Introduction

The Polish economist Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) needs little introduction to English-speaking economists because of his widely acknowledged co-authorship of the Keynesian Revolution in economic theory and policy, and because his theory of the business cycle seems espedaily appropriate to analysing the instability of capitalism in the 21st century. Quite how much his theory is as widely understood is another matter. While his aphorisms have caught the mood of the new century, for example ‘the social function of the doctrine of “sound finance” is to make the level of employment dependent on the state of confidence’, recently cited by Paul Krugman (Krugman and Wells 2012), his theory is much less well-known, often hidden by rather forbidding mathematics, and more difficult to read than the engaging John Maynard Keynes.