This is an infinite book. In nearly 1200 pages, it tells the story of Cambridge University Economics in the post-WW2 decades. The narration by Ashwani Saith makes the Cambridge events appear as an epic phase in the history of the academy and of the discipline. Faced with 1188 pages, I initially gave up reviewing the book also, because I found that, as years went by, the prediction made by Frank Hahn in the centenary issue of the Economic Journal has been turning out increasingly correct. Hahn (Reference Hahn1991) pointed out that economic theorising will fade away and that it will mutate into scenario planning. He has been proven right, although he still gave it too much of a positive intellectual slant. The discipline has become a completely incoherent hodge-podge while, at the same time, remaining at its core glued to a primitive belief in the validity of the subjective behavioural postulates espoused in introductory micro textbooks. Thus, in my opinion, the deeds that occurred in one of the two main British academies will not generate any exciting tale. Nowadays, literally anything goes. A proof is given by how Piketty’s (Reference Piketty2014) neoclassically grounded book has atrophied left wingers’ brains. It was enough for him to write that ‘profits’ grow faster than income, for all the do-gooders and the brainless post-modern radicals to become Piketty’s acolytes overnight. Yet, the book is deeply flawed precisely where Piketty lays out the conditions showing ‘profits’ growth higher than income growth. To understand why, one would indeed have to go through the Cambridge odyssey.

Does Saith manage to convey the significance of what was at stake and of what happened? In my view, the answer is highly positive, albeit with a proviso. In order to appreciate Saith’s contribution, the reader ought to be motivated to learn and understand the economic debates forming the context of the book. To this effect, the following material seems to be essential reading: Luigi Pasinetti (Reference Pasinetti1974, Reference Pasinetti1977), G.C. Harcourt (Reference Harcourt1972, Reference Harcourt2006) and Walsh and Gram (Reference Walsh and Gram1980). Bhaduri (Reference Bhaduri1969) is especially important for Marxists to this very day. Best of all would be to get hold of two rare classical economical Penguin collections of readings, one edited by Harcourt and Laing (Reference Harcourt and Laing1971), the other by Amartya Sen (Reference Sen1970). These two items are really part of the Odyssey. They were some of the main weapons with which young theoretically driven ‘Cambridge’ militants fought for the cause not just, not even primarily, in Britain but also in other European countries. Certainly in Italy – where the present reviewer acquired the books – and perhaps elsewhere as well, like India and Australia. Although in those years for India, the two little volumes would have been too pricey. Because there was, indeed, a cause fed by the solid proofs that bourgeois socioeconomic theory – starting from the atomistic individual and then stretching all the way to the aggregate macroeconomy in a false seamless continuity – was flawed at its foundations. If there were not a cause, the hundreds of people who in the very early 1970s flocked to the Ridotto dell’Eliseo, a well-known theatre in Rome just in front of the Bank of Italy, to listen to Joan Robinson, would not have materialised. The Cambridge epic was a case, as Louis Althusser would have christened it, of class struggle within the theory. In this respect, it was not necessary for the leading characters of the ‘group’ to share the same views about society, politics, and ideology. It suffices to think of Nicholas Kaldor versus Maurice Dobb, for instance, with Kaldor, having lost a University election to Dobb, egotistically accusing the latter of neoclassicism. What was required is that all agreed on why marginalist economics was to be rejected and, with it, the related neoclassical macroeconomics produced by the invasive modelling done in American universities.

In that struggle, among the outside participants, India and Italy featured most prominently, with India generating a massive intellectual transfer, thereby becoming a creditor to Cambridge. There are, then, two aspects to the story: the first is internal to Cambridge, while the second is external to it. The former displayed marked gladiatorial features throughout the 1960s, when agile Italian knights – in a repeat of the 1503 Disfida di Barletta (the famous mounted tourney in which 13 Italian chevaliers defeated 13 French adversaries who threw the challenge in the wake of some serious wine drinking) – played the decisive role in defeating the heavily armoured Americans. The other aspect is external to Cambridge in two different ways. One way arises from the institutional and political situation internal to the University of Cambridge. It pertains to how the ‘group’ related to the relevant domestic British institutions in juxtaposition to the manner its enemies operated outside the University to extirpate the ‘group’ from the academic realm. The second way consists of the relations between the wider world and Cambridge. Saith deals pre-eminently with the internal processes and with the first aspect of the external factors, without neglecting to advance a critical outlook on the wider connections. He describes and analyses a trajectory leading eventually to the contemporary irrelevance of the department of economics, reduced by now to a mere appendage of US-inspired research agendas. A very important component of the story told in the two volumes focuses on the unravelling of the two branches in which economic thinking was being carried out in Cambridge: the Economics Department proper, and the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), a purely contractual institution dedicated to applied research in the development of which, Nicholas Kaldor invested much of his energy. The DAE achieved world-significant results in input-output analysis and national accounting with Professor and Nobel Laureate Richard Stone attaining a world first in sectoral macrofinancial balances thanks to the former Welsh National Orchestra’s oboist, Professor Wynne Godley. The Cambridge Odyssey ends with the transformation of the Faculty’s Economics Department into an American appendage, whereas the DAE was simply assassinated. The Author does see, however, a silver lining as regards to the future of the Cambridge intellectual tradition surviving by spreading to, and nesting in, other disciplines and many different universities. I respectfully disagree with this conclusion, which I shall address in my closing paragraph. In the ensuing notes, I will, therefore, follow the train of thought set in motion while reading this opus.

In a Zoom debate organised by the Editor of the Review of Political Economy, Saith stated that the two volumes may be accessed from any chapter not necessarily in sequence. In this way, the book becomes very readable. In reality, the two volumes are rather difficult. To appreciate them, one has to muster in depth the theoretical content of the internal divisions; otherwise, the reader may easily miss the stakes involved. Hence, the imperative to become acquainted with some of the readings listed earlier. The foundations of a post-WW2 Cambridge ‘Party’ of Political Economy were laid down in the very early 1950s, initially mostly due to the independent work of Maurice Dobb and Joan Robinson. The former really opened the road to development and planning, to both the Soviet and the Indian experiences, thereby starting the intellectual credit line from India to the United Kingdom, which Saith outlines very well without calling it that way. By 1960, Maurice Dobb and Amartya Sen had each published a book in which, in a different but comparable manner, they argued against the notion of a development path based on the traditional principle of factor substitution through prices by moving smoothly from the more abundant to the scarcer factor; that is from mass peasantry to advanced capital goods industries (Dobb Reference Dobb1960; Sen Reference Sen1960). Furthermore, in the very early 1950s, Joan Robinson began to fire on the ‘General Headquarters’ of economics by shelling the neoclassical theory of the production function and of capital. In her 1956 book The Accumulation of Capital, she encountered, through her assistant Ruth Cohen, a curiosum whereby a lower relative price of capital does not necessarily entail the selection of methods of production featuring a higher degree of mechanisation (on the account that a lower price of capital implies cheaper machines relative to wages). The Ruth Cohen curiosum implied a refutation of the principle of substitution and of distribution, as cherished by neoclassical theory and held strongly at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economics departments. However, Joan Robinson treated that result as an anomaly without, therefore, deriving the necessary conclusions which would have both strengthened and nuanced Dobb’s and Sen’s arguments about planned development in a Mahalanobis context. The real test of fire took place in the 1960s, which affected most of Cambridge economics, perhaps too much, spilling over into the next decade. Two great battles occurred in the middle of that decade precisely against MIT, both won by Cambridge U.K. The crucial weaponry was, however, provided by Italy, in the name of Pierangelo Garegnani, then at the University of Sassari in Sardinia, Italy, and Luigi Pasinetti, then both at Cambridge and at the Catholic University of Milan. They were joined few years later by Luigi Spaventa from the University of Rome la Sapienza.

In 1955, Nicholas Kaldor published, in The Review of Economic Studies, a paper where he outlined a theory of the distribution of income between profit and wages which did not depend on factors’ marginal productivities (Kaldor Reference Kaldor1955). The paper had some unsolved issues that were straightened out by Luigi Pasinetti in a celebrated 1962 essay published in the same journal. There, Pasinetti (Reference Pasinetti1962) proved the irrelevance of the marginal productivity theory of distribution in relation to the links between profits and saving in a growth framework. Pasinetti unearthed and highlighted something that, as he himself pointed out, had passed unnoticed in the previous literature. Profits are distributed in proportion to the ownership of capital, which in turn depends on accumulated savings. Thus: ‘As long as, in the economic system, there is a category of savers that save exclusively out of profit, the only rate of profit that is compatible with equilibrium growth is the one given by the Cambridge equation, independently of anything else’ (Pasinetti Reference Pasinetti1974, 128). The 1962 result sent MIT’s Modigliani and Samuelson into a frenzy. They jointly counterattacked, still in the Review of Economic Studies in 1966, throwing everything in – even the possibility that the capitalists might disappear so that all the savings would accrue to wages – just to save neoclassical theory. But that attempt was to no avail.

In 1960, a long overdue book appeared: Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities authored by the rather taciturn Librarian of the Marshall Library, the Italian Piero Sraffa. Having originally been invited by Keynes, Sraffa had been residing in Cambridge since 1927, and by 1929 had almost completed the book, leaving it in a drawer. Toward the end of the slim volume, Sraffa presents the case of a technique being the most profitable at a particular initial wage rate, becoming less profitable at a higher rate of profits and lower wage rate. At this point, the said technique yields its place to a different technique that, at the previous wage rate, was inferior in terms of the rate of profit. However, at still higher rates of profit, therefore at a still lower wage rate, the first dominant technique would dislodge the second intermediate one. This means that the same first technique would be again the preferred one, but now at different profit and wage rates vis à vis the wage and profit rates that prevailed before it was dislodged by the intermediate one. Such an eventuality is complete anathema to standard theory to this very day. This is because traditional theory requires that for each wage and profit rate, one and only one technique must dominate, so that in any movement away from a particular wage and profit rate relation, a different technique would naturally be selected, with the old one never coming back again. The reason for such a condition is that in neoclassical theory, the wage rate and the profit rate are prices of two aggregate physical factors, capital and labour. The prices must reflect their respective scarcities, just like the prices of apples and pears should reflect the availability of each fruit, subject to the principle of diminishing marginal utility. In a similar and symmetrical way, the neoclassical theory of factors prices and income distribution must be subject to diminishing marginal productivities.

At MIT, Paul Samuelson and, I presume, Robert Solow were not impressed with what was transpiring from Cambridge England. Incidentally, something had already happened to Solow some years before the start of the battles. This was when Luigi Pasinetti (Reference Pasinetti1959), during his stay at Harvard, strongly criticised Solow’s notion of technical progress because it was built on a theoretical approach which excluded the production of capital goods. Furthermore, a visit to MIT by the straight-talker Joan Robinson in 1961 must not have lightened their hearts. Be that as it may, Paul Samuelson decided to write a paper that would prove that a single-sector aggregate model would be robust enough to confirm the validity of the marginalist capital theory despite all the doubts. The paper was published in 1962 in the Review of Economic Studies with the telling title ‘Parable and Realism in Capital Theory: The Surrogate Production Function’ (Samuelson Reference Samuelson1962). From Cambridge U.K., there was complete silence for about three years, although when Samuelson presented the paper at MIT, Garegnani was around. In a footnote, Samuelson thanked Pierangelo Garegnani for having alerted him that the assumption of equi-proportionality of inputs used in the Surrogate Production Function was a special case. Samuelson wrote that he hoped Garegnani would formulate an extensive explanation of the point made at the seminar. Yet, nothing came in writing for a number of years. Then, we have a story told by Luigi Pasinetti in a recently videotaped long interview with Nadia Garbellini published on the INET website (Brancaccio and Garbellini, Reference Brancaccio and Garbellini2018). One day, in 1965, Geoff Harcourt came running to Sraffa’s office in the Cambridge Faculty of Economics, holding a freshly published Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) article by the late David Levhari, then a doctoral student of Paul Samuelson. They all gathered in Sraffa’s office. Levhari, in his paper, claimed to have refuted the notion that a discarded technique could reappear again. We should reply, Geoff intimated. Surely he is wrong, said Sraffa. Would you reply, asked Harcourt? Sraffa: no, no! Joan Robinson: no, no! Luigi Pasinetti sitting quietly: I know the mathematics of the paper so I may try to formulate a response. And he did, very successfully at that. In 1966, Harvard University’s QJE published, inter alia, a Symposium including three articles, written one each by Luigi Pasinetti (Reference Pasinetti1966), Pierangelo Garegnani (Reference Garegnani1966), and Michio Morishima (Reference Morishima1966), debunking, especially the first pair, the Levhari argument. The Symposium was closed by Paul Samuelson (Reference Samuelson1966) who admitted that the Levhari refutation paper was wrong (QJE 1966). A few years later, in two different essays, Pierangelo Garegnani (Reference Garegnani1970) and Luigi Spaventa (Reference Spaventa1970) showed that the original 1962 paper by Paul Samuelson was indeed a very special case. As a non-secondary aside, I should note that in the same issue of Harvard’s QJE, but separately from the Symposium, Frank Hahn (Reference Hahn1966), the Cambridge enemy of the Cambridge ‘group’, published a paper that addressed a pressing issue persistently raised over the years by Joan Robinson. Among neoclassical theory’s major failings, she argued, was the fact that the theory is unable to tell us how the economy gets into equilibrium. Lupus in fabula! This is precisely what Hahn’s fully neoclassical paper showed: namely, the neoclassical theory, which is entirely based on the notion of equilibrium, cannot possibly tell how an economy gets into it.

Therefore, by the 1970s, there existed in Cambridge a rather coherent body of literature – including, unwittingly, the Hahn Reference Hahn1966 paper – enabling the formation of a curriculum which could have covered in a systematic manner, Joan Robinson’s methodological views, the Kaldor-Pasinetti approach, and Marx’s business cycle through the famous non-linear model by Richard Goodwin – a not particularly prolific, yet exceptionally smart, mathematical marxist physicist turned economist. Goodwin had moved in the early 1950s from the United States to Cambridge, U.K., for political reasons – and the critique of neoclassical capital theory. Furthermore, considering that around the same period, Maurice Dobb (Reference Dobb1973) published a truly remarkable volume on the history of economic thought written from the standpoint of the classical-Marxian-Sraffian and Kaleckian approaches, a completely autonomous programme could indeed have been mounted. In this context, economic development could be covered in part by the Dobb-Sen contributions and, in most part, by the arrival of Ajit Singh, an incredible gift from India to Cambridge via the University of California in Berkeley. To Ajit Singh, Ashwani (Reference Saith2019) has devoted a whole book from which sprang the two volumes under review. Singh was a formidable intellectual and researcher who did not eschew to openly consider the options for, and paths to, development in the concrete context of imperialist conditions. Ajit Singh had the unique ability to combine a very strong theoretical understanding of economics with a powerful penchant for historical and empirical studies. The idea of writing a textbook did arise and was produced in co-authorship by Joan Robinson and John Eatwell (Reference Robinson and Eatwell1973). It was a failure caused by the lack of unity of purpose. It was the first and last attempt at a joint cooperation on a didactic pedagogical project.

Just the same, according to Saith’s account, in 1976, Joan Robinson produced an agenda regarding how a new programme should look, articulated over a number of points. ‘Capital, she wrote, is not a factor of production. Capitalism is a particular economic system in which the command of finance permits production to be organised by employment of labour, supplying other inputs, incurring costs in advance of proceeds and making profits. Profits are related to the finance supplied and not to the ‘productivity’ of physical inputs’. Moreover, she stressed that investment decisions are controlled and made by governments and by ‘the competitive struggle of big corporations’ (all quotations are from Saith, 15, 9). Joan Robinson goes on to argue that foreign investment must be questioned, for doing more harm than good. In reading her 1976 agenda, I asked myself who could in those years in Cambridge teach in a systematic manner along Robinson’s suggested lines. The answer was, very few people except for Ajit Singh. Others were in reswitching modes or into long-term gravitations to fully adjusted positions while Kaldor was abandoning his earlier belief in the smooth, albeit non-marginalist, adjustment to full employment growth. He was moving into what Geoffrey Harcourt – an irreplaceable intellectual and institutional pillar of what remained of non-neoclassical Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s – called Kaldor Mark 2 (it is unfortunate that the wider public would become aware of the significance of Kaldor (Reference Kaldor1996) Mark 2 after the posthumous publication of his magnificent Italian Mattioli Lectures). There were, therefore, significant bifurcations pulling the intellectual cohesion apart. In addition to Singh, only Bob Rowthorn, then, engaged on the battlefront with his own valuable views and committed marxist frequentations. (There is a beautiful picture of a young Bob Rowthorn with Ernest Mandel and Atvater, taken in 1970 at the Tilburg University conference about capitalism in the 1970s) Through his work on Kalecki, Rowthorn was dealing with questions compatible with the Joan Robinson agenda. The implementation of the latter would have required searching for new elements. Saith mentions that the relations between the Cambridge ‘Party’ and the rest of the world were problematic because of its insularity. However, I would rather speak of individualistic absolute self-centredness (with Kaldor at the apex while exonerating Dobb and Pasinetti), thus making interactions toward a common goal much more difficult. The reality was moving in the opposite direction to Joan Robinson’s agenda. Maurice Dobb died in the same year, while Kaldor, Joan Robinson, and Richard Kahn were either retired or on the cusp of retirement. The last thing the group could do was to find new forces. The task was rendered more difficult by the lack of unity which resulted – as Pasinetti (Reference Pasinetti2007), quoted by Saith, forcefully stated – in their total negligence to secure the reproduction and expansion of their own intellectual tradition.

A completely different attitude characterised the behaviour of the adversaries championed by Professors R.C.O. Matthews and Frank Horace Hahn, the latter a Kaldor-supported appointment to the chair to boot. They aimed at conquering the commanding heights external to the Faculty Board, in which they were a minority, as well as outside the University. Unlike the Cambridge ‘Party’ who remained cooped up in the University, the Matthews-Hahn faction established a whole set of external networks, actively promoting and placing their former students. Saith illustrates these linkages in great detail, explaining their intricacies and power-oriented consistency, against which the Cambridge ‘Party’ was simply helpless and hapless. Saith relates how the main intellectual plank employed by Frank Hahn to terrorise the colleagues in the Faculty was his own bragging about the perfection and beauty of General Equilibrium Theory of the Arrow-Debreu variety. Yet, he mentions that Hahn had, however, a hidden Achilles heel known as the anything goes theorem, so labelled in the most massive text to date on advanced microeconomics (Mas-Colell et al Reference Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green1995). The theorem had been formulated in stages by Gérard Debreu, Rolf Mantel, and Hugo Sonnenschein in three separately written papers between 1970 and 1974. Simply put, it states that the demand curve for any single market, and a fortiori for all markets, may not be downward sloping. More specifically, if we start from a family of excess demand functions, the ensuing rise in prices is not likely to bring about a stable equilibrium. Higher prices mean higher incomes which, being spent, will create once more a set of excess demand functions. Thus, the Arrow-Debreu theory is not so beautifully perfect after all, it crashes in flames even before getting to production and capital. I am surprised and astonished by the ‘Party’ not having grasped the opportunity to lash out into Frank Hahn in those very years that the anything goes theorem was being published. They certainly did not lack the opportunity and ability to find the appropriate ways to capitalise on it. However, I am convinced that the time, in terms of living labour, spent on the reswitching story was way beyond what was productively necessary, including the hours wasted in arguing that General Equilibrium à la Arrow-Debreu was not immune to the critique of neoclassical capital theory. At some point, all this inhibited the willingness to look critically at the role and the forms that the Arrow-Debreu theory was acquiring in the United States. The demolition of Hahn’s approach and of his intellectual bullying may not have saved the day, but it would have made things more difficult, since, in the early 1970s, conditions for a general assault on Cambridge economics were not fully ripe.

We are now approaching the close of the review of this very complex book. Saith correctly locates the assault on Cambridge economics in a wider international context constituted by two interrelated factors: the rise of both the so-called neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the United States, the latter proving to be extremely dangerous in military terms, relative to the likelihood of a nuclear conflagration. Saith subjects the former to a lengthy and deeply argued discussion. Before that, he had already shown that MIT and Chicago were fake enemies as they fully subscribed to the same microeconomic principles. With neoliberalism and the rise to dominance throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the United States of a whole array of schools and institutions, from the Virginia School to those extolling the infallibility of the efficient market hypothesis and the validity of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE), an entire politically powerful network came into being. It is on this web that the destroyers of Cambridge economics relied, even though they individually may not have agreed with Fama’s theory or DSGE. The assault was initiated by Frank Hahn and his associates, and joined in the mid-1980s by the new chair occupied by Partha Dasgupta, whose father, A.K. Dasgupta, was an exceptionally refined economic thinker of a most classical Indian vintage. The advent of neoconservatism led to the creation of official ranking criteria with the task of disciplining and cleansing academic institutions. This is what Frank Hahn and Dasgupta did to Cambridge through the Research Assessment Exercise and other similar bodies leading to the purging of the Faculty and the Department, to the demise of the Cambridge growth project and to the end of the hitherto very successful DAE.

The book is written in both a sharp and a nuanced form. Saith’s writing, both in its content and prose, is very stimulating. Many threads are followed but none become a red herring as the different strands are always reconducted to the main line of the narrative: the demise of Cambridge Economics. However, I beg to disagree with the Author regarding his relative final optimism. We have entered a phase in which, as was anticipated in the early 1930s while in prison by Antonio Gramsci in his notes on Americanism and fordism, the dominant classes, that is, capital in the marxist sense, do not need intellectuals but only experts. Thus, ‘Cambridge’ is a quaint story of a bygone era.

These notes are dedicated to Amiya Kumar Bagchi from Kolkata, a formidable marxist, author of the most advanced book on economic exploitation (Bagchi Reference Bagchi1982), who passed away while this review was being written.