Abstract

This paper argues that the most common reading of Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science in the methodology literature, according to which it was an historical foil for subsequent positivist-empiricist ideas, underestimates its contemporary relevance. In light of recent scholarship on 1930s positivism in philosophy, Robbins’s Essay is better interpreted as representing an attitude I call ‘broad positivism’, which remains a live option in contemporary philosophy of science. In consequence, the basis of Robbins’s preference for clear demarcation between economics and psychology should be regarded as not merely historical in interest, but as raising valid considerations against the widespread current trend towards ‘correcting’ aspects of economic theory by reference to psychological experiments.