ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reaction of Samuelson to some of Robinson’s criticism of the neoclassical approach to capital and production. The criticism issued from her earlier work, and was dealt with in the previous chapter. Initially, Samuelson (and others, apparently, too) thought that in his reaction he had developed an innovating and very successful idealizing model which was not only immune to the criticism but also had some additional desirable properties. This is the triumph referred to in this chapter’s title. But then Samuelson’s claims about the properties of his model were shown to be false by Garegnani. This is the sense in which there was a crisis for the neoclassical model. Until the early 1960s, a point of criticism of neoclassical capital theory which
emerged repeatedly, though with varying emphasis, was that neoclassical theory did not exclude the possibility of capital reversing. This possibility was considered to be an anomaly. It was not until sometime during or after the period of the altercation betweenSamuelson andGaregnani that another anomaly, the possibility of reswitching of techniques, came to occupy a prominent place in the discussion, together with capital reversing. But the history of how reswitching was introduced into the debate, and how reswitching and capital reversing moved to the centre of the stage, is bynomeans clear. I have three reasons for going into this in somedetail. First, an attempt to straighten some of the historical confusions is a valid enter-
prise in its own right. We simply want to know what happened, how, why, and in what order. Second, I will try to show that getting the historical picture right has consequences for the methodological analysis. Thus, the view or at least the suggestion that Sraffa gave the impulse to the debate because he discussed reswitching quite clearly in his book, implies a wrong picture of how this (and probably almost any) scientific debate evolves. The development and the direction of this debate in capital theory was not inspired by grand views of global results, but was rather the result of local analytical strategies and attempts by theorists to solve local puzzles and problems, usually of a formal kind. An indication for this is that the way in which capital reversing and reswitching are related was something which was only
found out in the course of the debate. The fact that Sraffa saw all along the critical potential of his reswitching counterexample does not diminish the importance of this point. All other theorists behaved rather like sleepwalkers, groping their way around. A detailed study of the publications shows that there was no clash between two fully formed theories. It was even the case that the debate served to sort out which of the propositions considered to be characteristic of neoclassical production models belonged to the basic premises (or assumptions) of neoclassical production theory, and which to the set of its predictions. Finally, getting the historical picture right also helps us to form an opinion on the sort of strategies and arguments that served as moving forces of the debate. In particular, does empirical or factual criticism provide the fuel, or do purely formal arguments? In what follows, the historical account and the discussion of the relevant articles
in the form of case studies will alternate. The results of this exercise point to a need for extensions and improvements of the methodological analysis of the previous chapter. The improved analytical framework is presented in the next chapter.
