ABSTRACT
In the foreword to her An Essay on Marxian Economics, Mrs. Joan Robinson writes: “Until recently, Marx used to be treated in academic circles with contemptuous silence broken only by an occasional mocking footnote.” 1 Although this may well have been true in the English-speaking world, such a dictum would not apply to many other countries. Nevertheless, it is true that even in those countries where both Marxism and modern economics are equally pursued as academic disciplines, the two schools usually have not been on speaking terms with each other. One school does not understand the language of the other, and the latter would not care to understand the former. It is therefore a great tribute to Keynes that, although he himself treated Marx “with contemptuous silence, broken only by an occasional footnote,” he opened a new vista in modern economics which almost naturally led to a fruitful comparison between his doctrines and those of Karl Marx. As Schumpeter wrote in his obituary essay on Keynes:
Though Keynes’s “breakdown theory” is quite different from Marx’s, it has an important feature in common with the latter: in both theories, the breakdown is motivated by causes inherent to the working of the economic engine, not by the action of factors external to it. 2
