London School of Economics

• 1. Introduction

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  The London School of Economics and Political Science was born at a breakfast table. On the 4th of August 1894, Beatrice and Sidney Webb sat down with Louis Flood and George Bernard Shaw and sketched out a plan that would become one of the world's most consequential universities. The school that emerged from that meeting has since educated over 40 world leaders, produced 21 Nobel laureates, and shaped the intellectual architecture of the modern world. But the story behind that influence is stranger and more contested than any league table suggests. Where did £20,000 left by a Fabian lawyer lead? Why did a debate about deflation versus demand management reverberate for decades? And how did a school founded by political radicals become a training ground for prime ministers on every continent?

• 2. A Fabian Inheritance

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  Henry Hunt Hutchinson was a lawyer and member of the Fabian Society who, when he died, left £20,000 in trust to be used toward advancing the Fabian Society's objects "in any way they deem advisable." Sidney Webb, one of five trustees named to manage the bequest, saw an opportunity. The proposal to establish a school was accepted by the trustees in February 1895, and LSE held its first classes that October in rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi, in the City of Westminster. The founding four , Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw , were not academics in any conventional sense. Shaw was a playwright. The Webbs were social reformers. Wallas was a political theorist. Their shared conviction was that the social sciences, treated rigorously and taught seriously, could cure the ills of industrial society. The school joined the federal University of London in 1900, and the degrees of BSc (Econ) and DSc (Econ) established in 1901 were the first university degrees in Britain dedicated to the social sciences. Subjects now taken for granted , accountancy, sociology, economic history , were pioneered in Britain at LSE. The school also employed Britain's first full-time lecturer in economic history, a signal of the founders' belief that economics without context was incomplete.

• 3. The Great Intellectual Battle

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  Friedrich Hayek joined LSE as a lecturer in 1931, arriving from Vienna into one of the sharpest debates in the history of economics. On one side stood Hayek and LSE economist Lionel Robbins, who followed the Austrian School and emphasized free trade and opposition to state intervention. On the other stood John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge, who was developing what became known as Keynesian economics, arguing for active state participation and demand management to address the slump caused by the Great Depression. The dispute had roots stretching back further. LSE's Edwin Cannan, Professor of Economics from 1861 to 1935, had clashed with Cambridge's Alfred Marshall , the leading economist of the day , over whether economics should be considered an organic whole or whether pure theory and economic history should be treated separately. Despite the popular image of relentless rivalry, the two institutions had cooperated in the 1920s on the London and Cambridge Economic Service. But the 1930s renewed hostilities. What began as a disagreement over policy instruments expanded into a contest over the fundamental nature of macroeconomics, one that shaped economic policy debates for the rest of the twentieth century. During World War II, the school decamped to Cambridge itself, occupying buildings belonging to Peterhouse , a strange wartime truce between rival traditions.

• 4. Student Revolt and Consequence

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  In 1966, LSE appointed Sir Walter Adams as director. Adams had previously been principal of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and students objected to his failure to oppose Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence and his cooperation with the white minority government. What began as targeted opposition broadened into wider concerns about LSE's financial links to Rhodesia and South Africa through its governors. The protests escalated steadily. In 1969, a student attempt to dismantle the school's gates led to the arrest of over 30 students and closure of the school for 25 days. Injunctions were taken out against 13 students, nine of them from LSE. Three students were ultimately suspended, two foreign students were deported, and two staff members seen as supporting the protests were dismissed. The LSE Students' Union developed a reputation as the most politically active in Britain during this period, a label it has held ever since. The school's central London location and more than 200 student societies contributed to it being awarded the top spot for student nightlife by a national newspaper in 2015. The student newspaper, The Beaver, publishes each Tuesday during term time and is among the oldest student newspapers in the country.

• 5. Four Nobel Prizes in a Decade

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  In the 1970s, four Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences went to economists with LSE ties, arriving in rapid succession. John Hicks, who had lectured at LSE from 1926 to 1936, won in 1972. Friedrich Hayek, lecturer from 1931 to 1950, won in 1974. James Meade, lecturer from 1947 to 1957, won in 1977. And Arthur Lewis, who had earned a BSc (Econ) at LSE in 1937 and became the school's first Black academic from 1938 to 1944, won in 1979. Lewis remains the only Black person ever to have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. As of 2025, LSE counts 21 Nobel laureates in total among alumni and staff. The school's motto, rerum cognoscere causas , meaning "to know the causes of things" , was taken from Virgil's Georgics and suggested by Professor Edwin Cannan. The beaver mascot, adopted alongside the motto in February 1922, was chosen for its associations with foresight, constructiveness, and industrious behaviour. The recommendation came from a committee of twelve, including eight students, established specifically to research the matter.

• 6. A Campus Built from Controversy

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  Mark Wallinger's sculpture The World Turned Upside Down was installed on Sheffield Street on the 26th of March 2019, featuring a globe resting on its north pole. The work immediately drew protest for showing Taiwan as a sovereign state rather than as part of China, depicting Lhasa as a full capital, and drawing international boundaries between India and China as recognised internationally. It also did not show the State of Palestine as a separate country from Israel. After reactions from both Chinese and Taiwanese students, LSE decided to retain the original design but added an asterisk beside Taiwan's name and a placard clarifying the institution's position. The campus itself has grown dramatically around these debates. LSE now occupies around 30 buildings between Kingsway and Aldwych. The New Academic Building, designed by Sir Nicholas Grimshaw at a cost of over £45 million, expanded the campus by 120,000 square feet and was officially opened by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the 5th of November 2008. The Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, named after the Singaporean statistician and philanthropist, opened in January 2014 after an architectural design competition managed by RIBA Competitions. Designed by O'Donnell and Tuomey, it achieved a BREEAM Outstanding rating for environmental sustainability and won both the RIBA National Award and London Building of the Year Award. The Marshall Building at 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields opened in January 2022, named after British investor Paul Marshall. Its site had previously housed the Francis Crick Institute's laboratories, which LSE purchased in 2013.

• 7. Influence and Contradiction

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  Since 1990, LSE has educated 24 prime ministers or presidents, the second highest number of any university in the United Kingdom. The school's library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, is the world's largest library dedicated to social sciences, holding over 4 million print volumes and welcoming 1.8 million visits per year. Yet against this influence sits a record of controversy that the school has never fully resolved. In February 2011, LSE director Howard Davies resigned after the school accepted a £1.5 million donation linked to Muammar Gaddafi's family while simultaneously enrolling one of his sons. In 2013, LSE attracted international attention when a BBC journalist posing as a student accompanied the school's Grimshaw Club on a trip inside North Korea, prompting hostile threats from the North Korean government against the students involved. In August 2015, a university-commissioned report giving a favourable assessment of the charity Kids Company was revealed to have been funded by the charity itself, without disclosure. In 2024, internal emails described students wearing keffiyeh as being "dressed as terrorists." The school that Edwin Cannan, Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw designed to know the causes of things has found that living with its own contradictions is part of the ongoing education. A new building, the Firoz Lalji Global Hub at 35 Lincoln's Inn Fields, was acquired from the Royal College of Surgeons in 2017 and is expected to be completed by summer 2027.