Space exists to stop everything happening in Cambridge

Abstract

Cambridge is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Its Faculty of Economics embraced Alfred Marshall, Arthur Pigou and John Maynard Keynes. Until the 1980s it was a remarkable outpost for innovative heterodox economics, with leading figures including Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa. Subsequently it became a mainstream department. This chapter considers the intellectual and cultural environment of the Cambridge Economics Faculty, particularly from the 1930s to the 1980s. Post-Keynesian economics and modern heterodox economics sprang largely from this milieu, and they still bear signs of their Cambridge legacy.1 I do not believe that the inadequate global headway made by heterodoxy in Cambridge or elsewhere in the last fifty years can be pinned on the insufficiency of its highest achievements. Many setbacks are due to hostility from orthodoxy. But heterodoxy must bear some responsibility. Its fate is partly to do with its practices and its ideological sub-texts, and its persistent avoidance of some major questions. Science is a dynamic social system that is embedded in shared habits and institutions. We should consider the institutional contexts in which