Edwin Cannan

Edwin Cannan (3 February 1861 – 8 April 1935) was a British economist and historian of economic thought. He taught at the London School of Economics from 1895 to 1926.

Biography Edwin Cannan was the younger son of David Alexander Cannan and artist Jane Dorothea Claude. His mother died at the age of 38 of tuberculosis in Madeira, Portugal 18 days after her son Edwin was born. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford.

As a follower of William Stanley Jevons, Edwin Cannan is perhaps best known for his logical dissection and critique of classical economic theory in his famous 1894 tract A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution. Although Cannan had personal and professional difficulties with Alfred Marshall, he was still "Marshall's man" at the LSE from 1895 to 1926. During that time, particularly during his tenure as professor of political economy from 1907 onwards, Edwin Cannan shepherded the LSE away from its roots in Fabian socialism into tentative Marshallianism. This period was only to last, however, until his protégé, Lionel Robbins, took over with his more "Continental" (i.e. Austrian) ideas.

Though Cannan, in his early years as an economist, was a critic of classical economics and an ally of interventionists (he read an early paper to the Fabian Society in 1889), he moved sharply to the side of classical liberalism in the early 20th century. He favoured simplicity, clarity, and common sense in the exposition of economics. Cannan emphasised the institutional foundation of economic systems. See, for example, Hodgson remarks that in Wealth (1914) Cannan stressed the family, private property and the state. Cannan opposed the views of Thomas Robert Malthus on overpopulation, arguing that an "optimum population" from the maximum productivity point of view will vary.

Cannan became president of the Royal Economic Society in 1932.

He is buried at Wolvercote Cemetery Oxford, England.

Major works

The Origin of the Law of Diminishing Returns, 1813-15, 1892, The Economic Journal (EJ). Ricardo in Parliament, 1894, EJ.

2nd edition, 1912

; via Mises.org. In 1920, after the Great War, the first edition of Wealth of 1914 was placed in a time capsule beneath the foundation stone of the extension of the Old Building of the London School of Economics as a symbol of Edwin Cannan's contribution to the institution. See Edwin Cannan also suggested the motto of the London School of Economics, rerum conoscere causas, adopted in 1922. See

Early History of the term "Capital", 1921, QJE. An Application of the Theoretical Apparatus of Supply and Demand to Units of Currency, 1921, EJ. ; 7th ed., 1932, via Mises.org. Monetary Reform, with J.M. Keynes, Addis and Milner, 1924, EJ

vol. 3

Edwin Cannan

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