Robbins as Innovator: the Contribution of an Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

Lionel Robbins’s An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) made at least three important contributions: (1) constructing a more modern, focused, and general definition of economics, which continues to inform the best contemporary practice, (2) exploring the legitimacy of, and relationship between, empirical and a priori analyses in economics, and (3) demonstrating the fallacy of interpersonal utility comparisons, laying the groundwork for Hayek’s subsequent critique of the mirage of social justice. Robbins’s definition of economics proposed in the Essay (p. 15), “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses,” is so perfectly phrased as to seem unremarkable today. Definitions proposed by Robbins’s teachers and contemporaries, such as those of Edwin Cannan, Hugh Dalton, and Alfred Marshall, were singularly limited by modern standards and unsatisfactory to Robbins. The most satisfactory definition Robbins could find THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS 12, NO. 4 (2009): 81–88