ABSTRACT
Geoff Harcourt’s work-in his writings and teaching-is in the best tradition of dissenting economists. Over the past decades, much of his work has influenced and enriched not just scholarship in ‘western’ academia, but also Indian discussions which strive to broaden the scope of economic inquiry and make theoretical analysis more relevant to understanding the actual behaviour of economic phenomena. For this reason, and as an appreciative student of Geoff’s own generously capacious mode of dissidence, I propose to consider very briefly some of the antecedents to such an approach in the form of contributions made to economic analysis by some nineteenth-century Indian theorists who also, in their own period, questioned the assumptions and conclusions of standard theory.
