A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures.

• Author: Caldwell, Bruce
• Position: Review

By Lionel Robbins, edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xxviii, 359. $39.95.

This volume contains the transcripts of a series of lectures on the history of economic thought given by Lord Robbins to students at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book also contains Robbins' syllabus, a bibliography of all of his writings on various aspects of the history of thought, as well as a bibliography, composed by the editors, of all of the texts that Robbins cites or quotes from in his lectures. This last contribution by the editors was a considerable service because Robbins did a lot of quoting and citing! The editors also provide an excellent interpretative essay in their introduction to the lectures.

Teaching the history of economic thought requires selection, and Robbins' selections will strike most readers as pretty standard if not a bit old-fashioned. For example, he gives considerable attention (more than a third of the course) to pre-Smithian thought, a practice that is probably less common among historians today. His treatment of these earlier writers is fairly predictable: Robbins labels the section "Anticipations" to let his audience know that his intent is to find those places where earlier writings anticipated later more systematic developments. The rest of the course hits the usual highlights. Four lectures on Smith are followed by one on Malthus on population and then five lectures on various aspects of classical analysis. Two chapters on Marx come next. The remaining lectures cover marginalism, and not just Menger, Jevons, and Walras but also such second-generation writers as Wieser, Clark, Wicksteed, and Bohm-Bawerk. Concluding chapters cover Marshall's economics, then Fisher, Marshall, and Wicksell on money.

There are two disappointments. First, in his two chapters on Marx, Robbins concentrates on precursors like Saint-Simon and on Marx's value theory. There is nothing on Marx's predictions concerning the laws of motion of the capitalist system or on the ways that later Marxists sought to modify the system, which for many people would be equally (if not more) important subjects. And more to the point, Robbins spent much of his academic life defending classical liberal ideas against socialists of various stripes. It would have been fascinating to hear what he would say to a new generation of students about his various opponents'...