ABSTRACT
Harcourt’s 1969 survey article on the Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital, which shortly afterwards was expanded to a book (Harcourt 1972), is surely his bestknown paper. In these classical writings, the contributions of his 1955-8 Cambridge classmate and close friend Luigi Pasinetti1 to the capital theory debates played a major role. Of course, the well-known contributions of his other Cambridge classmate Pierangelo Garegnani and the latter’s attacks against the neoclassical view of a downward-sloping demand curve for aggregate value capital were also appropriately recognized. But our festee, more than other participants in the debate, paid elaborate attention to Solow’s modern reformulation of Fisher’s concept of the rate of return on investment and Pasinetti’s critique of it.2 It was not only post-Keynesian economists like Pasinetti and Harcourt, heavily influenced by Joan Robinson and Sraffa, but also neoclassical economists such as Ferguson who interpreted Solow’s approach as an attempt to corroborate essential findings of the aggregate version of neoclassical theory, based on the macroeconomic production function, by means of a linear multisectoral model: ‘The situation appeared almost hopeless for aggregate neoclassical theory until a seminal breakthrough by Solow established the grounds for resurrecting aggregate capital theory’ (Ferguson 1972:175).
