Lionel Robbins – författare

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) is best known to economists for his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932 and 1935). To the wider public he is well known for the ''Robbins Report'' of the 1960s on Higher Education, which recommended a major expansion of university education in Britain. However, throughout his academic career – at Oxford and the London School of Economics in the 1920s, and as Professor of Economics at the School from 1929 to 1961 – he was renowned as an exceptionally gifted teacher. Generations of students remember his lectures for their clarity and comprehensiveness and for his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.

Besides his famous graduate seminar his most important and influential courses at LSE were the Principles of Economic Analysis, which he gave in the 1930s and again in the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as the History of Economic Thought, from 1953 until long after his official retirement. This book publishes for the first time the manuscript notes Robbins used for his lectures on the Principles of Economic Analysis from 1929/30 to 1934/40. At the outset of his career he took the advice of a senior colleague to prepare his lectures by writing them out fully before he presented them; the full notes for most of his pre-war lectures survive and are eminently decipherable.

Since he made two major revisions of the lectures in the 1930s the Principles notes show both the development of his own thought and the way he incorporated the major theoretical innovations made by younger economists at LSE, such as John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor, or elsewhere, notably Joan Robinson. He intended to turn his lecture notes into a book, abandoning the project only when he was asked to chair the Committee on Higher Education in 1960. This volume is not exactly the book he wanted to write, but it is a unique record of what was taught to senior undergraduate and graduate economists in those ''years of high theory''. It will be of interest to all economists interested in the development of economics in the twentieth century.

This book examines the nature and the causes of the 1929 depression, tracing its background and the broad conditions from which the depression emerged. As an infl uence on economic activity, Robbins sees World War I, and the political changes that followed it, as a series of shifts in the fundamental conditions of demand and supply, to which economic activity had to adapt. Th e needs of the war had called a huge apparatus of mechanical equipment into being, which the resumption of peace rendered in large part superfl uous. The war also disrupted world markets, and its settlement created conditions that aggravated this disruption. Th us, the struggle that was to end nationalist friction in fact gave nationalism new scope.

The depression of 1929 and beyond dwarfed all preceding economic disruptions, both in magnitude and in intensity. In 1929 the index of security prices in the United States was in the neighborhood of 200-210; in 1932 it had fallen to 30-40. Commodity prices in general fell by 30 to 40 percent, and in some commodity markets the drop was even more catastrophic. Production in the chief manufacturing countries of the world from 30 to 50 percent, and the value of world trade in 1932 was a third of what it was three years before. Worldwide, something like 30 million people were unemployed.

There have been many economic downturns in modern economic history, but never anything to compare with the years of the Great Depression. Few books have conveyed that period with greater clarity and precision than this masterpiece by Lionel Robbins. Murray Weidenbaum''s masterful new introduction adds to its contemporary value.

This book examines the nature and the causes of the 1929 depression, tracing its background and the broad conditions from which the depression emerged. As an infl uence on economic activity, Robbins sees World War I, and the political changes that followed it, as a series of shifts in the fundamental conditions of demand and supply, to which economic activity had to adapt. Th e needs of the war had called a huge apparatus of mechanical equipment into being, which the resumption of peace rendered in large part superfl uous. The war also disrupted world markets, and its settlement created conditions that aggravated this disruption. Th us, the struggle that was to end nationalist friction in fact gave nationalism new scope.

The depression of 1929 and beyond dwarfed all preceding economic disruptions, both in magnitude and in intensity. In 1929 the index of security prices in the United States was in the neighborhood of 200-210; in 1932 it had fallen to 30-40. Commodity prices in general fell by 30 to 40 percent, and in some commodity markets the drop was even more catastrophic. Production in the chief manufacturing countries of the world from 30 to 50 percent, and the value of world trade in 1932 was a third of what it was three years before. Worldwide, something like 30 million people were unemployed.

There have been many economic downturns in modern economic history, but never anything to compare with the years of the Great Depression. Few books have conveyed that period with greater clarity and precision than this masterpiece by Lionel Robbins. Murray Weidenbaum''s masterful new introduction adds to its contemporary value.

Lionel Robbins''s now famous lectures on the history of economic thought comprise one of the greatest accounts since World War II of the evolution of economic ideas. This volume represents the first time those lectures have been published. Lord Robbins (1898-1984) was a remarkably accomplished thinker, writer, and public figure. He made important contributions to economic theory, methodology, and policy analysis, directed the economic section of Winston Churchill''s War Cabinet, and served as chairman of the Financial Times. As a historian of economic ideas, he ranks with Joseph Schumpeter and Jacob Viner as one of the foremost scholars of the century. These lectures, delivered at the London School of Economics between 1979 and 1981 and tape-recorded by Robbins''s grandson, display his mastery of the intellectual history of economics, his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, and his eloquence and incisive wit. They cover a broad chronological range, beginning with Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, focusing extensively on Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and the classicals, and finishing with a discussion of moderns and marginalists from Marx to Alfred Marshall. Robbins takes a varied and inclusive approach to intellectual history. As he says in his first lecture: "I shall go my own sweet way--sometimes talk about doctrine, sometimes talk about persons, sometimes talk about periods." The lectures are united by Robbins''s conviction that it is impossible to understand adequately contemporary institutions and social sciences without understanding the ideas behind their development. Authoritative yet accessible, combining the immediacy of the spoken word with Robbins''s exceptional talent for clear, well-organized exposition, this volume will be welcomed by anyone interested in the intellectual origins of the modern world.