Kalecki and Keynes Revisited: Two Original Approaches to Demand-Determined Income—And Much More Besides

In 1962–1963 I had the privilege of attending Michal Kalecki’s lectures at the Warsaw Higher School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS), as it then was, on the dynamics of a capitalist economy. From Warsaw I moved directly to King’s College, Cambridge, where I often heard Joan Robinson speak of Michal Kalecki as the man who had discovered the General Theory before Keynes, as she also fully acknowledged in print (1952, 1964, 1966a, 1976) and in correspondence with Kalecki. Such a generous recognition was put forward also by some few others, such as Oskar Lange (1939) and Lawrence Klein. Kalecki’s pre-1936 writings ‘created a system that contains everything of importance in the Keynesian system’ (Klein 1951: 447); Klein (1975) makes the even stronger statement that ‘Kalecki’s greatest achievement, among many, was undoubtedly his complete anticipation of Keynes’ General Theory’ (emphasis added; see also Klein 1964, 1966). No recognition ever came from Keynes, or from any of his close associates such as Richard Kahn. Apparently Kalecki had sent to Keynes, before the General Theory was published, a German version of his 1933 paper on the business cycle, which Keynes returned to him with a note explaining that he did not know German—others of Keynes’ immediate circle certainly did and the resources of the College and of the University make this a curious response; it rankled then and it still rankles today. In 1937 Joan Robinson wrote to Kalecki: ‘It must be rather annoying for you to see all this fuss being made over Keynes when so little notice was taken of your own contribution’ (reproduced in Patinkin 1982).