Joan Robinson through the lenses of sixty years of book reviews

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we discuss Joan Robinson’s views through the lenses of her 127 book reviews, an activity which she engaged in throughout her life. A complete list of them—so we hope—is presented with full reference to the original place of publication, in the form of tables arranged by decade. We follow her work in chronological order, taking each decade as the framework to analyse what she was working on at the time and show how her reviews were—at times loosely, at times closely—connected with her scientific and political concerns. In some cases, the reviews amounted to review essays, which she reprinted in her Collected Economic Papers, but even in the short reviews she managed to give full expression to her views on the topic or author, and thus they offer us additional insights into her mode of thought, examples of her crisp prose and forceful style of argument. Her reviews ranged over a great variety of topics, reflecting over 60 years of the development of economics, or at least those aspects and topics which she deemed relevant at the time, and so they come to form part of her intellectual legacy, as much as her published work.