Luigi Pasinetti and the Cambridge Economists

This paper pays tribute to Luigi Pasinetti as an historian of economic thought in general but, in particular, to his work on the Cambridge economists, and his interpretations mainly of Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes, but also of Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. With them he shared everyday Cambridge life, and he is universally associated with them in terms of a common ‘school’ – the Cambridge school. The purpose of the paper is not to provide a systematic account, but to offer some illustrations of Pasinetti’s style of doing history of economic thought and how it developed over time. It is argued that the theoretical framework to which Pasinetti has dedicated so much of his intellectual efforts is built on his understanding of what Cambridge economics was about and how its scope and aims should be pursued and integrated. As such, it is a personal construction which stands, alongside the individual contributions by the Cambridge economists with whom Pasinetti associates himself, as a milestone in the landscape of non-mainstream economics.