ABSTRACT
A second and more substantial wave of Joan Robinson tributes is now crowding upon the earlier and, understandably, briefer expressions of intellectual admiration and personal affection that marked her death the summer before her 80th birthday. 1 These undertakings are testimony to the professional legacy Robinson left behind. 2 Most economists know at least something of her work and the folklore that has come to surround it: her irreverence for established theory, her seemingly unquenchable zest for intellectual argument, doggedly pursued on the conviction that she was at least morally right, the sharpness of her wit (and often her tongue), along with her occasionally unconventional mode of dress and her enjoyment of nature. These are the aspects of the Robinson persona that made her something of a legend in her own time. Less well known is the depth of the despair she felt toward the end of her days and her disillusionment about the economics profession and her fellow economists. The source of her acute negativism was that despite her best efforts to give direction to the profession's perception of "What are the questions?" the majority (an important segment of which she lambasted as "bastard Keynesians") not only resisted her persuasions regarding the essentials of Keynes's revolution but, on many an occasion, responded in kind to the tone of her adversarial style.
