This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Post-Keynesian economics takes its name from a claim that sounds strange until its history is explained: that the 'Keynesian economics' taught in most universities after the Second World War, the neoclassical synthesis built by John Hicks, Paul Samuelson and others into a tidy IS-LM model of temporary market frictions, was not really what John Maynard Keynes had argued in his 1936 General Theory. Joan Robinson, who worked alongside Keynes at Cambridge in the 1930s and helped shape the General Theory before its publication, spent much of her later career arguing exactly this, calling the synthesis 'bastard Keynesianism.'
Robinson and the economists who gathered around her at Cambridge held that Keynes's real insight was not a temporary wage-and-price rigidity that better policy could eventually smooth away, but a permanent condition: an economy operating under fundamental uncertainty, where the future cannot be reduced to a known probability distribution, will not reliably find full employment on its own, in good times or bad. Michal Kalecki, working independently in Poland, had reached strikingly similar conclusions about effective demand and income distribution before Keynes published, giving the post-Keynesian tradition an alternative founding figure alongside Keynes himself.
Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, extending this uncertainty-centered reading of Keynes into a theory of how financial systems generate their own crises, became post-Keynesian economics' best-known twentieth-century contribution. But the field's founding argument remained Robinson's: that mainstream economics had domesticated Keynes into a special case of the equilibrium theory he had written the General Theory to overturn.