“Economics once more became political economy”
Joan Robinson and the “Bastard Keynesians”
Joan Violet Robinson was what the English call a “blue blood.” Her father was a senior officer in the British Army who had served in India and South Africa. Her maternal great-great-grandfather was Spencer Perceval, who served as a Tory prime minister from 1809 to 1812 and is the only holder of that office to have been assassinated. (The killer was a disgruntled merchant.) Interestingly, there was also a nonconformist scholar in her lineage. Her paternal great-grandfather, Frederick Denison Maurice, was an eminent Christian Socialist theologian who lost his post at King’s College, Cambridge, after saying he didn’t believe in eternal damnation. Robinson was born Joan Violet Maurice on October 31, 1903, in Camberley, Surrey, an affluent town thirty miles southwest of London that has long been associated with the nearby Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where her father taught. She attended the private St. Paul’s Girls’ School, in West London, which was founded in 1904. There she developed a passion for poetry, particularly the works of Shelley and Byron, but her main subject was history. In 1921 she won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, the first women’s Oxbridge college, where she switched to economics. “I did not have much idea of what it was about,” she recalled much later in life. “I had some vague hope that it would help me to understand poverty and how it could be cured. And I hoped that it would offer more scope for rational argument than history (my school subject) as it was taught in those days. I was somewhat disappointed on both counts.”1
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