ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Defining Economics: Robbins’ Essay in Theory and Practice
Author:
Lionel Robbins has become famous for his definition of economics, which has become standard fare in introductory textbooks. Yet no one has examined in detail the process through which economists came to accept that definition. The aim of this paper is to trace the reception of Robbins’s definition of economics as, to use a useful abbreviation, the science of scarcity. This definition was analytic, in that it identified an aspect of behavior, and it laid a foundation that could be seen as justifying not only the narrowing of economic theory to the theory of constrained maximization or rational choice but also the “imperialism” of economists’ ventures into the fields of law, sociology and political science. Though Robbins’s definition is often presented as self-evidently correct, the developments that it has been used to support were all keenly contested, to such an extent that for two decades or more, responses to it in academic journals were overwhelmingly critical. Even writers of textbooks came to adopt his definition only gradually, qualifying it in directions that added a descriptive element to the way the subject was defined. The fate of his analytical definition was linked to the rise of mathematical theorizing based on optimizing models and later to the economic imperialism associated with Gary Becker. Focusing on explicit discussions of the definition in the academic journals and in economics textbooks the paper traces out the ways in which it was contested from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century.
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