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By the time of his death the English economist Lionel Robbins (1898-1984) was celebrated as a 'renaissance man'. He made major contributions to his own academic discipline and applied his skills as an economist not only to practical problems of economic policy - with conspicuous success when he served as head of the economists advising the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill in 1940-45 - and of higher education - the 'Robbins Report' of 1963 - but also to the administration of the visual and performing arts that he loved deeply. He was devoted to the London School of Economics, from his time as an undergraduate following active service as an artillery officer on the Western Front in 1917-18, through his years as Professor of Economics (1929-62), and his stint as chairman of the governors during the 'troubles' of the late 1960s. This comprehensive biography, based on his personal and professional correspondence and other papers, covers all these many and varied activities.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Father and son; 2. The Great War; 3. Postwar; 4. The London School of Economics; 5. Iris Gardiner; 6. New College Oxford; 7. The young professor; 8. Fritz and Lionel; 9. The School in the mid 1930s; 10. The approach of war; 11. The economics of war; 12. Director of the Economic Section; 13. Anglo-American conversations; 14. The Law Mission and the Steering Committee; 15. 1944; 16. The last months of the war; 17. The postwar settlement; 18. Return to the School; 19. The end of the transition; 20. LSE in the early 1950s; 21. Chairman of the National Gallery; 22. Lord Robbins; 23. The Robbins Report; 24. The sixties; 25. The arts; 26. The troubles at LSE; 27. Retirement; Conclusion.
About the author
Susan Howson is Professor of Economics and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto. She was educated at the London School of Economics (1964–1969) and at the University of Cambridge, where she obtained her PhD in 1975. She has held visiting positions in the International Division of the Bank of England (1979–1981); Nuffield College, Oxford (1984–1985); and Wolfson College, Cambridge (1991–1993). Professor Howson is the author of Domestic Monetary Management in Britain 1919–38 (Cambridge University Press, 1975) and British Monetary Policy, 1945–51 (1993) and co-author with Donald Winch of The Economic Advisory Council (Cambridge University Press, 1977). She edited The Collected Papers of James Meade (3 volumes, 1988) and co-edited with Donald Moggridge the wartime diaries of Lionel Robbins and Nobel Laureate James Meade, and the Cabinet Office diary of James Meade (1990). Professor Howson began research on the life and work of Lionel Robbins in the early 1990s. She edited a selection of his major articles in economic theory and economic policy under the title Economic Science and Political Economy (1997). Her work on British economic policy has been published in The Economic Journal, the Economic History Review, History of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic History and Oxford Economic Papers, among other publications. She is also a contributor to the Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Structural Change and Growth, Volume III, 2004). The recipient of two prizes for research in economic history, Professor Howson has also held two Connaught Senior Research Fellowships in the Social Sciences, in 2004 and 2007, for her work on Lionel Robbins.
Summary
A biography of a major twentieth-century English economist who was a key player in the development of economics as an academic subject, especially at the London School of Economics; in economic policy, especially in Britain during the Second World War; in higher education in the 1960s; and in the administration of the arts in Britain.
Foreword
Biography of a major twentieth-century English economist who was a key player in the development of economics as an academic subject.
