With the passing of Geoff Harcourt on 7 December 2021, we lost a great Australian. His national honours included awards as Officer (AO, 1994) and Companion (AC, 2018) of the Order of Australia; Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia (1995) and of the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia (2012); and Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW (2016). His international honours included Distinguished Fellowship of the History of Economics Society (2004) and the Veblen-Commons Award of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (2010). Many people have now written about Geoff’s towering intellect and his enduring influence, both ‘down under’ and internationally, in helping shape post-Keynesian economics and contributing to capital theory. In 2022 Cambridge University Press will publish a 50th anniversary edition of his book Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital.
On behalf of the ELRR Editorial Board, I acknowledge the enormous debt of gratitude we owe to Geoff’s wise counsel, and our great love for him. Geoff, along with his friend and the journal’s Patron John Nevile, provided unwavering support and guidance for our journal in its role as a source of open debate and a voice for social justice. Geoff played an active role, not (as might be expected, given his eminence) on our Advisory Board, but in hands-on work on the Editorial Board. He attended all Board meetings until prevented by our COVID-induced retreat to Zoom and his own declining mobility. With his encyclopædic reading, he regularly provided advice on books to review. Importantly, as Obituary Editor, he promoted ELRR’s role as a journal of record, ensuring that we noted both the intellectual contribution and some of the personal foibles, particularly but not only, of those who had shaped the heterodox tradition. In our early international days, Geoff mobilised his global networks to invite contributions from eminent scholars in Europe, the Sub-continent and North America. His Australian connectedness was expressed at his funeral, in the playing of the didgeridoo and clapsticks and the scent of burning gum leaves and mosses in the Smoking Ceremony granted to Geoff and his family by local First Nations people.
Geoff’s combination of acuity and open-mindedness guided our journey from local production to international publication, exploring key issues as they emerged. ELRR’s December 2014 issue contains a symposium edited by Geoff, addressing the conundrum of how to reconcile the goals of economic development, global redistributive justice, and planetary survival. The scope and style of his thinking are reflected in the website (https://www.geoffharcourt.com/) collated by Avi and Susan Cohen, together with Peter Kriesler and members of the Harcourt family. Later in 2022, ELRR will publish a commemorative themed collection edited by Peter Kriesler and Wendy Harcourt, reflecting and building on Geoff’s contribution to social policy.
