Value and Capital: Fifty Years Later.

• Author: Clower, Robert W.

Edited by Lionel W. McKenzie and Stefano Zamagni. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Pp. xxxvi, 490. $95.00.

In his 1940 OJE review of the first edition of John Hick's Value and Capital, Abba Lerner (then at Columbia University) remarked:

To say that Professor Hicks' "Value and Capital" is the

most important publication for economic theory since

the appearance of Mr. Keynes' "General Theory of

Employment Interest and Money" does not quite do it

justice. For not only do some of the important "Keynesian"

results, reached independently and earlier by

Professor Hicks, appear in their final form in this volume,

but the elegance and precision with which

fundamental notions are presented and the astonishingly simple

way in which the intricate argument unfolds itself

make it certain that the book will remain a classic for

students to read and re-read long after Mr. Keynes'

book has been rendered obsolete. . . .

Other reviewers, most notably Oskar Morganstern in the 1941 JPE, were less kind (cf. the comment in the first paragraph of the editorial introduction to the present volume, p. xviii); but subsequent events show that Lerner's assessment was prescient. Indeed, as perusal of any modern economics text or treatise will reveal, no writer of this century has done more than John Hicks to shape contemporary modes of teaching and writing. So it is fitting that, nearly fifty years after publication of Hicks's great classic--the book that painlessly introduced English-speaking economists to the theretofore largely ignored general equilibrium writings of the Lausanne School--two former students of Hicks should organize a conference to celebrate its Fiftieth Anniversary.

The volume under review, a major product of that conference, consists of fifteen commissioned papers and eleven related comments, together with a short postscript by Hicks (who, at nearly 85 years of age, attended the conference and (so the editors inform us) sat through and commented on most of the presentations). The volume is thus a testimonial, or seems to have been so intended, to the "flowering of economic theory" (xvii) that followed post-World War II publication [1946] of the second edition of Value and Capital. On close inspection, however, one finds it difficult to regard the contributions in this volume as "testimonials" to ideas set forth in Value and Capital.

When Hicks originally wrote Value and Capital, it was still possible seriously to view general equilibrium...