Between The Trade Cycle and the Galton Lecture : a reappraisal of the intellectual exchange between Harrod and Keynes in early 1937

This paper revisits a significant moment in the intellectual exchange between Roy Harrod and John Maynard Keynes: the early months of 1937. Archival sources—including the involvement of Dennis Robertson—document their fertile discussion of Harrod’s The Trade Cycle (1936) and Keynes’s Galton Lecture (1937). Textual evidence reveals converging reflections on technical progress, demographic change, and the macroeconomic role of public policy. Although the two works address distinct analytical horizons, the paper shows a reciprocal intellectual influence between Harrod and Keynes, highlighting their shared effort to extend macroeconomic analysis beyond the short-run framework of The General Theory.