ON THE ROLE OF VALUES IN ECONOMIC SCIENCE: ROBBINS AND HIS CRITICS

Abstract

Lionel Robbins’s (1932) An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (henceforth, Essay) is one of the two most important works on economic methodology of the twentieth century, together with Milton Friedman’s classic ‘‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’’ (1953). The fundamental legacy of the Essay is having forcefully championed a conception of economic science as axiomatic, value-free, and primarily concerned with scarcity—a conception that is today widely, even though not universally, accepted. Robbins (1932) presented his position as if it captured what was at the time a broadly shared understanding of economic science. As it turns out, Robbins’s Essay was met by largely negative reactions in academic journals. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the nature of the negative reactions to Robbins’s work in the 1930s, primarily with respect to the value-freeness of economics. Some interpreters have argued that the hostility to Robbins’s work was mostly based on a misunderstanding of his position (e.g. Peston and Corry 1972; Masini Forthcoming). Robbins himself supported this interpretation, arguing that, with respect to his work on methodology, ‘‘I have never succeeded in making my views immune from misunderstanding’’ (Robbins 1963, Preface to his Politics and Economics, p. vii). Even though some reactions to the Essay did originate from failure to appreciate the subtleties of Robbins’s views, I want to argue that a great many were based on a substantive disagreement over the very possibility and desirability of keeping values outside of economic science. Recent developments in the debate on the role of values in science show that Robbins’s critics, although clumsily, pointed to genuine weaknesses of the thesis that economic science should be value-free. I will reconstruct and evaluate what I take to be the most insightful lines of criticisms leveled against Robbins from 1932, when the Essay was published, to