Joan Robinson and the reconstruction of economic theory.

The article focuses on Joan Robinson's late-career project to reconstruct economic theory by integrating insights from classical political economy, Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Sraffa, emphasizing distribution and historical time over marginalist equilibrium analysis. Robinson rejected the Marshallian framework and marginal productivity theory, arguing that income distribution is exogenous and shaped by social, political, and institutional forces rather than by supply and demand equilibrium. Her reconstruction centers on a circular process of socio-economic reproduction where prices and quantities are determined to sustain this reproduction under given distributional conventions, with historical time—characterized by irreversible, path-dependent processes and fundamental uncertainty—contrasted against reversible, model-based logical time. The synthesis she envisioned, often termed the Kaleckian–Keynesian–Sraffian approach, highlights the role of effective demand, mark-up pricing, and the conflict between capital and labor, while challenging traditional equilibrium models and advocating for a methodology grounded in conventions and social practices.