ABSTRACT
In a letter to John Neville Keynes, in an attempt to persuade him to decline the offer of a chair in Oxford and to remain in Cambridge, Hubert Foxwell wrote in 1888: ‘It is much better that a study should be concentrated in a particular place. There arise many of these same advantages as in the localisation of an industry’ (Harrod 1951, 9). In this article we propose to amplify this remark by investigating the nature and importance of Cambridge as a place in economics. Here we concentrate our analysis on the post-Marshall era, being of course mindful that prior to that era the term Cambridge school is synonymous with Marshall’s economics and endeavors. Cambridge capital controversy, Cambridge monetary theory of business cycle, Cambridge equation as a version of the quantitative theory of money-the geographical reference often crops up in the characterization of the economic theories and approaches that developed in Cambridge, England, between the 1920s and the 1960s-including the contributions of economists who did not always share the same interests, backgrounds, or attitudes, but who all lived and worked for considerable periods of time in that particular corner of the world. In this essay we have selected a group of economists and a span of timeessentially between the two wars, with a few encroachments in the years following the death of John Maynard Keynes1-to reconstruct the Cambridge of those years and explore the space it represented for economics. It was not only a place, but also a play of magnetic forces, drawing together and driving apart, where ideas emerged from an environment formed through intense human and professional relations, a well-defined cultural tradition, and a way of its own of organizing work and study. We present the dramatis personae and the background to their actions (section 1.1), and then go on to consider the characteristics of intellectual and personal communication at Cambridge (section 1.2), on the basis of which we are led to define the Cambridge economists more as a ‘group’ than a school (section 1.3). In section 1.4 we see how an outsider like Piero Sraffa fitted into this group, thanks to the human and academic characteristics of Cambridge. The final section is dedicated to some concluding but by no means conclusive observations that we hope will nevertheless help define Cambridge as a place in economics.2
