Robbins himself was highly politically engaged despite his neutrality doctrine

Evidence

Robbins did not intend for his dictum to mean, as some at the time insinuated, that economists should refrain from any form of public engagement or philosophical argumentation. His major publications in the 1930s, including The Great Depression and Economic Planning and the International Order, were written to appeal to a general audience, and during the de cade he may have been the most po liti cally engaged of all the market advocates in Chicago and London. Rather, he was making the more limited claim that economists could not draw on their scientifi c work to arrive at any normative conclusions. If economists determined that free trade would lead more effi ciently to the wellbeing of the poor than protectionism, it would be appropriate for them to indicate as much, but they should not connect that analysis to any broader assertions about the ends that society should share. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common impression of Robbins as a pure ivory-tower advocate; relevant to the reader’s MPS network mapping.