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> Nice piece, Mike.
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> Is there a Joan Robinson Appreciation Society? I read a lot of her when I was researching Wall Street and was greatly impressed. But does she have many fans today?
Thanks! It's a funny thing, the internet. Yesterday afternoon I spent half an hour typing the Robinson piece up thinking it should at least be around to be stumbled upon by the occasional curious Googler. At 3am I got up to change a diaper, checked my phone, and Twitter and blogs had worked their unpredictable magic. I'm glad it struck a chord. Even though I'm sure some of the attention came from liberals wanting another Marx smackdown, that's not what she is actually doing.
There are quite a few Joan Robinson appreciators around. One of my colleagues has a signed portrait of her up in his office, from her visit here in 1975 - she arrived a few weeks after Milton Friedman toured and made a heroic attempt to undermine him wherever she went. The department library's copy of her Collected Economic Papers, from which I got the Open Letter, is inscribed from her to the late Ted Wheelwright: "For Ted, to carry on the fight, Joan". She was here in the midst of the campaign that eventually established Political Economy at Sydney (via a staff strike, occupation of the Vice-Chancellor's office and 4000-strong student walkout), after the radical Wheelwright was denied a professorship for the sixth time. A different time!
Robinson's protege Geoff Harcourt is at the University of New South Wales across town, possibly in an emeritus capacity but pretty active and a really nice guy.
As for Michael's question as to whether she had actually read Capital - she certainly had, and in great detail. There's a substantial chapter in the 2009 intellectual biography by Harcourt and Prue Kerr dealing with her engagement with Marx. She started to seriously read Capital in December 1940 and had a fairly intensive correspondence with Maurice Dobb about it as she went. I agree that she misses much of the sociological aspect to Marx, which is rather an important aspect indeed. But I don't think there's a necessary contradiction between wanting to improve the economic analysis and appreciating the sociological/historical side.
Mike