‘Marvellous intellectual feasts’: The LSE Years, 1933–48

Abstract

Arthur Lewis spent a decade and a half at the London School of Economics (LSE), as a student, lecturer and researcher; and yet the record of the time he spent there is sparse. There are no personal diaries, no contemporary interviews on which to build up a picture of life at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s from Lewis’s own perspective. As his Princeton colleague and biographer Robert Tignor observed, Lewis throughout his life was an intensely private person who allowed few people access to his innermost feelings.1 But even more than was usually the case with Lewis, he appears to have been reluctant to write about or speak of personal events and encounters in this period of his life. This is not to say that Lewis underestimated the intellectual debt that he owed to the LSE. On the contrary, over half of his short autobiographical contribution to Breit and Spencer’s Lives of the Laureates (1986) was devoted to the intellectual legacy of the LSE, where what he described as ‘marvellous intellectual feasts’ were served up by teachers such as Arnold Plant, Lionel Robbins, Friedrich Hayek and John Hicks.2 He also generously acknowledged the stimulus he had received from the company of bright and high-achieving LSE students. While Lewis mentioned no names, his distinguished contemporaries at the LSE included two trade and development economists, F. V. Meyer and Alfred Maizels. Another contemporary, born in Germany in 1915, the same year as Lewis, was the development economist H. W. Arndt, later to be a Leverhulme scholar at the LSE.3