In August 2021, the Financial Times commentator Martin Sandbu announced the return of class conflict as a central theme in economic debate. Sandbu urged his readers to study an underappreciated Polish economist if they wanted to make sense of the new context: “Every downturn rekindles interest in John Maynard Keynes. This one should call attention to Michal Kalecki.”

Sandbu’s twinning of Kalecki with Keynes was symptomatic. Kalecki achieved international renown in the 1930s and ’40s as a cofounder of what came to be known as the Keynesian revolution. He developed some of the same economic ideas as Keynes independently of him while giving them a more radical thrust. Yet the legacy of Keynes still overshadows that of Kalecki.

By the time of his death in Warsaw, in 1970, Kalecki had passed into the company of “interesting” but neglected thinkers, both for an older generation of mainstream economists and for more recent post-Keynesian and heterodox scholars. The latter sought in Kalecki’s work a more contemporary criticism of capitalism than that provided by Karl Marx, and a sharper critique of its workings than Keynes could offer.