Post-Keynesian economics is a body of economic thought that developed since the mid- 1950s, but of course its origins can be traced back to Keynes’s General Theory, and to the group of young economists, called the Circus, who discussed and criticized Keynes’s earlier Treatise on Money.
Among the economists to be found in the first volume of this Handbook, post-Keynesian economics is primarily associated with the names of Keynes, Sraffa, Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Kahn, Kaldor and Minsky, but other influential figures, for very diverse reasons, could include Veblen, Fisher, Schumpeter, Lowe, Harrod, Lerner, Shackle, Hicks, Leontief and Simon.
Up until the beginning of the 1970s, this dissident school of thought was mainly known as the neo-Keynesian school, but also as the Anglo-Italian school or the Cambridge school (of Keynesian economics). It became mostly known for its models of growth and distribution, the so-called Kaldor-Pasinetti models (Baranzini and Mirante 2013), which were an alternative to the neoclassical theory of income distribution based on marginal productivity theory. The main initial purpose of the school was to bring Keynes’s analysis into the realm of capital accumulation and the long period, as exemplified by Joan Robinson’s (1956) remarkable achievement. Then in the early 1970s, following letter exchanges between Alfred Eichner and Joan Robinson, the term post-Keynesian was put forward, a name that had been used occasionally before by both Nicholas Kaldor and Robinson. The name post-Keynesian stuck when Jan Kregel (1973) used it in the subtitle of his book summarizing the main views of Cambridge Keynesians, and when Eichner and Kregel (1975) used it in the title of their survey article for the Journal of Economic Literature. Finally, Paul Davidson and Sidney Weintraub created the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1978, purposefully omitting the hyphen in an effort to go beyond the growth and distribution issues that had been at the heart of the Cambridge Keynesian work. Both spellings are still in use.
An overall history of post-Keynesian economics can be found in King (2002).
Pasinetti (2007) has done the same for the Cambridge branch, and Lee (2000) provides an account, with the relevant correspondence, of the amalgamation of the early Cambridge and American members of the school. Arestis and Sawyer (2006) and Setterfield (2010) offer recent surveys of what are essentially post-Keynesian monetary and growth theories, while Lavoie (2014) provides a synthesis of the various postKeynesian theories. A fair outside assessment of post-Keynesianism can be found in Screpanti and Zamagni (2005).Many observers have complained that it is difficult to identify a simple running thread among self-assessed post-Keynesian writers, something that would be comparable to the neoclassical framework of constrained optimization informed by relative prices and scarcity. The issue of a lack of coherence, in theory and in methodology, within post-Keynesian economics, has often been brought up. Post-Keynesians themselves seem to have diverse opinions as to what is really essential or special about postKeynesian economics. To some extent, these differences of opinion are related to the different strands that coexist within post-Keynesian economics. After having defined these strands, it will be shown that there exist some key characteristics that are common to all these strands and that there is more agreement among post-Keynesians than is often perceived.