ABSTRACT
In the Anglo-American universities, economics has been held in a vice-like grip by the neoclassical orthodoxy. One of its key limitations is the neutral role played by money in the microeconomic determination of prices. Although the liberal right embraced the term monetarism, its actual meaning is that money has no real impact on economic activity (apart from causing inflation). In the face of this establishment position, mainstream Keynesian economics has fought a timid rearguard action, being forced to accept the tools and assumptions of neoclassical theory. On the European continent, however, a new genre of monetary macroeconomics has emerged, often referred to as the Franco-Italian circuit school; an approach that ‘has its antecedents in the writings of Marx on the circuit of money capital’ (Bellofiore and Seccareccia 1999: 753).1
