Robbins on Race

As part of a new research project, which explores how the neoliberals helped to shape British higher education, I’ve been visiting the London School of Economics. The LSE library holds several relevant archival collections, including the papers of Lionel (Lord) Robbins.

There, I stumbled upon a couple of articles Robbins authored early in his life, before he became a Professor at the LSE, which took me by surprise for the crass and retrogressive way they addressed race. While I knew he’d spoken about race in some of his earliest work, including his first book-length publication, a 1926 pamphlet titled Wages, as far as I was aware his comments on this theme were scattered and, though not especially elegant, not especially incendiary either.

More generally, I’ve always considered Robbins one of the more politically moderate, in some ways even progressively inclined, neoliberals. A comparatively principled classical liberal who emphasised the rule of law and equality of opportunity as much as free competition, Robbins was always something of an outlier in the neoliberal movement, which on balance erred quite heavily towards conservatism.

This progressive inclination, of course, came through in the so-called Robbins Report, published in October 1963, which advocated the rapid expansion of the university sector in the UK and which established equality of opportunity as the bedrock of higher education policy. This why the Robbins Report is often interpreted as social democratic, rather than neoliberal, in orientation. (I disagree with this reading but can’t go into that here.)

Yet in these two early articles, penned in 1925 and 1927 for The Outlook, a London-based magazine he wrote for regularly during this period of his life, Robbins expressed a number of views that very much fly in the face of his later reputation as a moderately progressive liberal.

I thought it worthwhile to share some of my key takeaways.

Race and Population, 1925

The first of these two pieces is a book review of Sir Leo Chiozza Money’s The Peril of the White (1925). A deeply reactionary screed with firm eugenicist overtones, Peril argued that the declining birth rate of white Europeans would soon cause a crisis of colonial governance. Because the white population was shrinking while colonial populations weren’t, before long Europe would struggle to retain control of its colonies and thus its prominence on the world stage. Money was deeply disturbed by this prospect and argued that white Europeans should return to having more babies to stave off this world-historical disaster.

In his review, Robbins challenged some of Money’s claims, but not others. Robbins, who himself went on to serve in a range of Colonial Office functions, took no issue with Money’s premise that Europeans should rule over non-Europeans. And he admitted that he was ‘entirely at one with [Money] in desiring that the present white population should be better distributed’ across the globe.¹

Instead, his quarrel with The Peril of the White pivoted on economics. He reached back to the concept of optimum population, first developed by his mentor at the LSE, Edwin Cannan (more on him below). An optimum population is the number of people the natural resources and land in a given territory can sustain without triggering Malthusian checks like famines or social decay. Robbins worried that if white Europeans were to increase their fertility rates again, this would push Europe’s population levels above the optimum, thus causing economic, demographic, and social disruption.

To Robbins, then, the solution to Money’s problem was not for whites to increase their birth rate but for all other races to decrease theirs. In his words:

On the whole, Robbins remained unconvinced of Money’s thesis that the decline of white fertility rates posed a problem to the integrity or security of Europe’s colonial project. He reasoned that Europe was culturally and technologically so highly developed that colonial peoples stood little chance of successfully challenging its rule. Robbins concluded his review with these words:

Here Robbins was directly echoing his mentor, Cannan, who had concluded his 1914 book, Wealth, with some remarks on immigration. Extending his theory of optimum population to the question of migratory trends, Cannon argued that the only justifiable migration restrictions are those which ‘segregate a race or races which have not as yet at any rate sufficient control over their own multiplication’. And then:

This passage clearly struck a chord with the young Robbins, who, as we’ll see below, was to grapple with its implications for years to come.

Population Problems of the Pacific

The second article, entitled Population Problems of the Pacific, appeared in May 1927 in The Outlook. Another book review, this one saw Robbins discuss two recent texts on migration policies in the Pacific, though he focussed chiefly on Fleetwood Chidell’s Australia, White or Yellow?, a fierce polemic against Australia’s restrictive immigration policies. Chidell’s claim was that the heavily underpopulated country of Australia had no moral right to bar migrants from heavily overpopulated areas, like Europe and East Asia. By lifting its immigration restrictions, Chidell argued, Australia could, and indeed should, help ease the population pressure experienced elsewhere.

This much Robbins agreed with. What he questioned was the wisdom of opening Australia’s borders to both Europe and East Asia. ‘Mr. Chidell is not content with urging the removal of the barriers to British and European immigration. He would also admit coloured people to a certain area of the continent. […] I confess that I am doubtful of the wisdom of this expedient’.³

He attacked Chidell’s argument on practical and normative grounds. Practically speaking, Chidell’s case for open borders was that it might help de-escalate growing geopolitical tensions in Europe and the Pacific, which were at risk of producing ‘an Italian-German-Japanese block’ that, Robbins admitted, certainly ‘could cause very grave inconvenience’. However, Robbins retorted, this was no reason for Australia to open its borders to East Asian migrants.

But Robbins was even less convinced of the normative dimension of Chidell’s argument, which assigned Australia a moral duty to permit migrants from overpopulated areas to cross its borders. Robbins rejected this notion fiercely: ‘if I am not greatly mistaken, a very strong case indeed can be made out against permitting further expansion to peoples whose multiplication is so rapid’. He continued:

Though he didn’t say it in so many words, Robbins was, in effect, defending the white Australia policy—he wanted Australia to permit entry to Europeans while barring all other racial groups. Like in his earlier piece, the idea of optimum population was key: He justified racial selection on the basis not of racial superiority (an idea he rejected) but differential fertility rates, which he claimed would cause the overpopulation of the Pacific region.

Here again, Robbins was channelling Cannan. This time, he concluded his review with a direct quote:

A conceptual motif

What should we make of these two articles? How should we understand them within Robbins’s oeuvre and thought? We may be tempted to see them as insignificant outliers. These were just book reviews, we might say, in which Robbins was shooting from the hip rather than carefully theorising a problem. And the result is a pair of ill-advised articles that, in the final analysis, don’t align with his more systematic views on themes of race and population.

I’d say that this reading lets Robbins off the hook too easily. These pieces were not unmoored from his broader conceptual concerns at the time. The key theoretical problem confronted in these reviews, that of optimum population, was an enduring interest of his, one he consistently approached through the twin lenses of race and fertility.

In 1927, Robbins penned a contribution to a festschrift in honour of none other than Cannan, who had retired from the LSE a year earlier. His chapter, entitled ‘The Optimum Theory of Population’, explored some of the implications of Cannan’s work on this theme, including the issue of migration. While in an ideal world, Robbins mused, ‘where there were no such things as local variations in birth and death rates, racial differences and sovereign states’ the concept of relative overpopulation might not be a meaningful one, in reality ‘there still remains the grim fact of differential rates of multiplication which must necessarily involve a dynamic conflict of interest’.⁴ While less expressly racialised than his article on Australia’s migration policies, this chapter was grappling with the same fundamental problem.

One year later, Robbins returned to the problem of population size in a paper read to the Oxford Political Economy Club, and then published in Economica, on Britain’s falling birth rate. While predominantly focussed on the domestic effects of a decline in birth rate, in an aside Robbins did make a point of mentioning uneven fertility rates:

Robbins returned to this problem again in his 1937 book Economic Planning and International Order, which left a significant imprint on neoliberal thought, where he revisited the question of international migration. In an extended footnote, he wrote:

Robbins went on to wonder whether migrants can, in fact, be expected to change their reproductive habits if exposed to the cultural attitudes of the host country. He arrived at no specific conclusion.

The latest reference I can find to this theme is from a 1958 public lecture, where Robbins again rehearsed the view that the best justification for limitations on migration is differential fertility rates. Referencing Cannan, he said that ‘[i]f the inhabitants of a certain area are so fixed in habits of rapid multiplication that there is no hope of speedy change, then it is obviously in the interests of the world as a whole that they should be confined to a smaller rather than a larger area.’ He then went on to indicate his broad agreement with this view, at least as it applies to ‘some low-income groups from Asia and Africa’, which may legitimately be assumed to have deeply rooted reproductive habits and thus pose a risk of overpopulation.⁷

Remarkably, this places us back where we started. Though he delivered this lecture more than 30 years after writing his book reviews for The Outlook, in the interim Robbins appears not to have changed his mind either about the dangers of differential fertility rates or, indeed, about the racial groups to whom migration limitations should apply.

1  Lionel Robbins, ‘Race and Population’, The Outlook, 3 October (1925): 225–6.

2  Edwin Cannan, Wealth, 3rd edition (Staples Press, 1928 [1914]), 287.

3  Lionel Robbins, ‘Population Problems of the Pacific’, The Outlook, 7 May (1927): 538–9.

4  Lionel Robbins, ‘The Optimum Theory of Population’, in: T.E. Gregory & H. Dalton (eds.), London Essays in Economics (George Routledge & Sons, 1927), 133.

5  Lionel Robbins, ‘Notes on Some Probable Consequences of the Advent of a Stationary Population in Great Britain’, Economica 25 (1929), 78n1.

6  Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (Macmillan, 1937), 249n1.

7  Lionel Robbins, Politics and Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 1963), 123.