Editor’s Introduction

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) was the foremost British economist of his generation. He was appointed Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics in 1929, when he was thirty years of age; from then until his retirement from his Chair in 1961 he dominated the Economics Department at LSE and built it up to its pre-eminent position in British economics. Robbins was not only an academic economist. He was important and influential in the shaping of economic policy in Britain and the international economy in and after the Second World War, in the expansion of British higher education, and in the administration of the arts in Britain. He was created one of the first four life peers in 1959. In the last two decades of his life Lord Robbins was most widely known as the author of the Report of the Committee on Higher Education published in 1963, but this was only the most conspicuous of his several major contributions to British public life. Nonetheless, as James Meade has emphasized, ‘the richness of his other lives and of his personality must not be allowed to overshadow the fact that he was by profession an economist and an economist of the first rank’ .1