Keynes's Economics and the Theory of Value and Distribution - ed. John Eatwell & Murray Milgate

Keynes's economics have never been far from the centre of theoretical controversy since the publication of the General Theory in 1936. Controversy persists because Keynes's ideas have never been satisfactorily incorporated into orthodox thinking. Instead they have either been carefully segregated in a box labelled 'macroeconomics' (the theory of value and distribution being 'microeconomics') or simulated in orthodox models by the imposition of a variety of ad hoc assumptions - sticky money wages and the effects of 'uncertainty and expectations' being the most popular.

This book exposes the origins of this unsatisfactory situation and suggests an entirely new approach to the relationship between the theory of value and distribution and the analysis of output. Once the analytical foundations of the neoclassical synthesis and later orthodox variants - 'disequilibrium' models and the 'new macroeconomics' have been swept away, the way is clear to examine Keynes's theory of output and employment in the light of the classical and Marxian theory of value and distribution, itself revivified by Piero Sraffa in his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The book brings together key articles from the Cambridge Journal of Economics and new articles specially written.

John Eatwell, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is one of the founder editors of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Murray Milgate, formerly Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, is Lecturer in Economics in the University of Sydney.