Strictly, the "Cambridge Keynesians" refer to the unique group of Cambridge economists inspired or connected to the work of John Maynard Keynes in a more "fundamentalist" way than the American Neo-Keynesian Synthesis. Their origin stems from the inner circle, the five members of Keynes's "Circus" who jointly read and commented on the successive drafts of the General Theory before it was published - Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Piero Sraffa, Austin Robinson and James Meade. Forming a more distant ring, but in many ways equally important for the later development of Keynesian economics, were the contemporary young economists in England at the time, such as Roy F. Harrod, Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and John Hicks - who were among the first to digest and expand upon Keynes's work, becoming its first flag-carriers outside of Cambridge proper.
In subsequent years, the "Cambridge" Keynesians, the center of the Cambridge Keynesians reformed, particularly after Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor began inching towards an integration of Keynes's theory and Classical Political Economy - particular in developing the "Cambridge" approach to the theory of growth and endogenous business cycle theory. To some extent, this move was inspired by the work of Michal Kalecki, who seemed to have been able to marry Marxian and Keynesian analysis in his (independent) work on macrofluctuations; but perhaps the greatest impetus was the eminence grise of Cambridge - Piero Sraffa, whose virtually single-handed resurrection of Ricardian value theory in his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) energized a generation of economists. Although it followed upon Joan Robinson's queries about capital aggregation (1954, 1956), Sraffa's "capital critique" set off the Cambridge Capital Controversy with the American Neo-Keynesians.
The Robinson-Kaldor growth theory and the Cambridge Capital Controversy galvanized a new generation of "Cambridge Keynesians" such as Luigi Pasinetti, Piero Garegnani, John Eatwell, Geoff Harcourt at Cambridge proper, and many sympathizers elsewher - particularly among the American Post Keynesian school. Thus, loosely, the "Cambridge" approach combines some part of three strands of work: that of the original "macroeconomic" vision of John Maynard Keynes, the "distributional" emphasis of Michal Kalecki and the "value theory" of Piero Sraffa - all three strands of which were perhaps personified in most clearly in the dynamic duo, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor.
The Five Members of Keynes's "Circus"
Associates of the Circus Generation
The Cambridge "Renegades"
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