Joan Robinson and Her Circle (2005)

The major influences on Joan Robinson as an economist include Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove, Austin Robinson, Richard Kahn, Piero Sraffa, Michal Kalecki and Nicholas Kaldor.† (I omit people who are still alive, most notably Luigi Pasinetti, Amit Bhaduri, John Eatwell and Donald Harris.) She came up to Cambridge in 1922, to Girton College, to read economics; she read history as a schoolgirl at St. Paul’s Girls School in London, and, at one remove, was privy to history in the making during World War I. Her father, a professional soldier, was at the centre of a major scandal concerning the conduct of the war by Lloyd George’s government. Though it effectively ended his military career, he was in fact vindicated for his whistle-blowing actions (as we would say now). He showed the sort of integrity and courageous, if quixotic, behaviour for which Joan Robinson herself was to become famous. Joan Robinson told me that until as a 15-year-old school child she became known as the daughter of Major General Sir Frederick Maurice of the infamous Maurice debates, her life in her mind was more real to her than life in reality. She did a switch (not a re-switch) at this juncture. I suspect that her childhood fantasy life may be one clue as to why she was such a powerful theorist and remorselessly logical writer. But enough of speculative psycho-babble.