History versus equilibrium: Nicholas Kaldor on historical time and economic theory

Abstract

Nicholas Kaldor's biographers portray his intellectual development as a linear progression, away from conventional equilibrium methodology and towards an emphasis on history as the organising concept for economic analysis. This paper contends, however, that the methodology advocated in Kaldor's later work is explicit in one of his earliest papers, ‘A Classificatory Note on the Determinateness of Equilibrium’, published in 1934. Indeed, Kaldor's conception of the nature of path dependency in the 1930s is more sophisticated than that found in his later work. Emphasis is placed on the lessons for current research into path dependency that can be learned from the study of Kaldor's intellectual development.

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