This book re-examines early-twentieth-century British welfare economics in the context of the emergence of the welfare state. There are fresh views of the well-known Cambridge School of Sidgwick, Marshall, Pigou, and Keynes, by Peter Groenewegen, Steven G. Medema, and Martin Daunton. This is placed against a less well-known Oxford approach to welfare: Yuichi Shionoya explores its foundations in the idealist philosophy of T. H. Green; Roger E. Backhouse considers the work of its leading exponent, J. A. Hobson; and Tamotsu Nishizawa discusses the spread of this approach in Britain. Finally, the book covers welfare economics in the policy arena: Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Atsushi Komine discuss Keynes and Beveridge, and Richard Toye points to the possible influence of H. G. Wells on Churchill and Lloyd George. A substantial introduction frames the discussion, and a postscript relates these ideas to the work of Robbins and subsequent developments in welfare economics.
Backhouse, Roger E.: - Roger E. Backhouse was a lecturer at University College London and at the University of Keele, before moving to the University of Birmingham in 1980, where he has been Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics since 1996. In 2009 he took a part-time position at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. After writing two textbooks on macroeconomics, he moved into the history of economics and methodology, on which he has published many articles in the leading journals, including History of Political Economy, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. His books include A History of Modern Economic Analysis (1985), Economists and the Economy (1994), Truth and Progress in Economic Knowledge (1997), and The Penguin History of Economics (2002) (published in North America as The Ordinary Business of Life, 2002). Books he has edited include The Cambridge Companion to Keynes (with Bradley W. Bateman). He has been review editor of the Economic Journal, editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology, and associate editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
Nishizawa, Tamotsu: - Tamotsu Nishizawa was a lecturer and then an associate professor at Osaka City University before moving to Hitotsubashi University in 1990, where he has been a professor since 1993 and Director of the Institute of Economic Research since 2007. He was a visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 2000 to 2001. His research field has been the history of economic thought. Professor Nishizawa's main publications include Economic Heretics: Economic Policy Ideas of the 19th Century Birmingham School (1994, in Japanese) and Economic Thought of Alfred Marshall and the Historical School (2007, in Japanese). He has edited several books, including Marshall and Schumpeter on Evolution: Economic Sociology of Capitalist Development (with Y. Shionoya, 2009). He was also the editor of the Journal of the Society of the History of Economic Thought in Japan.
