A history of Dobb’s Wages

François Allisson and Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Maurice Dobb’s Wages, a short textbook-style work commissioned by John Maynard Keynes for the Cambridge Economic Handbooks series, was first published in 1928. It went through six revised editions by 1959, along with numerous reprints and translations up to the 1980s. This paper analyses the evolution of the book’s content in order to question the status of economic theory in relation to the study of labour issues. The first section examines the making of the handbook and shows how Wages addressed the usefulness of economic theory, particularly price theory. The second section traces the evolution of Dobb’s views on wages, shaped by his controversy with John Hicks in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The third section explores the growing scepticism of Wages across its subsequent editions and translations, following its trajectory from the centre to the periphery of economics.

Keywords: Dobb (Maurice); textbook; wages; labour economics; wage theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B13 B24 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2026-05-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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Published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 8, May, 2026. ISSN: 0309-166X

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