Anthony Crosland as a Political Economist

Abstract

Returning to Trinity in the year of Attlee’s new dawn, converting from Classics to PPE at the age of 27, the ex-paratrooper on his way to a First made a careful study of Marshall’s Principles, Pigou’s Economics of Welfare and Keynes’ General Theory under the guidance of the pragmatic Robert Hall, whose Economic System in a Socialist State had in 1937 looked with Hayek to market pricing for accurate calculation even as it had looked with Jay, Dalton and Macmillan’s Middle Way to the purposive nationalisation of the commanding heights. Crosland in 1947 replaced his tutor (invited to succeed James Meade as Economic Advisor to the Government) as Lecturer in Economics at Trinity. His principal scholarly contributions — ‘The Movement of Labour in 1948’ ‘and (1949) Prices and Costs in Nationalised Undertakings’ (1950) — demonstrate the lack of interest of a morally-minded socialist who had joined Labour at the age of 16 in the use of mathematics, diagrams and abstractions that do so little for the cause of equality and welfare. Later articles in Encounter, Socialist Commentary and Tribune, together with the polemical Britain’s Economic Problem in 1953, show him more comfortable with economics when freed from the disciplinary detachment of arid formalism.

Written for this volume.