Search

This article explores the emergence of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, highlighting its strengths but also some tensions discernible at its advent. From 1912, Economic Journal, the disciplinary gold standard, was published under Cambridge editorial control: first, by Keynes himself, then through successive long-serving panels of Cambridge heterodox economists. The first significant success of the locally enacted, externally inspired, neoclassical campaign to displace heterodox traditions in Cambridge economics was the relocation of Economic Journal to Oxford in 1976; comprehensive neoclassical domination in the Faculty was enforced in the following decades. The launch of the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1977 was a definitive marker in the survival and subsequent evolution of heterodox economics, not least because it was published from Cambridge, the undisputed original habitat of modern heterodox economics. The initiative was catalyzed by the apprehension of a prescient group of Cambridge young Turks that heterodox, left-oriented research would henceforth be excluded from Economic Journal. Notwithstanding the subsequent purges of all non-mainstream traditions from the Cambridge Faculty of Economics, the new theoretically and policy-oriented journal has flourished as an open, integrating forum linking diverse strands of post-Keynesian and heterodox economics and economists globally, but also notably within Cambridge itself.

The battles of Cambridge economics had history, and not just within Cambridge. And there was geography: while Cambridge folklore generally portrays the purge of heterodox economics as an insular intra-Cambridge, even intra-Faculty affair, as the outcome of the organised academic and institutional violence of the local orthodox axis, there were worlds beyond Cambridge exercising deeper and wider influences and networks—academic, political and ideological—that played a crucial role in the transfer of power from the heterodox lineages to their orthodox adversaries. This chapter investigates selected aspects of the processes and strategies that underlay the construction of the powerful global ‘neoliberal thought collective’, reviewing in turn its core formation, diffusion and operationalisation of its ideational perspectives into wider policy and political domains through a vast network of corporate-funded think tanks; the priceless and well-managed anointing of their ideological doctrine through the global market branding provided by the device of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economic Science through prize committees with affinity and association with the Hayekian Mont Pelerin Society; the subsequent weaponisation of the neoliberal message through its systematic infiltration into the political realm via the agency of political leaderships nurtured by it; and finally, a sketch of how the power of these articulated disciplinary, ideological and political formations came to besiege and displace Cambridge heterodox economics in its own citadel. The chapter complements the internal, insular narrative of the Cambridge purges to provide a more holistic perspective on the process of paradigm and regime change.

This chapter deals with the second episode of The DAE Trilogy and narrates the sorry tale of the prolonged demise of an iconic unit of Cambridge applied economics, the Cambridge Growth Project (CGP), launched by Richard Stone and Alan Brown in 1960, and wilfully terminated in 1987 by a hostile Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). CGP had received substantial funding support from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1967 onwards under various chairmen and had become the flagship project of the DAE, with an enviable reputation, nationally and internationally. A good many names and reputations were fashioned here, and three “Nobel” economics awards were linked to Stone, including his own. This refusal led to the closure of the Stone-Barker CGP in 1987 with the dispersal of most of its research team; a cumulative stock of intellectual capital and research capacity was summarily lost to the DAE. When Stone retired in 1980, work continued on the development of the disaggregated, dynamic model that analysed the process of structural change in the UK economy—both zooming in on the regional level and also zooming out to take account of the articulation of the UK economy with the European and world economies. Contemporary documentation reveals the wide range of criticisms made by the SSRC/ESRC decision-making Consortium but also records the precise rejections, including an outraged response from Richard Stone, of each of these objections; the defense fell on deaf ears at ESRC. Inter alia, the CGP response challenged and rebutted charges pertaining to methodology and technique, in particular about the value of its approach of disaggregation; substantive issues especially concerning aspects of innovation; treatment of policy issues, especially employment. The CGP reply also raised unsettling issues of procedural probity; of goal posts being continually shifted by the Consortium; of questionable selections of unsuitable and predictably biased experts; of the uneven application of evaluative criteria across competing applicants; and about egregious, gratuitous reputational attacks on the CGP team. It made no difference; notwithstanding the outrage and the clamour, the deed was done and, with the Godley-Cripps Cambridge Economic Policy Group having also been shut down by a similarly hostile denial of SSRC funds a few years earlier, the era of applied macroeconomics at the DAE came to a sad and savage end. A contemporary report in The Economist observed that the ESRC allocation had “revived talk of conspiracy theory” denying funding to units, mentioning both the CEPG and the CGP, to units that “have been critical of government policies”.