ABSTRACT
The founding father of Post Keynesian economics in the USA, Sidney Weintraub (1914-83), was a distinguished practitioner of orthodox, ‘classical’ or ‘bastard’ Keynesianism, who liberated himself from mainstream macroeconomics only after an arduous and protracted intellectual struggle (King 1995). The next generation of Post Keynesian theorists had no such difficulty. Paul Davidson (1930-), for example, was a pupil of Weintraub’s and a disciple of Keynes almost from the start, while Alfred Eichner (193788) seems never to have taken the neoclassical synthesis at all seriously. The fourth major US Post Keynesian, Hyman Minsky, represents a very interesting intermediate case. Born in 1919, he is closer in age to Weintraub than to either Davidson or Eichner. Yet Minsky was a late developer. He published nothing before the appearance of two important papers in 1957 opened literary floodgates which have yet to close. And his Post Keynesian identity was in doubt up until 1975, when his book John Maynard Keynes finally established Minsky as a powerful critic of Keynesian orthodoxy.
