Hayek was not a prominent figure at LSE, Robbins and Plant dominated

Evidence

I have interviewed several students and teachers who were at LSE during the 1930s and 1940s, and none of them volunteered comments attesting to Hayek’s impact in lecture room or seminar. Nor when directly asked did their remarks suggest that Hayek was a prominent person in the school. The dominating figures were Lionel Robbins and the (subsequently more obscure) Arnold Plant. This is also plain from the correspondence of representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose financial support was so important to the school. Given Hayek’s later eminence, his admirers have assumed that he must have been “always already famous” and their recollections adjusted themselves to suit this assumption. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 455

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader historiography debunking retrospective narratives of greatness, and to the reader’s interest in how the neoliberal network formed rather than assumed. — connects to: Robbins recruited Hayek to the LSE as an ally against interventionist economics — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 68; Hayek’s LSE critiques made him Keynes’s leading rival by 1932 — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 70; Hayek’s 1931 LSE lectures were poorly understood yet intellectually exciting — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 66 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Robbins deliberately imported Hayek as an intellectual counterweight to Keynes #responds-to (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 65