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.

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.