In Cambridge, UK, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were some of the most distinguished post-war non-neoclassical economists, which included Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa. The Cambridge capital theory controversies seemed to have been decisively settled in Cambridge,...

This paper considers from a methodological point of view why disputes in macroeconomics over its fundamental assumptions regularly occur. It analyses the problem first using Kuhn's concept of the paradigm and then draws on McCloskey's use of rhetorical analysis. It finds the latter of limited...