Robbins as a Political Economist: A Response to O'Brien

Abstract

D. P. O'Brien's recent 'literary biography' of Lionel Robbins in this JOURNAL (O'Brien, I988), does much to recapture the spirit of a thinker of erudition and stature whose forthright contributions extended well beyond his own specialist field of economics into the realm of public policy. His article anticipates a long overdue study of an economist who has too often been caught in the shadow of more publicity acknowledged contempories. In this comment I would like to extend O'Brien's discussion of the 'feud' between Robbins and Keynes in the I930S and to suggest that its importance goes deeper than its immediate temporal setting. An intellectual rivalry can be traced to 1925 when Robbins produced an 'unprovoked' attack on Keynes's monetary policy prescriptions. By the time they faced each other across the table of the Committee of Economists in 1930 the debate was invigorated by Robbins's intervening conversion to Austrian economics which provided an additional and explosive component to an already smouldering situation. Robbins's allegiance to the Austrian tradition remained evident in his writing throughout the thirties, most notably in The Great Depression. Robbins's commitment was softened by his wartime experience as Director of the Economic Section of the War Cabinet and was further revised with his return to teaching after the war and his reacquaintance with the Classical and Wicksellian roots of his earlier education. In these later years, as O'Brien (I988, p. io6) notes, Robbins was both critical of his early writings and more appreciative of Keynes' contribution. Despite these reservations, the Austrian influence was not simply a passing phase but added an important and lasting dimension to his work variously refered to by Robbins himself as 'political philosophy' or 'political economy' the relationship between economics and politics. I will suggest that an appreciation of this is not only critical for making sense of his 'feud' with Keynes, but also in assessing his own important contribution to the direction of post-war British macroeconomics.