Even though references to the “Cambridge School” are frequent in history of economic thought literature,
what this term designates is far from being univocal, being used sometimes in relation to Marshall and his disciples, sometimes to Keynes and his followers, sometimes to the approach to economics prevailing in Cambridge throughout the period spanning from the early days of the twentieth century to the 1970s, when Cambridge enjoyed international prestige as one of the leading centres of scientific investigation in economics.
As in any other science, there is more than one definition of what it takes to constitute a school in economics. If we accept as the definition of school “an alliance of persons, a community of ideas, an acknowledged authority, and a combination in purpose, which banded them into a society apart” (Higgs 1897 [2001]: 7), then this would hold only for the first decades of the Cambridge School, when Marshall introduced the new degree in economics in 1903 and created a community of disciples that kept his teachings alive well after his death. They spread the ideas of the master as presented in his Principles of Economics (Marshall 1920), acknowledged his authority, shared the mission he set for economics and were perceived and perceived themselves as a group of scholars with a well-defined identity. Keynes himself, in his introduction to the Cambridge Handbooks in 1922, could speak of the authors contributing to this output as “orthodox members of the Cambridge School of economics” whose “ideas about the subject, and even [whose] prejudices, are traceable to the contact they have enjoyed with the writings and lectures of the two economists who have chiefly influenced Cambridge thought for the past fifty years, Dr. Marshall and Prof. Pigou” (Keynes 1971-89, hereafter CWK, XII: 857). The School included almost all the members of the Faculty of Economics and Politics, Claude William Guillebaud (1890-1971), Hubert Douglas Henderson (18901952), Frederick Lavington (1881-1927), Gerald Frank Shove (1887-1947), Dennis Holme Robertson (1890-1963), Maurice Herbert Dobb (1900-76), and Edward Austin Grossage Robinson (1897-1993).When the term “school” is applied to the Keynes era and more so to the post-Keynes period, the above definition is more problematic. First there is the issue of whom should be included. Until Keynes’s death in 1946 the list would certainly have included Roy Forbes Harrod (1900-78), Richard Ferdinand Kahn (1905-89), Nicholas Kaldor (1908-86), Michal Kalecki (1899-1970), James Edward Meade (1907-95), Joan Violet Robinson (1903-83), Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) and Richard Nicholas Stone (1913-91), while for the post-war period the names of Wynne Godley (1926-2010), Richard Murphey Goodwin (1913-96), Geoffrey Colin Harcourt, Robin Marris (1924-2012), Luigi Pasinetti and Ajit Singh (1940-2015) are to be added. Secondly there is the issue of what exactly they shared and whether it is sufficiently broad to consider them a school.
Most of these economists shared common times and places, but this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to constitute a school. A school is, after all, marked out by shared approach and doctrinal content, and we can speak of schools of thought also in the absence of unity of time and place. Conversely, a shared place and time do not lead to the formation of a school if there is no common pursuit or recognized leader. While the role of “master” might, in the first period after Marshall, have been performed by Keynes, who was the pivotal figure in the inter-war Cambridge, after his death it is hard to identify a “master” around whom the school regrouped.
However, in the literature the term “Cambridge School” is generally applied without qualification to Keynes’s immediate circle in the inter-war years, and to his followers in the later period.
Schumpeter (1954: 223) argues that Keynes and the “orthodox Keynesians... were a school by virtue of doctrinal and personal bonds, and always acted as a group, praising one another, fighting one another’s fights, each member taking his share in group propaganda”.
Pasinetti (2007: 61) maintains that Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor and Piero Sraffa formed “a powerful school on the track of Keynes’s economic theory”.
He recognizes that this “school” was in reality a motley, argumentative group united and divided by strong emotional bonds, although he discerned “something... much deeper, that shaped their intellectual affinities or attractiveness and at the same time gave rise to their strong and stormy personal relationship” (ibid.). That “deep something”, Pasinetti argues, derived from adopting a common approach to economics.On the other hand, Bliss (2010: 632-3) wrote: “Keynes created a circle of true believers and a corresponding group of heretical others.... The characters listed in Pasinetti’s book [2007] were each different, and where their paths crossed they were frequently in ill-tempered opposition... The exception would be the twin stars Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson”.
For our part, we have characterized the Cambridge economists in the inter-war years as a group rather than as a school (Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2005; Marcuzzo et al. 2008). We maintained that:
Unlike a “school”, a “group” does not subscribe to a common body of doctrine, although there may be internal cohesion and shared contents;... this group identity stemmed from motivations, values, life-styles and work-styles, leaving room for reciprocal respect, overriding many contrasts, and keeping the sense of belonging alive;... the points of theoretical division, precisely because they generated discussion, did not break the group up but served to form a connective tissue;... precisely because there was no common corpus of accepted ideas to defend, the characteristic feature seems rather to have been elitism - a system of co-optation based on characteristics that were neither ideology nor exactly academic performance or success, but rather the features of a moral and intellectual aristocracy. (Marcuzzo et al. 2008: 582-3)
As to the period after World War II, there is certainly a recognizable group of economists in Cambridge that shared an opposition to neoclassical economics and drew mainly on Keynes’s heritage, but they can hardly be considered a school given the nature of their research agenda, which was highly diversified and, in the case of Sraffa, radically so.
Whether in the form of opposition or endorsement, the Cambridge group or school is a landmark in the history of twentieth century economic thought, because of its outstanding characteristic of being associated with the most powerful attempt at building an approach to economics alternative to the mainstream. For this reason it is still capable of arousing strong reactions in friends and foes alike. In the following pages we reconstruct the main elements of this tradition, the stages of its developments and the nature of its heritage. For the purpose of reconstructing the main features of the “Cambridge School” it is useful to identify four stages of its history: (1) the Marshall era, up to the mid-1920s; (2) the Keynes era, up to the mid-1940s; (3) the Golden Age, up to the early 1970s; and (4) the “fall from grace”, up to the early 1980s.