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In the decades following World War II, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titled Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. New ideas in optimization theory, linked to linear programming, developed from the conference's papers. The authors’ history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of postwar science in-between National Laboratories and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The authors argue that the conference signaled the birth of a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques un-interrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A business expert Joan Robinson devoted much of her energy to critiquing equilibrium analysis, or what she was accustomed to calling Walrasian economics. In her various writings she returned again and again to the idea that Walrasian economics necessarily misdirected analysis in macroeconomics, capital theory, distribution theory, and value theory. Many of her writings made mention of Walrasian equilibrium, usually in the context of the wrong way to look at a particular problem. Indeed, for Robinson, the Walrasian theory came to stand for the intellectual opposition as it were, for the "others" who had got it wrong, where the "it" was anything from the measurement of capital to the role of expectations in long run investment decisions. As an attempt to gather adherents to a competing research program, Robinson's moralizing is explicable. The ultimate issue of course is the relative progressivity of the neo-Walrasian and post-Keynesian research programs. What is required to judge the issue is a comparative appraisal of those two competing research programs. It is a bit troubling that no such appraisal has as yet been attempted.