The Cambridge Journal of Economics – A Forum of One’s Own

This article explores the emergence of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, highlighting its strengths but also some tensions discernible at its advent. From 1912, Economic Journal, the disciplinary gold standard, was published under Cambridge editorial control: first, by Keynes himself, then through successive long-serving panels of Cambridge heterodox economists. The first significant success of the locally enacted, externally inspired, neoclassical campaign to displace heterodox traditions in Cambridge economics was the relocation of Economic Journal to Oxford in 1976; comprehensive neoclassical domination in the Faculty was enforced in the following decades. The launch of the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1977 was a definitive marker in the survival and subsequent evolution of heterodox economics, not least because it was published from Cambridge, the undisputed original habitat of modern heterodox economics. The initiative was catalyzed by the apprehension of a prescient group of Cambridge young Turks that heterodox, left-oriented research would henceforth be excluded from Economic Journal. Notwithstanding the subsequent purges of all non-mainstream traditions from the Cambridge Faculty of Economics, the new theoretically and policy-oriented journal has flourished as an open, integrating forum linking diverse strands of post-Keynesian and heterodox economics and economists globally, but also notably within Cambridge itself.