The financial and economic crisis brings to a reconsideration of macroeconomics: as it happened in the past, after the Great Crash of 1929 as well as after the Second World War and after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the subsequent oil crisis. A brief critical survey of mainstream macroeconomics (the neoclassical synthesis and its variants, and its criticisms on the side of Keynesians and Sraffians) is followed by a brief survey of the elements of alternative macroeconomic analysis developed by Keynes and Kalecki, Minsky and Sylos Labini, and others.