Get A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures PDF

Lionel Robbins's now well-known lectures at the background of financial notion contain one of many maximum bills on account that global struggle II of the evolution of financial principles. This quantity represents the 1st time these lectures were published.

Lord Robbins (1898-1984) was once a remarkably comprehensive philosopher, author, and public determine. He made very important contributions to monetary concept, technique, and coverage research, directed the commercial portion of Winston Churchill's warfare cupboard, and served as chairman of the Financial Times. As a historian of financial rules, he ranks with Joseph Schumpeter and Jacob Viner as one of many top-rated students of the century. those lectures, brought on the London university of Economics among 1979 and 1981 and tape-recorded via Robbins's grandson, show his mastery of the highbrow background of economics, his infectious enthusiasm for the topic, and his eloquence and incisive wit. They conceal a large chronological variety, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, focusing broadly on Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and the classicals, and completing with a dialogue of moderns and marginalists from Marx to Alfred Marshall. Robbins takes a diversified and inclusive method of highbrow background. As he says in his first lecture: "I shall move my very own candy way--sometimes speak about doctrine, occasionally discuss people, occasionally discuss periods." The lectures are united through Robbins's conviction that it really is most unlikely to appreciate thoroughly modern associations and social sciences with no figuring out the guidelines at the back of their development.

Authoritative but obtainable, combining the immediacy of the spoken note with Robbins's unheard of expertise for transparent, well-organized exposition, this quantity might be welcomed through someone attracted to the highbrow origins of the trendy world.