Effective Tension in Robbins’s Economic Methodology

Version 1.1 Abstract: Lionel Robbins 1932 Essay is one of the most influential methodological works in 20th century economics. This said, the Essay is not philosophically seamless; it exhibits certain tensions that are not easily reconciled within any specific philosophical characterization of scientific knowledge. The paper discusses these issues, but also emphasizes that these tensions did not inhibit the influence of the Essay within economics. In fact, it is argued that these philosophical tensions actually contributed to its influence. Marginalist economics was under attack from a number of different directions and Robbins’s Essay provided an effective response these critics – a response that would have been much less effective if Robbins had consistently adopted (only) one of the prevailing philosophical conceptions of scientific knowledge. It was a methodology for economics, not for philosophers, and its influence needs to be understood within the historical context of marginalist economics in the 1930s