In 1960 Oxford's Nuffield College granted him a Research Fellowship that he enjoyed until 1962, the year in which he left for the University for Cambridge, called there by the prestigious economist Lord Richard Kahn.

The University of Cambridge was the one European center able to maintain genuine intellectual independence and to exert considerable worldwide influence against the growing dominance of American economics.

If one adds that another memorial service, shortly after that of Joan Robinson, was held in Cambridge, though in another Chapel, for yet another close associate of Keynes, Piero Sraffa, one cannot resist the impression that today's ceremony concludes a whole historical phase, almost an era, in the recent history of economic thought.

This group of Cambridge economists had been the protagonist of one of those extraordinary and unique events in the history of ideas that decisively pushed knowledge ahead and created a break with the past.

When, in October 1956, I arrived as a foreign research student almost ignorant of economics (and of English), innocent of all that had been going on, I noticed Joan Robinson's newly published book, The Accumulation of Capital, prominently on display in the bookshop windows.

[6] Although Ricardo's theory (in Kaldor's paper) was without equations, it was the starting point after which economists began to explicitly see the Ricardian model as a coherent whole, susceptible to mathematical formalization.

[7] Pasinetti explains that "the more constructive approach is taken of stating explicitly the assumptions needed in order to eliminate the ambiguities"[8] in the Ricardian model, hence, the reason for the mathematical formulation.

The attentive reader may notice that the two major results (on income distribution and on value respectively) depend on two assumptions that are implicit in the formulation of the model, i.e. of the above set of equations, namely: 1) that capitalist appropriate the whole surplus of the economic system, after paying rents to landowners, and conventional wages to workers; and 2) that the proportion of labour to capital is exactly the same in all sectors.

Kaldor baptized his theory as ‘Keynesian’ because it succeeded in catching a few important concepts both from Keynes's Treatise's widow's cruse allegory and from Kalecki's profits equation.

Equation (3.1) shows that the share of profitsin total output depends positively on the natural rate of growth and the capital/output ratio and negatively on the propensity to save of the capitalist class.

Specifically, in 1966, Paul A. Samuelson and Franco Modigliani, the MIT economists, wrote a detailed and widely quoted paper where they tried to minimize the consequences of the Pasinetti Theorem and to lessen the generality of its conclusions.

The formulation of the anti-Pasinetti range and all theoretical justification (and some empirical exercises) proposed by Samuelson and Modigliani was challenged by Pasinetti[21] and in a much more critical way by Kaldor[22] and Joan Robinson.

Kaldor concluded that, "unless they make a more imaginative effort to reconcile their theoretical framework with the known facts of experience, their economic theory is bound to remain a barren exercise."

Already in the 70's the debate of the original Pasinetti Theorem, and hence the Samuelson-Modigliani's interval, took a turning point, by reaching a second phase in which "many authors proceeded to relax assumptions, trying out new hypotheses and introducing complications of all sorts".

This means that the introduction of the public sector meant that the profit rate remained independent of the workers propensity to save and of the capital-output ratio (technology).

In the early 20th century, the economist John Bates Clark, in an effort to refute Marx's surplus theory, suggested that wages and profits (or rather interest, as they were called by Neoclassical economists, owing to their assumption that rate of profit and rate of interest coincide) were simply considered as prices, obtained from the marginal productivity of the factors of production; a theory synthesized by J.B. Clark's famous statement, that "what a social class gets is, under natural law, what it contributes to the general output of industry".

Robinson opened the controversy with a now famous statement, with which she exposes the main problems of the traditional concept of capital as follows: Moreover, the production function has been a powerful instrument of miseducation.

Pasinetti set out to show that the theorem stated a year earlier by David Levhari and Paul Samuelson, which was supposed to demonstrate the impossibility of reswitching at the aggregate level, was false.

[35] The paper begins by setting a numerical example that shows -by constructing two alternative techniques- that even satisfying all Levhari and Samuelson hypotheses, reswitching is a possibility at the aggregate level.

Therefore, Pasinetti considers it as a great contribution – made already by the Physiocratic school of 18th century France – to have concentrated on the concepts of surplus and economic activity presented as a circular flow in the Tableau Economique, devised by François Quesnay.

Curiously enough, the Marginalist revolution of the late 19th century preferred to go back to study the concept of wealth as a stock, thus largely de-emphasizing the problems of production and distribution, and to focus on models of "pure exchange".

The two theoretical factors are represented by the two types of theories – specifically the macro-dynamics of economic growth and input-output analysis- […][46] Leaving aside for a moment the technical aspects, we can say that overall the book is completely new for three reasons.

The second important point is that it is the first work in which Pasinetti does not solve a specific problem in isolation, but tries to offer a global vision of the economic process and integrates all the contributions he had made before.

It is only a little less consoling to realise that, with all the new horizons open before us, we should so often let ourselves be prisoners of the old concepts and fall short of out actual possibilities, not because of objective difficulties, but because of the persistence of old ideas, which accomplish the rare combination of being both unfavourable and obsolete.

When these aspects will be fully understood, it may well emerge as containing the most fundamental of all the theoretical concepts thus far conceived by Pasinetti to interpret the basic economic features of the newly shaped world in which we live.

This is precisely what, on purpose, I had completely eliminated from my analysis, by adopting not only a vertically integrated conception of the production process but also sharp simplifications as to the employment of labour and capital goods in each single sector.

[48] In 1973 Pasinetti published a paper, "The Notion of Vertical Integration in Economic Analysis", which would be a milestone for the development of all the analytical implications of the concept and its relation to the inter-industry theoretical schemes of Input-Output type.

Book I also contains some reflections on the progress of knowledge in economics and the rise and fall of scientific paradigms based on the work of the famous epistemologist Thomas Kuhn.

Besides the importance of each one of the biographies, the purpose of all of them is: The foregoing biographical sketches on Kahn, Joan Robinson, Kaldor and Sraffa may help –I hope- to highlight the multifaceted and significant aspects of the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics.

I hope the reader may have been able to grasp the unity, in some basic sense, of their purposes and at the same time the intriguing disparities in their approaches in many other respects [...] [64] I shall therefore argue that the relevant message that should be extracted from the works of the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics is, in fact, positive –not negative.