ABSTRACT

The chapter sets out some reference to the famous controversy between the two Cambridges: Cambridge, UK, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (US); a controversy that for some while animated economic debate but which has now been confined to the history of economic thought. From here we will be led to aspects of other important theories: those of the post-Keynesians, Schumpeterians and the neo-Austrians, and institutionalism and the fragmented positions that make up modern heterodox economics. Notwithstanding the vigorous attack directed from Cambridge, UK, the neoclassical school associated with Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its recent developments, which opposes to its opponents a substantial cohesiveness and the use of prestigious and consolidated methodologies giving a strict scientific appearance, remains the dominant orthodoxy of the present. We must ask the reason for this continual dominance of the neoclassical tradition, and this chapter will attempt to clarify the primary reasons for the substantial failure of the attacks upon this neoclassical mainstream2 and specify some possibly crucial points that have been omitted from the debate.