ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: "Forward" and "Backward" Switches, and Joan Robinson
Author: Gehrke Christian
In a paper which was published almost twenty years ago, Luigi L. Pasinetti has described Joan Robinson’s attitude to reswitching as ‘an intriguing and incomplete puzzle’ (1996: 214). The present paper adds a few pieces to the assembling of this puzzle. As is well-known, in her early contributions to the Cambridge capital controversies Robinson (1953, 1956) clearly stated the possibility of reswitching, but dismissed it as a “curiosum” to which no great importance should be attached. Her attitude to reswitching and capital reversing changed in the mid-1960s, after the publication of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities and of the 1966 Symposium on “Paradoxes in capital theory”. Robinson now acknowledged the importance of “backward switches” for the critique of the neoclassical theory of distribution and in the article she published with Naqvi in 1967, as well as in the newly added Postscript to the third edition of her Accumulation of Capital of 1969, reswitching played an important role. However, in the early 1970s Robinson then “switched back” to dismissing it as ‘unimportant’ again. The present paper shows that as late as in 1967 Robinson’s understanding of the underlying causes of reswitching and of capital reversing, and thus also of the conditions under which these phenomena can (and cannot) occur, was still far from accurate. This emerges clearly from documents which have been preserved in the Sraffa Papers in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from a manuscript which has been preserved in the Kahn Papers in the Modern Archive Center at King’s College, Cambridge. These documents show that the more analytical parts of the Robinson-Naqvi paper (on which also the 1969 Postscript was based) were all authored by Naqvi alone, and that Robinson was only prevented from making a number of erroneous statements on capital-theoretic issues in print by critical comments which she had received on notes and draft versions of her articles from Piero Sraffa. Ironically, Robinson inserted a hidden admission of error with regard to her previous views on reswitching, which was clearly visible only for Sraffa, into her 1975 article entitled “The Unimportance of Reswitching”.
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