Lionel Robbins: Neoclassical Maximizer or Proto-praxeologist?

Austrian economists writing after the so-called Austrian revival of the 1970s have generally been dismissive of Lionel Robbins’s An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (Robbins 1932), denying it a significant role in shaping the modern praxeological paradigm in economics.1 Their attitude in this regard has been heavily influenced by the views of Israel Kirzner. Kirzner (1979, pp. 5, 27, 166 and passim) sharply contrasts what he dubbs “Robbinsian economizing” with “Misesian human action.” And he explicitly equats Robbinsian economizing with the later neoclassical paradigm of “maximizing” in which all ends and means are given and known to the choosers, whose only “choice” therefore consists in allocating the known means among the given ends so as to “maximize” utility or profit. As Kirzner (1979, p. 6) puts it: “For Robbins, economizing simply means shuffling around available resources in order to secure the efficient utilization of known inputs in terms of a given hierarchy of ends.” Kirzner goes on to characterize Robbinsian decision makers as “strictly price takers” who are unable to raise or lower prices in the face of unanticipated reductions or accumulations of inventories. Thus the concept of economizing at the center of Robbins’s analysis is, according THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS 12, NO. 4 (2009): 98–110