Abstract
The publication in English of the first two volumes of the collected works of Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) is a tribute to the intellectual importance of his contributions to the analysis of twentieth-century capitalism. The whole project will involve seven volumes, the first two of which deal with the capitalist economy. Most of the material contained in them is already well known to the community of nonconformist economists. The first volume assembles, for instance, the 1935 Econometrica article on the business cycle, which made Kalecki famous among mathematical economists, the booklet Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations (1939), and his celebrated paper on the political aspects of business cycles (1943). We find also the complete version of his first Polish book Essays on the Business Cycle Theory (1933), a part of which appeared in Kalecki’s selection of essays published in 1971 by Cambridge University Press. Likewise, the second volume features Kalecki’s contributions to the question of full employment, written while in Oxford during and immediately after the Second World War (after a period spent at the United Nations, he returned to Poland in 1954). The centerpieces of Volume II are his classic book Theory of Economic Dynamics, which in the United States has been reprinted by Monthly Review Press,1 along with the very important Economic Journal articles “Observations on the Theory of Growth” (1962)—a critique of the Keynesian approach to growth under capitalism—and “Trends and the Business Cycle” (1968)—a profoundly argued statement about the strength of stagnationist tendencies.
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© 2016 Joseph Halevi, G. C. Harcourt, Peter Kriesler and J. W. Nevile
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Halevi, J. (2016). Kalecki and Modern Capitalism. In: Post-Keynesian Essays from Down Under Volume I: Essays on Keynes, Harrod and Kalecki. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475381_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475381_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56948-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47538-1
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