetti’s mentors – Nicholas Kaldor and Richard Goodwin – published major volumes in their seventies.† Kaldor’s 1985 Raffaele Mattiole Lectures, Causes of Growth and Stagnation in the Word Economy, (1996) were given just over one year before his death and seen through the Cambridge University Press by Tony Thirlwall and Ferdinando Targetti; the lectures are, in effect, an account of his legacy to our profession. Goodwin’s magnum opus, The Dynamics of a Capitalist Economy: A Multi-Sectoral Approach (1987), co-authored with Lionello Punzo, brought together in a grand synthesis, the two major preoccupations of his academic life – aggregative cycle models and productioninterdependent models – on which he had been working since the late 1930s. It is a pleasing symmetry then that Pasinetti’s volume has also been published in the second half of his eighth decade and that it, too, draws together themes on which the author has been working for a life time.