Michał Kalecki’s Capitalist Dynamics from Today’s Perspective

In 1962, having just graduated in economics from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and hoping for a scholarship for Cambridge the following year, I decided to go to Warsaw, braving the coldest winter of the century, and learn more in corpore vili about the comparative economic systems which were to become my life’s main research and teaching interest. At the time there was a thriving school of economics in Poland with, in addi- tion to Kalecki, such eminent representatives as Oskar Lange, Kazimierz Laski, Wlodzimierz Brus, Ignacy Sachs, and many others. I learned Polish fast, and by September I was attending both Kalecki’s and Lange’s lectures and their courses, which were being given in English that year for students from developing countries, at SGPiS (the Higher School of Planning and Statistics, as it then was; it is now the Higher School of Commerce). I had a fellowship from the Polish Academy of Sciences and was associated with the PAN Department of Economic Sciences, on the 20th floor of the Russian-built Palace of Culture. It was there that I first met Tadeusz Kowalik, who used to attend our seminar although he was a member of the PAN History Department.