Introduction

Summary

In 2005, Luigi Pasinetti was asked by his friend and colleague Pier Paolo Varri how he would like his seventy-fifth birthday to be celebrated. Pasinetti immediately replied: ‘let us discuss my new book!’. The book was, of course, Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians, which was almost finished at that time. One of the most original and provocative parts was the ‘Postlude: Fighting for Independence’ of Book Two (The Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics), where he portrays what he considers the main features of the classical-Keynesian school, offering a list of nine theoretical and methodological characteristics, qualifying and unifying (to some extent, at least) the economists associated with it (Pasinetti, 2007, pp. 217–237). When, about a couple of years ago, John E. Woods (a student of Luigi Pasinetti at King’s College in the late 1960s) and Philip Good (economics editor of Cambridge University Press) launched the idea of a collection of essays discussing Pasinetti’s ‘nine characteristics’, we felt it certainly an appropriate, though a somewhat unconventional, way to celebrate Pasinetti’s career as an economist.