The Joan Robinson Legacy.

• Author: Clower, Robert W.

This volume starts with a lovely portrait (the frontispage) of Joan Robinson (circa 1970, I should guess) that perfectly captures her warmth, thoughtfulness, intelligence and beauty during the latter part of the period when I met her most frequently and knew her best. Ms. Rima has here assembled a mixed collection of essays (mostly by persons who would style themselves "Post Keynesian") on various aspects of Joan Robinson's many contributions to economic doctrine and method, Joan's own writing was so limpid that mere commentators, whatever their literary and intellectual talents, have an impossible act to follow. Joan Robinson may not always have been everyones' cup of tea, but at one time or another she was every reader's glass of champagne.

Like many Cambridge students in the 1920s, and like Alfred Marshall (cf. Keynes, Essays in Biography, Collected Work Vol. X, p. 146), Joan Robinson ". . . belonged to the tribe of sages and pastors |and so~ was endowed with a double nature. . . ." But--again like Marshall--"As a preacher and pastor . . . |she~ was not particularly superior to other similar natures." And while one could not be in Joan's presence for more than a few minutes without recognizing her incredible keenness of intellect and quick logic, neither can one read her books and collected works and imagine that anyone of Keynes's stature would say of her, as Keynes did say of Marshall, ". . . as a scientist |she~ was, within |her~ own field, the greatest in the world for a hundred years." Despite her sharp intelligence, Joan had no discernable feel for what Polya calls "shaded inference"--the essential quality of mind that separates the great empirical scientist from the great logician or mathematician. Though Joan often spoke and wrote sensibly about scientific methodology (one of the more notable instances being her remark that "in a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out error, doctrine has long life.") she seemed to view economic theories either as nearly white--so Marx and Keynes were seen not as wrong but merely sometimes confused or misguided--or (especially anything she associated with Walras or classical theory) as perfectly black. Her collected works may entertain future historians of economic science, but they will not add much to what future generations will regard as "accumulated economic knowledge."

With few exceptions, the essays in this volume are "in the spirit" if not in the literary style of Joan...