Introduction

This volume is an intellectual biography of Joan Robinson (1903–83) who was undoubtedly one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century and the greatest woman economist.1 In its pages we recount her intellectual development and her major contributions from her first publication in the early 1930s to her last, which was published posthumously in 1985. Her story is intricately entwined with the story of Cambridge economics in the twentieth century, taking in major changes in the way economics was thought about, done and taught, changes to which Joan Robinson and her circle, the first generation of what may loosely be called Keynes’s pupils, made major contributions, from the 1920s until well into the post-war years. Most of the major players remained active until their deaths, most of which (apart from Keynes’s, of course, who died in 1946) occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.2