LSE market advocacy was built by importing Austrian ideas rather than innovating domestically

Evidence

Most important, he read German easily and extensively and familiarized himself with a broad international literature that remained largely obscure to his pre de ces sor. While Cannan had struggled to register his dissatisfactions with Marshallian economics in terms derived from other British economists, Robbins discovered an alternative intellectual tradition in Austria that directly addressed many of his concerns. As his colleagues at the LSE observed, Robbins was not a particularly innovative thinker; his great skill lay in his capacity to aggregate and synthesize the scholarly achievements of others. In a discipline that remained distinctly insular, however, he achieved signifi cant originality by elaborating on the insights of foreign sources that his colleagues found largely obscure. While Cannan’s distinctly British sensibility had cultivated an environment at the LSE that was friendly to conservatism, the ideas that defi ned its leading professors’ views in the early years of the Great Depression were imported from abroad. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 59

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader story of how continental (esp. Austrian/Viennese) economic ideas filtered into Anglo-American policy networks ahead of the turn. — connects to: LSE’s 1930s market advocacy grew from one contrarian teacher’s singular personality — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 58; Robbins recruited Hayek to the LSE as an ally against interventionist economics — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 68
• DEFINE: Establishes Robbins’s distinctive intellectual role as synthesizer-importer, key to the whole MPS story.

Broader Connections

• Robbins recruited Hayek to the LSE as an ally against interventionist economics #responds-to (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 68