Aims of the lecture

In 1932 Lionel Robbins provided what has become the most commonly cited definition of economics. The aims of this lecture are as follows.

• 1. To explain the arguments Robbins made in the book in which he provided this definition;

• 2. To trace the way in which that definition of economics became the standard definition of the subject and the controversies that it elicited on the way.

• 3. To explore some of the possible consequences of the definition for the problems economists have chosen to tackle and the way that they have chosen to tackle them.

Because Robbins’s definition has connections with several other topics (e.g. welfare economics, microeconomics and mathematical economics), this lecture inevitably refers to material covered later in the course.

Bibliography

L. C. Robbins’s An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1932), available as a free download from https://mises.org/library/essay-nature-and-significance-economic-science (accessed 26 October 2017), provides his now-famous definition of economics, and his explanation of the conclusions he drew from it concerning how economics should be practised. A second edition was published in 1935; though this was revised significantly, the main arguments, including the ones discussed in this lecture, did not change, and either edition could be used.

S. Howson’s Lionel Robbins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) provides a definitive account of the author, although very little of this book is on the Essay. Howson’s “The Origins of Lionel Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science”, History of Political Economy 36:4 (2004), 413–43, however, gives an account of how Robbins came to write the book.

R. E. Backhouse and S. G. Medema’s “Defining Economics: The Long Road to Acceptance of Robbins’s Definition”, Economica 76 (2009), 805–20, analyses reactions to Robbins’s definition of economics and establishes that there were always economists who did not accept it. Backhouse and Medema’s “On the Definition of Economics”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 23:1 (2009), 221–33, is a shorter account, placing the Robbins definition in the context of other definitions.