Hugh Dalton (1887–1962)

Abstract

Hugh Dalton combined a brief but very successful academic career, spent entirely at LSE, with a deep commitment to the Labour Party. Cassell Reader in Economics from 1920 to 1935, when he resigned in order to devote himself to politics, Dalton published important work on public finance, the distribution of income and wealth and the economics of socialism. His authoritative textbook, Principles of Public Finance, was still selling well in the early 1950s having first appeared in 1922, and his 1920 article on ‘The Measurement of the Inequality of Incomes’ was rediscovered in the 1970s and has been very widely cited ever since. Dalton was essentially a pre-Keynesian economist, who applied A.C. Pigou’s neoclassical microeconomics to develop a surprisingly radical brand of democratic socialism.

Appendix: Dalton’s Other Writings

Between the wars, it was not unusual for an academic economist to write more books than refereed journal articles (this would be a very dangerous career strategy today!). Thus, Dalton published only two full-length articles on economics in the course of his 16 years at LSE. One was the 1920 paper on inequality, discussed in detail in Section 2 above. Eight years later came an article on the theory of population, in which he drew on the many books on the subject that he had reviewed for the LSE’s house journal Economica to survey the literature on the theory of optimum population and its relationship to unemployment (Dalton 1928a).

Dalton wrote a large number of book reviews, beginning with several contributions in 1914–1915 to the Chicago-based International Journal of Ethics, for whom he reviewed books on economics, politics, social policy and religion by authors who included W.J. Ashley, W. Cunningham and J.A. Hobson. Dalton wrote review articles for Economica on public finance (Dalton 1921b) and the economics of industry (Dalton 1922b) and lengthy reviews of works on population (Dalton 1923b) and public finance (Dalton 1928b), together with many shorter reviews on these and related topics. A quarter of a century later, his last two academic publications were reviews of the official history of the wartime economic blockade (Dalton 1953a) and Ursula Hicks’s treatise on British public finances (Dalton 1954).

His fluent command of Italian, presumably acquired during his military service in the First World War, made Dalton the reviewer of choice for Italian-language books for the Economic Journal in the 1920s and early 1930s, a decade in which the global domination of the English language in academic economics was much less absolute than it would become after 1945. Some of the authors that he reviewed were well known (Achille Loria in 1921 and 1922; Roberto Michels in 1922; Maffeo Pantaleoni in 1925), others less so (Ulrisse Gobbi in 1921; Umberto Ricci and Alfonso di Pietri-Tonelli in 1922; Ugo Spirito and Lello Gangemi in 1933; Leone Wollemborg in 1935). The Italian author who most influenced Dalton’s own work was the socialist Eugenio Rignano, as we saw in Section 3 (see Dalton 1921a). Dalton also wrote books on international relations (Dalton 1928c, 1940) and contributed articles on political themes to the journal Political Quarterly (Dalton 1931, 1935c, 1936). His diaries for the years 1918–1960 were published 24 years after his death (Dalton 1986a, b). Finally, mention must be made of the three volumes of his memoirs, which drew heavily on the diaries (Dalton 1953b, 1957, 1962).