Preface: Outline of the Allen Oakley Festschrift Papers‪.‬

It is with great pleasure that I present the papers for the Allen Oakley festschrift. Having first read Allen's articles in early 1978 for my honours thesis, and then enrolling in a Masters and later PhD under his supervision, I got to know very intimately the work he was doing over the decades. I was aided immensely by his work on Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, and found his attempts to reconstruct political economy on the basis of a realistic view of agency and structure to be critical to the future of political economy. Geoff Harcourt was Oakley's Honours and PhD supervisor, and it is therefore very fitting that he should write the Foreword to the festschrift. In 'Allen Oakley--An Independent-Minded Scholar of Quality', Harcourt lays out the dedication and originality of Oakley's contribution, including the positive views of Robert Heilbroner of Oakley's work on Schumpeter. Indeed, the web of networks in political economy and history of economic thought is very complex, and the Australian contributors to this festschrift owe a great deal to Harcourt in their academic careers.