A Concerned Intellectual’s Task: Joan Robinson’s Three Popular Books

As we saw in Chapter 4, Maurice Dobb, in a letter to Joan Robinson (JVR, 31 January 1941) stated: I feel that the ‘poetic’ element – shades of meaning inherent as it were in style, construction, emphasis — is important in all economic languages certainly, and perhaps in all languages outside the rarest and most refined discourses of Logical Positivists. This is just what gets lost in translation from one poetic convention into another. And most of it, I suggest, is not just irrelevant ‘moral’ stuff, but is concerned with the slant that theory has on reality — with the completeness or incompleteness of the picture of the real world it affords, with the perspective and ‘projection’ and dimensions it is employing, with what it throws into relief as causally important and what it relegates to the shade. Whether these meanings could or could not ultimately be reduced to a propositional system I don’t feel competent to say. But I feel quite sure they usually can’t be rendered in half-a-dozen or a dozen simple propositions. (Dobb’s emphasis, JVR/vii/120/12) This chapter presents Joan Robinson as a political economist who relied on, but also looked beyond, deductive reason for knowledge and understanding.