Durbin, Evan Frank Mottram (1906–1948)

Abstract

Born in Devon, Durbin was a Scholar of New College, Oxford, won the Senior and Junior Webb Medley Scholarships, first class Honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and the Ricardo Fellowship to University College, London. Hired as an economics lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1930, he was later promoted to senior lecturer. During the war he was a personal assistant to Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, and in 1945 he was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Edmonton. He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Hugh Dalton at the Treasury, and was appointed junior Minister of Works in March 1947. He was drowned in Cornwall in 1948. Durbin is best remembered for his book The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940), an influential statement of the revisionist case in Britain, of which his close friend and professional colleague, Hugh Gaitskell, later commented: ‘it marked the transition from the pioneering stage to that of responsibility and power.’

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman