ABSTRACT
For economists, as for others whose research agendas reflect the history of their subjects, disciplinary memory exists on two levels: there is, first, the body of knowledge scholars acquire from their intellectual forbears in the process of their professionalization and, second, the body of new knowledge which a scholar leaves to the generation that follows. Joan Robinson's life work offers an extraordinary opponunity to examine the role and construction of disciplinary memory on both levels. While Robinson is not remembered as an historian of economic thought, the doctrines that comprise the history of thought, in panicular classical economic thought, are an imponant building block for her own contribution to economics, especiaHy to the subspecialty that has become known as post-Keynesian economics.
