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A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures
By Lionel Robbins, edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xxviii, 359. $39.95.
This volume contains the transcripts of a series of lectures on the history of economic thought given by Lord Robbins to students at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book also contains Robbins' syllabus, a bibliography of all of his writings on various aspects of the history of thought, as well as a bibliography, composed by the editors, of all of the texts that Robbins cites or quotes from in his lectures. This last contribution by the editors was a considerable service because Robbins did a lot of quoting and citing! The editors also provide an excellent interpretative essay in their introduction to the lectures.
Teaching the history of economic thought requires selection, and Robbins' selections will strike most readers as pretty standard if not a bit old-fashioned. For example, he gives considerable attention (more than a third of the course) to pre-Smithian thought, a practice that is probably less common among historians today. His treatment of these earlier writers is fairly predictable: Robbins labels the section "Anticipations" to let his audience know that his intent is to find those places where earlier writings anticipated later more systematic developments. The rest of the course hits the usual highlights. Four lectures on Smith are followed by one on Malthus on population and then five lectures on various aspects of classical analysis. Two chapters on Marx come...