ABSTRACT
A theoretical scheme, by definition, involves simplification. However, whether the simplification is illuminating or misleading can be judged only by applying it to specific problems. For at least the last three decades of her working life, the problem of economic growth in a capitalist economy had continued to engage Joan Robinson. She preferred to describe it as the `generalization of the General Theory'. In this search for a satisfactory scheme for analysing economic growth, she rejected the neoclassical paradigm, based on the idea of `capital' as a factor of production. She recognized that this was an oversimplification that misled rather than illuminated our understanding of the process of capitalistic growth.
