This paper is a contribution to the forthcoming Edward Elgar Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis volume edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Heinz Kurz. Its aim is to introduce the reader to the main episodes that have marked the course of modern macroeconomics: its emergence after the...

The notion of frictional unemployment first arose in the writings of Beveridge, Pigou and Hicks. Why did it fail at the time to grow into a fully fledged theory ? Our answer is simple. This failure was due to the fact these economists were unwilling and/or unable to go beyond the then-prevailing...

The standard view about the relation between the Marshallian and the Walrasian approaches is that they are complementary to each other. My aim in this paper is to show that, on the contrary, they constitute alternative sub-research programs within the wider neoclassical paradigm. I make my point...

According to Klein, Keynes’s General Theory was crying out for empirical application. He set himself the task of implementing this extension. Our paper documents the different stages of his endeavor, focusing on his The Keynesian Revolution book, Journal of Political Economy article on...

The aim of the present paper is to assess the new classical/real business cycle revolution, which dethroned Keynesian macroeconomics. In its first part, I critically discuss the microfoundations requirement that constitutes a cornerstone of the new approach and suggest an alternative, softer,...

The aim of this paper is to elucidate Keynes's Marshallian lineage. I argue that the result of bringing out the Marshallian antecedents of the General Theory highlights Keynes’s failure to achieve the theoretical project he was striving at, namely to demonstrate an involuntary unemployment...

This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Lucas’s work: his methodological writings, published and unpublished. Particular attention is paid to his views on the relationship between theory and ideology. I start by setting out Lucas’s non-standard conception of theory: to him, a theory and a...

It is often argued that what marks the difference between Keynesian macroeconomics and new classical macroeconomics (the first installment of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models) is the presence of microfoundations. These are deemed to be absent in the Keynesian approach, but central...

Robert Lucas is rightfully credited with having changed the course of macroeconomic theory. The aim of this paper is to document his transformation from a potential contributor to Keynesian macroeconomics to the master builder of an alternative paradigm, equilibrium macroeconomics. I reconstruct...

The aim of this paper is to ponder upon Marshall’s conception of equilibrium and to confront it withWalras’s. In a first section, I present a rational reconstruction of the Marshallian conception. In contrast to its standard tripartite classification interpretation, I claim that this...