Geoff Harcourt has promised his wife that this great tome, in two volumes, is the last large project he will undertake, a mere fifteen years after his official retirement. Aided and abetted by Peter Kriesler, he has put together a collection of forty-six contributed chapters, ranging across the field of post-Keynesian economics and representing a snapshot of work in progress in this school of thought towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
How does a ‘handbook’ differ from a ‘companion,’ in particular John King’s (2012), and do we need both? A handbook, it seems, contains full-length research articles and might in some ways better be described as a handbook of current economic research, rather than of a branch of economics. Its distinctive offering, relative to the journals, is a comprehensive introduction by the editors, which allows the reader to identify the key contributions of each chapter and offers some critical analysis beyond the usual author’s abstract. King’s companion, by contrast, offers 112 concise entries organized by theme, more like an encyclopedia. A handbook is therefore of greater value to the research student or academic looking for a condensed resource on a particular subject, while a companion is more of a reference work. By the same token a handbook will date more quickly as research progresses, since each chapter is itself a contribution to the research dialogue, while a companion offers the reader a wide survey at a more general level.
A further contrast may be drawn between a handbook and a ‘guide,’ where the latter contains elements of both handbook and companion. Like a handbook, a guide contains full-length articles but the difference is that these are surveys of a particular topic organized within a comprehensive, unifying framework. A guide is therefore something like an advanced textbook that aims to offer a complete introduction to the field in question. A recent example is Eckhard Hein and Engelbert Stockhammer (2011), which is explicitly in the tradition of Richard Holt and Steven Pressman (2001) and Alfred Eichner (1978).
There is healthy diversity among the authors of the Oxford Handbook, with only 44% of those in the handbook appearing also in King’s companion. This list (Philip Arestis, Joerg Bibow, Stephanie Blankenburg, Robert Blecker, Victoria Chick, Paul Davidson, Sheila Dow, Amitava Krishna Dutt, Giuseppe Fontana, James Galbraith, Geoff Harcourt, John King, Peter Kriesler, Marc Lavoie, Fred Lee, John McCombie, John Nevile, Rod O’Donnell, Neil Perry, Claudio Sardoni, Malcolm Sawyer, Mark Setterfield, Anthony Thirlwall, Jan Toporowski, and Randall Wray) includes many of the current central figures of the school, while being neither exhaustive nor exclusive. The introduction identifies eighteeen themes, to some of which correspond a single chapter while a few address several. The themes given the greatest attention are methodological issues (nine chapters), money and finance (six chapters), and distribution and growth (six chapters). Only three chapters are explicitly listed under ‘economic policy’ but in fact at least ten fall under this heading, with the editors highlighting them under separate themes such as ‘wages’ or ‘environmental policy.’ Economic policy in the wider sense is the dominant concern of this handbook, while the emphasis on methodology reflects the continuing need to explain how and why the mainstream approach has to be superseded.
This new handbook is a valuable addition to the series of collections of otherwise unpublished research papers, often based on conferences, that have been produced in English by the post-Keynesian community since 1981. The most useful contribution of this review may be to help place the handbook in its intellectual and historical context, by listing in Table 1 the collections linked to conferences (therefore excluding many festchrifts and other collections of papers—a job for another day—and any inadvertent omissions).
Table 1. Chronological listing of post-Keynesian conference volumes
To some extent these collections may have reflected a shortage of journal capacity for post-Keynesian material. Now that Edward Elgar, the major publisher of post-Keynesian collections, has taken up the publication of two new journals, European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies and Review of Keynesian Economics, we may perhaps see fewer general collections of the sort represented by this Oxford Handbook. Nevertheless, given the price of journal subscriptions, the handbook (and its many predecessors) represents good value for money as a library purchase (approximately one-third of the price per article) and a particularly useful resource for historians of economic thought.
