The discontent surfaced most notably in the so-called ‘Cambridge controversies’ in the theory of capital, the debates between the two Cambridges (England and MA) which occurred principally between the 1950s and the 1970s. They started with Joan Robinson's article ‘The production function and the theory of capital (1953–4)’; they really ‘hotted up’ with the publication of Piero Sraffa's classic, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). They ‘ended’ with the publication of Christopher Bliss' volume, Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income (1975), as a result of which Avinash Dixit (1977) pronounced the quasi-rents of previous writings on the issues to be either zero or, in the case of the Cambridge, England, protagonists, negative. That the ‘end’ may have been prematurely dated is argued by Harcourt (1995a) and Cohen and Harcourt (2003) and is, I hope, borne witness to as well in the present volume.

With hindsight, we may say that the issues related not so much to the measurement of capital as to its meaning. This carried with it further questions about how the accumulation process in capitalist society may best be envisaged, and so modelled. There are, as we have seen, two principal competitors: On the one hand, Marx–Keynes–Kalecki–Schumpeterian ruthless swash-buckling entrepreneurs and capitalists, for whom profit-making and accumulation are ends in themselves, who call the tune to which all other classes in society must dance.