ABSTRACT
A theme that recurs prominently in the writings of Joan Robinson, involving a critical assessment of the significance and relevance of the neoclassical theory, is "the lack of a comprehensible treatment of historical time and failure to specify the rales of the game in the type of economy under discussion"; this lack "rendered the theoretical apparatus useless for the analysis of contemporary problems in the micro and macro spheres." 1 This criticism of theory with respect to its failure to deal adequately with historical time appears in Robinson's writings at various junctures and in various contexts of her analysis within the problems of value and distribution, accumulation, and technical change. As early as the early 1950s, Joan Robinson questioned the "meaning of capital"; 2 the questions acquired a sharper focus on distribution theory in the capital controversy, following Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities (1960) wherein the logical consistency of the explanation of the rate of profit in terms of the equilibrium between demand and supply of capital was challenged. In the 1980s, however, Robinson, a major participant in the debate, increasingly insisted that "the long wrangle about measuring capital" is a minor, secondary issue when compared with the methodological error of confusing comparisons of imagined equilibrium positions with a process of accumulation going through history. 3 It was in this context that she counterposed "history" against "equilibrium" and argued for abandoning the method of equilibrium. Her major argument rested on the role of uncertainty and expectations: "As soon as the uncertainty and expectations are admitted, equilibrium drops out of the argument and history takes its place." 4
