Lionel Robbins

• 1. Introduction

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  Lionel Robbins is remembered today for a single line: "Humans want what they can't have." That quote made him famous. But it also compresses a career spent asking what economics is actually for. Robbins led the economics department at the London School of Economics for decades. He proposed a definition of economics that reshaped how economists described their own work. He is also credited with steering Anglo-Saxon economics away from the direction set by Alfred Marshall. Along the way he clashed publicly with John Maynard Keynes. What turned that rivalry into something closer to alliance? And what exactly did Robbins mean when he said economics was a matter of scarce means and unlimited ends?

• 2. Early Life And War

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  Robbins was born on the 22nd of November 1898 in Sipson, west of London. His father, Rowland Richard Robbins, known as Dick, was a farmer. His father sat on Middlesex County Council and was active in the National Farmers' Union. The family belonged to the Strict Baptist tradition. His sister Caroline later became a noted Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. Robbins was educated at home, then at a preparatory school called Hounslow College. He later attended Southall County School. In October 1915 he started an Arts degree at University College London. He wanted to serve in the First World War. In early 1916 he began training at Topsham in Devon. He served as an officer in the Royal Field Artillery from August 1916 until 1918. On the 12th of April that year, a sniper wounded him during the Battle of the Lys. He returned home holding the rank of lieutenant. During the war he grew interested in guild socialism, reading the work of G. D. H. Cole. He also talked with Reginald Lawson, a connection on his mother's side of the family. Robbins met two important men through Clive Gardiner, an artist whom his father paid in 1917 to paint the young Robbins's portrait. Those two men were Clive's father, Alfred George Gardiner, and Gardiner's ally, the activist James Joseph Mallon. After his convalescence, Robbins was demobilised from the army in 1919. He then spent about a year working for the Labour Campaign for the Nationalization of the Drink Trade. Mallon helped him find that job. The campaign had grown out of a wartime scheme called the State Management Scheme. Robbins worked for Mallon and Arthur Greenwood at Mecklenburgh Square in London. That job, and that circle of contacts, would soon lead him back into formal study.

• 3. Building A Department

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  In 1920 Robbins resumed his studies at the London School of Economics. His teachers included Harold Laski, Edwin Cannan and Hugh Dalton. He graduated with a B.Sc. (Econ) in 1923, earning first class honours. Dalton's biographer Ben Pimlott later called Robbins the "most promising student of his generation at the L.S.E." After graduating, Robbins took a six-month post as a researcher for William Beveridge. Dalton had arranged that position. Robbins then won a one-year lecturing fellowship at New College, Oxford. References from Alfred George Gardiner, Theodore Gregory and Graham Wallas backed his application. He returned to LSE in 1925 as an assistant lecturer, again with Dalton's support. He was soon promoted to lecturer. In 1927 he went back to New College as a Fellow. He kept lecturing weekly at LSE throughout that time. Allyn Abbott Young, the Professor of Economics at LSE, died in 1929. Robbins took his chair and moved with his wife to Hampstead Garden Suburb. Through the 1930s he expanded the department. He hired Friedrich von Hayek, John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor. Those three names would carry LSE's reputation in economics for decades.

• 4. The Break With Keynes

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  In early October 1930, Robbins sat on the Committee of Economists of the Second MacDonald ministry. John Maynard Keynes chaired that small working group. The committee also included Hubert Henderson and Josiah Stamp from the Economic Advisory Council. Arthur Cecil Pigou represented academia alongside Robbins. The group had been asked to recommend economic policy during the Great Depression. Keynes drafted proposals that included tariffs. Robbins refused to sign that draft. He asked for the chance to submit a minority report instead. Keynes denied the request, since Robbins was a minority of one. Robbins had already compared the protectionist arguments to those of Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook. He walked out of a meeting. He then briefed the politician Philip Snowden against the committee's report. Robbins felt he had been treated unfairly. Bad feeling between LSE and Cambridge economists persisted for years afterward. Robbins was also initially opposed to Keynes's 1936 General Theory. His own 1934 treatise on the Great Depression reflects that earlier thinking. He later came to accept the case for government intervention. That shift in his thinking would matter once a much larger crisis arrived.

• 5. Wartime Reconciliation

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  In the summer of 1940, Robbins joined the British government's Central Economic Information Service. He moved there from Cambridge, where LSE itself had relocated during the war. The Service split into two parts, the Central Statistical Office and the Economic Section. Robbins became Director of the Economic Section in September 1941. That same year he worked with Peggy Joseph and James Meade. Together they devised the points system that rationed clothes, shoes and household items. That policy is considered a success. From 1942 Robbins worked largely with Meade on planning for post-war reconstruction. John Boyd Orr and Frank Lidgett McDougall had lobbied successfully to put food security on the United Nations agenda. Robbins attended the resulting conference at Hot Springs, Virginia, in 1943. He also represented the United Kingdom at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. He helped negotiate the Anglo-American loan of 1946. Over this stretch of the war, he became fully reconciled with Keynes. Robbins later wrote about the tradition he had grown up in. He said it gave weight to the trade cycle and swings in aggregate demand. But he said it tended to ignore deeper sources of disharmony. That blind spot, he wrote, had sometimes led to superficial thinking and sometimes to outright error. He credited Cambridge economists, Keynes above all, along with a Professor Robertson, with waking him from what he called his dogmatic slumbers.

• 6. Reshaping Higher Education

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  The Robbins Report of 1963 called for a substantial expansion of higher education across the United Kingdom. It rested on what became known as the Robbins principle. That principle held that university places should expand to meet demand from anyone qualified to study. The report drew on earlier LSE-based work by Richard Layard and Claus Moser. It also drew on recent ideas from Jean Floud and A. H. Halsey. Robbins took on a new post in 1968, becoming the first Chancellor of the University of Stirling. He also pushed for more government funding for the arts alongside universities. In later life he turned toward the history of economic thought. He wrote studies covering English doctrinal history. His LSE lectures, delivered in 1980, were later published as well.

• 7. Defining The Discipline

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  "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." That is how Robbins defined the field in his 1932 book, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. Robbins credited a paper by his close army friend Nathan Isaacs with shaping the Essay. Isaacs had delivered that paper to the Aristotelian Society in June 1931. That same month, Robbins sent Isaacs a copy of his own inaugural lecture. He admitted its content was already out of date. It failed to account for the work of the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Robbins used Hayek's cycle theory as one example. He used Jacob Viner's 1920s work on Canada's balance of payments as a contrasting example. One showed new theory being built. The other showed existing theory being tested. Isaacs pressed the importance of inductive reasoning. Robbins leaned more naturally toward deduction. The definition proved contentious through the 1930s. It later gained general acceptance among economists. The book runs six chapters, and its second half remains disputed. As an undergraduate, Robbins said he learned a great deal from Philip Wicksteed's 1910 book, The Common Sense of Political Economy. Within the British tradition, he admired William Stanley Jevons. He praised Jevons's command of statistical evidence and theory Robbins believed still held up. The historian Robert Skidelsky considered Robbins a rare, possible British successor to John Neville Keynes. John Neville Keynes had written the 1891 book Scope and Method of Political Economy. Robbins corresponded with the American economist Frank Knight from 1931 until Knight's death in 1972. His early paper The Representative Firm, published in 1928, began as a talk to the London Economic Club. It has been called his most celebrated article. In it he attacked a major concept belonging to Alfred Marshall. Ralph George Hawtrey of the Club defended Marshall's position in a letter to Robbins. Within weeks, Robbins sent a version of the paper to Keynes, who was then editing the Economic Journal. Robbins's later work has been described as imprecise. That includes a 1966 Chichele lecture on capital accumulation, published in 1968. It also includes a later study called The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy. Robbins also came to dislike collectivism, though his path there was not direct. An early interest in the ideas of Samuel George Hobson led him to join the National Guilds League. That membership did not survive past 1920, even though he held socialist views for a while longer. He later took the Austrian School's side in the socialist calculation debate, arguing against economic planning.

• 8. Family And Honours

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  In the 1944 Birthday Honours, Robbins became a Companion of the Order of the Bath. The American Philosophical Society elected him an International Member in 1955. On the 16th of June 1959, Robbins became a life peer, taking the title Baron Robbins, of Clare Market in the City of Westminster. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a member in 1966. The 1968 New Year Honours made him a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. Heriot-Watt University gave him an Honorary Doctorate in 1967. LSE named its Lionel Robbins Building after him. Since 2009 an outdoor artwork called Blue Rain, created by Michael Brown, an artist from the United States, has hung on that building. A second Lionel Robbins Building stands at Nottingham Trent University. On the 2nd of August 1924, Robbins had married Iris Elizabeth Harris Gardiner, a daughter of the journalist and editor Alfred George Gardiner. The couple had two children, a daughter named Ann and a son named Richard. Ann married Christopher Louis McIntosh Johnson in 1958. Richard became an artist and sculptor. Inside the LSE building that carries his father's name stands a bust of Lionel Robbins, made by Richard's own hand.