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Constructing Identity: The Post Keynesians and the Capital Controversies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Tiago Mata
Tiago Mata
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom.
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Extract

Economics in the 1960s was host to a number of dissenting movements challenging the profession's mainstream theories. As this mainstream changed in the 1970s, the dissenters also underwent a transformation of their own. By the late 1970s the dispersed dissenting voices had congregated to form groups of neo-Austrians, post-Keynesians, neo-Marxists and radical economists. Retrospectively, the 1970s appear as a period of intense negotiation among dissenters as they erected theoretical and methodological boundaries and institutions (associations, journals, seminars) that would come to define them. They were constructing not just conditions for carrying on their work but also a narrative perception of who they were, what they stood for and what was the nature of the profession they inhabited, which I hereafter call “identity” or “self-image.” The dispersed critiques were being redrawn into new sociological unities inside the profession. This paper aims to track one of the routes that brought dispersed critique into an organized and self-conscious grouping, self-identified as Post Keynesian economics. The broad question addressed is how did the Post Keynesians construct their identity?

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 241 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2004

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