Economists, social scientists, and the reconstruction of the world order in interwar Britain

Abstract

The early decades of the 20th century witnessed much discussion about the separation between positive and normative analysis, and the legitimacy of the prescriptive claims often advanced by social scientists. The paper investigates British debates about the reconstruction of the world order as a topic that brought together social analysts with very different backgrounds, and had the LSE as one of its focal points. The urgency of international politics at the time made it more difficult to sustain a clear distinction between positive analysis and policy prescription. To Lionel Robbins, the topic belonged to the applied domain of political economy.