Joan Robinson is the rebel with a cause par excellence. She has been at the forefront of most major developments, some of them revo­ lutionary, in modern economic theory since the late 1920s. Joan Robinson has always believed passionately in her subject as a force for enlightenment and she has coupled this belief with an equally passionate hatred of social injustice and oppression. She has thrown in her lot with the wretched of the earth, whether they be the unemployed of the capitalist world in the 1930s, or the poverty-stricken and mili­ tarily oppressed of the Third World in the post-war era, or students cheated of the living fire by their professors in the 1970s.