Robbins recruited Hayek to the LSE as an ally against interventionist economics
Evidence
Robbins immediately recognized Hayek as a powerful ally in his arguments against public expenditures, credit expansion, and tariffs. He made his enthusiasm very clear when the LSE’s director, William Beveridge, suggested that Hayek might be an appropriate choice for the longvacant Tooke Chair of Economic Science that Jacob Viner had just declined. Hayek, who had engaged in idle daydreams about the possibility of a professorship in London, was fl atly astonished at his good fortune in receiving the offer. As the longtime hub of the fi nancial world and an increasingly dynamic center for economic thought, it seemed an ideal situation. “I mean, if you are at thirtytwo a professor at the London School of Economics,” he later told an interviewer, “you don’t have any further ambitions.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 68
Categorization
- XREF: LSE becomes the institutional hub from which Viner-declined Tooke Chair anchors later austerity-adjacent intellectual history; ties to Robbins’s later Mont Pèlerin role. — connects to: Robbins deliberately imported Hayek as an intellectual counterweight to Keynes — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 65; Hayek’s LSE critiques made him Keynes’s leading rival by 1932 — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 70; Hayek was not a prominent figure at LSE, Robbins and Plant dominated — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 455 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Robbins deliberately imported Hayek as an intellectual counterweight to Keynes
#corroborates(0.98) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 65 - Hayek’s LSE critiques made him Keynes’s leading rival by 1932
#expands(0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 70 - Hayek was not a prominent figure at LSE, Robbins and Plant dominated
#contradicts(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 455 - The LSE and Chicago economics departments formed a prewar axis of free-market allies
#expands(0.78) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 87 - Fabian commitment to openness let a reactionary economics take root at the LSE
#expands(0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 52