Lionel Charles Robbins Biography

British economist, who became Baron Robbins of Clare Market in 1961, born in Middlesex, educated at the London School of Economics where he later became Professor of Economics. Between the wars he was an active anti-Keynesian (something he later declared to have been ‘the greatest mistake of my professional career’ in his Autobiography of an Economist, 1971). He chaired a committee on higher education (known as the Robbins Committee) which is credited with setting in motion the great expansion of the British system of higher education which took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In his classic Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932), Robbins proposed a definition of the subject matter of economics: the economic problem, and therefore the proper subject of the discipline, is the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends. Just how far his position on government intervention had altered since the war is evident in his Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (1952), which argued that even famous ‘free-marketeers’ like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham were in fact not dogmatic proponents of laissez-faire.