Kalecki and Robinson: An “Outsider’s” Influence

Abstract

Michal Kalecki and Joan Robinson were two of the major contributors to what is today called post-Keynesian economics. They first met not long after Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money had been published early in 1936, and there began an intellectual and personal friendship that lasted until Kalecki's death in 1970. There was a marked difference in their backgrounds and standing. Kalecki was clearly an outsider, an autodidact without any university degree, while Robinson was already a member of the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge. She had been very much involved in the Cambridge Circus that provided criticism and advice to Keynes as he moved from the Treatise on Money to the General Theory (Keynes, 1973a, pp. 337-43), and then she became a careful and sympathetic reader of drafts of the General Theory. Kalecki and Robinson were two very strong-minded individuals, and there must have been a good deal of give and take in their discussions, with each learning from the other. In a review article of Kalecki (1971), Robinson wrote that this volume reminds me that I learned far more, over thirty-five years, from the arguments with Kalecki that I lost than from those that I won (Robinson, 1973, p. 91). An examina-