The Robbins Critique

In 1932, some three years after Lionel Robbins was appointed Professor of Economics at LSE, he published his first book: An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.1 It was also the first methodological treatise by a British economist since John Neville Keynes’ The Scope and Method of Political Economy in 1890. Unadorned by complex arguments or arcane technique, the Essay was lucid, tendentious, blunt, confident, and rhetorically somewhat disingenuous — Robbins presented his unorthodox ideas as if they were standard fare, drawn from the accumulated wisdom of economics. The rhetorical ploy had little effect, and the Essay stimulated considerable controversy. Much of the attention centred on his critique of the scientific legitimacy of welfare economics, one of the fields in the territory he called ‘applied economics’ (Robbins 1932, 121, 125).2 Robbins would be satisfied by nothing less than a Carthaginian peace: welfare economics should be banished from the positive or empirical domain of economic science and relegated to the policy judgements of political economy. He advanced his arguments in an informal, discursive fashion, making no effort to distinguish various grounds on which he found it wanting. Examination of his last chapter shows that he regarded its scientific credentials as irredeemably defective in four respects.