ABSTRACT
Joan Robinson was among the first economists working around Keynes to recognize that the General Theory presented a new method of analysis as well as a new theoretical approach. She was thus already at work applying Keynes's new method of analysis to problems other than the determination of the level of output and employment on which Keynes had focused, even before his pathbreaking book was published. For as a Marshallian taught by Pigou (but with serious doubts, as she tells us, raised by Piero Sraffa's arrival in Cambridge), it was natural to consider Keynes's theory as an application of the Marshallian short-period theory. From this perspective it appeared obvious that the way was open to use Keynes's method to produce an extension and generalization to the Marshallian long period. This Mrs. Robinson attempted in her 1935 essay on "The Long-Period Theory of Employment." As I have suggested elsewhere (Kregel, 1985), the remainder of her professional career may be viewed as the continuous perfection and refinement of the problems that were originally raised in that paper (or more precisely, in the revised version that was published in the 1937 book, Essays in the Theory of Employment, which applied the method to a number of additional areas).
