An Analysis of Joan Robinson’s 1972 Article ‘What Has Become of the Keynesian Revolution?’ In Light of Keynes’s Assessment of Her Understanding of His Liquidity Preference Theory of the Rate of Interest in His Letter of November 9th, 1936 : ‘…For Your Argument… Is Most Certainly Nonsense.’

Keynes ‘s first paragraph in his letter of the 9th of November, 1936, to Joan Robinson is the following two lines: “I beg you not to publish. For your argument as it stands is most certainly nonsense.”Anyone who reads this correspondence will soon realize that it was simply impossible for Joan Robinson to have aided or contributed in any way to the development of the General Theory between 1930 and February, 1936, given the nature of these exchanges. Keynes is very specific as regards his Liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest: “You do not seem to realize that if you are right the whole theory of liquidity preference has to be thrown overboard…Such a conclusion cannot be brought in as a tacit inference from an unargued obiter dictum.”Given this clear and unambiguous statement by Keynes, how is it possible for joan Robinson to claim that she knows what Keynes was doing in the General Theory In 1936, in a reply to an article by H. Neisser, criticizing certain aspects of the Investment multiplier, R. Kahn stated quite frankly that ‘My own ideas were largely derived from Mr. Keynes’. It should come as no surprise that the three article exchange between Neisser and Kahn in 1936 was never mentioned by J. Robinson in any of her published work in her lifetime. The reason that it was never mentioned is because Kahn’s statement directly conflicts with and undermines the claims made about the history of the development of the multiplier by Robinson.It is interesting that, in her discussions of uncertainty in this paper, there is no mention made of Keynes’s clear-cut definition of Uncertainty as a Function of the Weight of the Argument on pages 148 and 240 of the General Theory. Robinson never supplied any definition of uncertainty in her article. Even more interesting is J. Robinson’s comments in 1972 that demonstrate a complete and total failure on her part to recognize Keynes’s concept of multiple equilibria in a macro model that has absolutely nothing to do with Marshallian partial equilibrium approach, as well as her complete and total failure to absorb Keynes’s IS-LM model in chapter 21 in Part IV on pp. 298-299 of the General Theory that was built on the foundation of chapter 20’s mathematical representation of the theory of effective demand using the D-Z model. Keynes’s General Theory is not about a single D function and a single Z function, but an entire set of such functions, only one of which will specify an actual amount of aggregate effective demand, Y, which ,when combined with r, the actual long run nominal rate of interest, specifies the (r, Y)space for the use of the IS and LM model