Economics in the 1960s was host to a number of dissenting movements challenging the profession's mainstream theories. As this mainstream changed in the 1970s, the dissenters also underwent a transformation of their own. By the late 1970s the dispersed dissenting voices had congregated to form groups of neo-Austrians, post-Keynesians, neo-Marxists and radical economists. Retrospectively, the 1970s appear as a period of intense negotiation among dissenters as they erected theoretical and methodological boundaries and institutions (associations, journals, seminars) that would come to define them. They were constructing not just conditions for carrying on their work but also a narrative perception of who they were, what they stood for and what was the nature of the profession they inhabited, which I hereafter call “identity” or “self-image.” The dispersed critiques were being redrawn into new sociological unities inside the profession. This paper aims to track one of the routes that brought dispersed critique into an organized and self-conscious grouping, self-identified as Post Keynesian economics. The broad question addressed is how did the Post Keynesians construct their identity?

For those readers who are not familiar with the history of Italian economic thought, the Cost of Reproduction Doctrine (CRD) is an interpretation ofthe theory of value developed by the distinguished scholar Francesco Ferrara (1810–1900) around the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a time when many of the flaws of the classical system had been identified but the analytical tools needed for their elimination were not yet available.

One of the very important components in the urban and agricultural land use model is the so-called bid-rent curve. Regional and urban economists, city planners, and economic geographers have used this curve extensively as an analytical device. It is generally accepted that the explicit bid-rent function was first applied to the equilibrium of land use patterns in agricultural production by August Losch (1954) in Germany and Edgar S. Dunn (1954) in America, and was later extended by William Alonso (1964).

Torrens [in 1815] clearly preceded Ricardo [in 1817] in publishing a fairly satisfactory formulation of the doctrine [of comparative costs]. It is unquestionable, however that Ricardo is entitled to the credit for first giving due emphasis to the doctrine, for first placing it an appropriate setting, and for obtaining general acceptance for it by economists.

The answer to this question might seem obvious: like Everest, dissent and controversy are there. However, for most academic economists, dissent is negligible and controversy is far less important than it is commonly made out to be. To draw attention to disagreements between economists is to offer a distorted picture of what economics is about. Instead, they argue, the focus of attention should be on the enormous extent to which economists agree. From this perspective, dissent and controversy are not worth much attention. Another justification for studying controversy is that it is exciting. James Tobin once argued (explaining the appeal of Keynesian economics) that when you are young you like theoretical controversy: you like hearing about the good guys and the bad guys, and the idea of being on the side of progressive thought and against an encrusted orthodoxy. Similarly, historians are interested in dissent and controversy in much the same way that writers of thrillers are more interested in neighborhoods where murders happen than in ones where everyone just watches TV all day! What these answers have in common is that they associate controversy and dissent with the pathology of the subject. Disagreement is something to be avoided and which reflects badly on the profession. The most famous representative of this view was probably Alfred Marshall. In his attempt to establish economics as a science that carried authority with the public, he studiously refrained (most of the time) from entering into controversy, and he sought to reconcile within his own work divergent trends that were tearing apart the subject in other countries.

Sir William Petty (1623–1687) is generally known to historians of economic thought as an early contributor to classical political economy. In fact, Karl Marx claimed—rightly, I believe—that Petty was the founder of that school of thought (Marx 1867, p. 81). Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos echo the sentiment that Petty, and not Adam Smith, was “the founder of classical political economy, that school which had its culmination in the Ricardian economic theory” (Amati and Aspromourgos 1985, p. 127). Aspromourgos has also observed that Petty wrote A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, as well as other works, in order to provide “an answer to the questions of how to maximize total employment and surplus labour, and how to best utilize surplus labour” (Aspromourgos 1996, p. 16, emphasis added).