Maurice dobb biography

Maurice Herbert Dobb Biography

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(1900–76), Political Economy and Capitalism, Studies in the Development of Capitalism

Britisheconomist and eminent Marxist scholar, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, subsequently Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his many books and articles, two stand out. The first is Political Economy and Capitalism (1937) which the obituary writer for the British Academy claimed marked ‘the emergence of Marxist economics as a really serious economic discipline’. The second, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1947), is an account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. Dobb was a strong supporter of labour education, writing many pamphlets for the Workers' Education Association, and was active in British Communist Party circles between the wars. Towards the end of his life, he published a short and accessible book on the history of economic thought: Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith (1973). In 1978 the Cambridge Jo

‘Maurice Dobb: Political Economist’ reviewed by Hans G Despain

It is difficult to think of a more capable political economist to learn Marxian economics from than the late Maurice Dobb (1900-1976). Dobb made major contributions in Marxian economic history, theories of monopoly capital, theories of crises, economic development and growth, penetrating criticisms of neo-classical theory, economic analysis of Soviet economic development, hundreds of pamphlets and popular articles to increase socio-economic literacy, and much more. There is a new and impressive intellectual biography of Maurice Dobb written by a talented and highly capable young historian called Timothy Shenk. This book deserves a wide audience, and hopefully will help to bring the talents and insights of Maurice Dobb to another generation of Marxian political economists.

From 1919, following the publication of his Economic Consequences of Peace, until his death in 1946, John Maynard Keynes and his theories dominated the economics department of Cambridge University. Although Keynes himself never


Maurice H. Dobb, 1900-1976.

British Neo-Marxian economist, perhaps the single person most responsible for bringing Marxian economics into the modern day. 

Maurice H. Dobb was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and taking his doctorate at the L.S.E., he became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1924, obtaining a fellowship from Trinity College in 1948.

His early interest in Marxian economics yielded his 1925 dissertation, which tries to marry elements of Marxian and Marshallian economics.  Between 1925 and 1928, Dobb lived in the Soviet Union, and produced one of the first serious accounts of the transformation of the Russian economy under the Bolsheviks.

In 1937, he produced one of his most famous works, Political Economy and Capitalism, helping update Marxian theory into a critique of  Neoclassical economic theory, which earlier Marxists had largely ignored, drawing particular attention and emphasis on the question of value theory. His 1946 exercise in Marxian economic history, examining the transition from feudalism to capitalism in careful detail, is one

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