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Enquiring what has happened to political economy, it is tempting to conjecture what would Robbins’s answer look like if he were still among us. Trying to answer this question by stepping in his shoes is appropriate sincethere is no comparable example in the history of economic thought of an economist who has dealt as widely as he has with political economy (both as a scholar and directly as an advisor and, ironically, has been as criticizedas he was (then and now) for excluding political affairs as part of the economist’s concerns and for championing rational choice theory and the axiomatic method as it developed after the 1950s. Yet, a closer examination of his works raises important questions not only regarding Robbins’s understanding of the relationship between economics and political economy, but also on Robbins’s epistemology underlying the nature of this relationship.A clarification of Robbins’s conception of economic science and the hopes he entertained as to the direction to which the discipline was headed (or at least should head) sheds much light on the extent to which the development of economics considerably diverged from his epistemological tenets and on the related question of what happened to political economy. If one searches an explanation for why economics went astray through Robbins’s lenses, one would argue that economics failed to move from statics to dynamics and incorporate time and uncertainty in its analytical framework, which was a central component of Robbins’s epistemology. Considerations of uncertainty and dynamics, nevertheless, were absent from the first edition of An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) and were given considerable weight on the second edition (1935), raising the question of what happened between both editions that changed Robbins’s perspective so much. We argue that two important elements were the arrival of Hayek and Rosenstein-Rodan at the LSE in the early 30s and the effect of the lingering crises on the debate about cyclical fluctuations among economists.Though he became famous for his definition of economics, it is seldom recognized that within his broad definition there is scope for different conceptions underlying choice (such as hedonism, behaviorism, and introspection) which significantly impact how the economist theorize. Hence, while he is often thought of as a precursor of rational choice theory and axiomatization, one must recognize that his rejection of hedonism and behaviorism, favoring introspection instead, implied that he did not conceive economics on a par with mathematics or physics. His understanding of “economics in time”, and the central role of uncertainty, ruled outdeterminism and hence the possibility of establishing mechanical analogies or building a strictly formal system of relations. Individuals err and learn, hence economics is a science that studies the choices of individuals in asystem of perpetual change. Introspection also meant for him attachment to reality, for he thought that what he was describing as human faculties were obvious truths and there was no need for experiments to validate them.It followed that deductions from assumptions which were trivial would themselves also be directly applicable to practicable problems.Though Robbins thought he was mainly stating the main principles of economics, the conflation of different traditions actually meant redefining economics in a broader sense. Yet, it was his definition of economics inthe strict sense which gained currency, not his conception of economics as a science that, by merging general equilibrium in the Lausanne tradition with Austrian subjectivism and dynamic considerations, would eventuallybecome a powerful tool to orient public policies following English classical economists’ demarcation of science and art. Whether a stable compromise of so many different elements could be achieved is debatable, thehistorical point though is to clarify the extent to which his conception of economics does not neatly fit in with the methodological precepts of neoclassical economics as it developed after the 1950s. By revisiting his vision in its appropriate intellectual context, one may speculate as to what happened to political economy and paths not taken.Robbins wrote widely in political economy and continuously argued throughout his career that economics is an important tool to orient public policies. In this he was following the distinction between political economy as an art and political economy as a science. The influence of English classical economists on Robbins extends further than the normative / positive divide, and this is an aspect seldom discussed by the literature. An important element that he drew from English classical economics was utilitarianism. In one of his earliest papers from 1927, where many of the arguments that would reappear in the Essay are anticipated, he claims that assumingutility as an end is not tantamount to utility maximization, and hence the framework of utility does not necessarily have a hidden ethical component (Robbins 1927). Although for a hedonist the inclusion of utility in economicanalysis implies adhering to utility maximization, he promptly rejects this notion. Furthermore, he argues that normative issues must not be part of economics quae economics if the economist has any hope of producinguseful knowledge in guiding the formulation of public policies. Excluding ethics from economics is thus a necessary condition, though not sufficient, if economics wants to acquire the status of science. In his RichardT. Ely Lecture, Robbins replied to the criticisms directed towards theEssay. Nearly fifty years after its original publication, he was still struggling to make its main points clear. He stressed that economics is different fromthe natural sciences since individuals are purposeful, i.e., “our explanations must to some extent be teleological” (Robbins 1981, p. 2, emphasis in the original). Furthermore, unlike natural scientists, economists cannot make predictions, since individuals are able to learn and adapt to the environment – time series may thus be an interesting method for analyzing the past, but not the future. In this paper Robbins insists on the demarcation between economics and political economy, arguing once more that both are complementary for the purposes of policy analysis.Were Robbins’s means appropriate to the ends he pursued? Is a value-free science achievable? (Scarantino, 2009) Is it possible to be realistic within the theory of value he endorsed? (Brown & Spencer, 2012) These arevaluable questions to assess the contemporary state of economics and political economy, and his critics may be right in some of their objections. Yet, there is still much misunderstanding of Robbins’s epistemology and littlerecognition of his discussion of dynamics, which was a lively issue in the economic debates of the 1930s. The point is that the fact that there are some elements in Robbins that are compatible with developments which would later take place does not mean in the least that he would support such developments or that he is to be regarded as a forerunner of axiomatics or rational theory. As Backhouse & Medema (2009) have shown, his definitionwould only be fully endorsed in the 1970s. However, his definition is quite broad and it does not say how individuals choose between alternative means. Hence, taken out of context it is a definition that is compatible with hedonism or behaviorism though he rejected both. Moreover, economics went through significant changes in the decades between his definition and its acceptance, such that by the time his definition gained currency adifferent “image of science” was already established (Giocoli 2003) which had little in common with Robbins’s hopes that economics would move from statics to dynamics and become more helpful for practical matters. His views were much more connected to past and contemporary economists (English classical economists and Austrians) than to the future developments of economics as a system of formal relations, to which Robbins’s would most likely reject.Robbins’s started to consider the importance of dynamics for economic analysis in the period between the first and the second edition of the Essay, as can be seen from a comparison of the two editions. On the second edition of the Essay many passages were added discussing dynamics, while such issues are virtually absent from the first edition. Even more significant is that uncertainty went from largely undiscussed in the first edition to the status of “main postulate of the theory of dynamics” (Robbins 1935, p. 78). This is notable because, although he has been often criticized as a defender of homo economicus, perfect rationality and perfect foresight were not main postulates of his theory, rather they were auxiliary assumptions. As such, they were assumptions that should be dropped once the discipline became sufficiently mature. Indeed, as early as 1927 he had alreadyargued that homo economicus was but a temporary assumption:"Perhaps it would be as well to insist, at this point, that this is not the same as desiring to exclude the consideration, in its economic aspects, of action based upon ethical intentions. This is not a dispute about economic motive. Somewhere about 1950, economists may hope that journalists and others will discover that ‘economic man’ is no longer assumed in their discussions, and will cease to acquire cheap reputations by pompous denunciations of this obsolete fiction. But until that time it is as well to be explicit" (Robbins 1927, p. 176).In the early 1950s, when the axiomatization of economics was gaining momentum, he realized that his dream had not come true and lamented that economics was becoming more statical and less dynamical:"It will surely come to be regarded as a paradox in the history of thought that, just at a period when the problems of economic dynamics were beginning to be successfully tackled by methods which can properly be described as extensions of the subjective theory of value, there should have developed a tendency to restate the statical foundations in terms which deliberately eschew any reference to the subjective at all." (Robbins 1953, p.102).The main contributions of our paper are summarized as follows. First, we show that although considerations of uncertainty, time, and dynamics were central to the second edition of the Essay, they were virtually absent from the first edition of Robbins’s seminal work. We argue that these changes can be explained by the economic context of the 1930s, with discussions of business cycles and fluctuations coming to the fore of economic debates, but also because of the arrival of Hayek and Rosenstein-Rodan in the early 1930s at the LSE. Secondly, we draw implications from Robbins’s lost philosophy of political economy to contemporary economics. Robbins may be criticized on many grounds; one may argue, for instance, that it is impossible to formulate economic theories dissociated from ethical valuations or that the theory of value he adhered to is flawed. Criticismsnotwithstanding, underlying the importance he attributed to the time element, uncertainty, and dynamics is his understanding of economics as the toolkit to orient political economy and his hope that economics would become increasingly more applicable to practical problems as it matured. Thus, not only theoretical concepts essential to analyse a system in perpetual change were lost, but, more broadly, the nature of the relationshipbetween economics and political economy suggested by Robbins went unnoticed.ReferencesBackhouse, R. E. and Medema, Steve G. (2009). “Defining economics: the long road to acceptance of the Robbins definition”. Economica 76, pp. 805–820.Brown, A. and Spencer, D. A. (2012). “The nature of economics and the failings of the mainstream: lessons from Lionel Robbins’s Essay”. Cambridge journal of economics 36.4, pp. 781–798.Giocoli, N. (2003). Modeling rational agents: From interwar economics to early modern game theory. Edward Elgar Publishing.Oliveira, T. D. and Suprinyak, C. E. (2018, forthcoming). “The nature and significance of Lionel Robbins’s methodological individualism”. EconomiaOliveira, T. D. and Suprinyak, C. E. (2016). The economist quae political economist: Lionel Robbins and the Economic Advisory Council. Cedeplar: Texto para Discussão, n. 535.Robbins, L. (1937a). Economic Planning and International Order. London: MacMillan.— (1939a). The Economic Basis of Class Conflict and Other Essays in Political Economy. London: MacMillan.— (1939b). The Economic Causes of War. London: Jonathan Cape.— (1927). “Mr. Hawtrey on the scope of economics”. Economica 20, pp. 172–178.— (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. MacMillan.— (1935). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. 2nd edition, London: MacMillan.— (1941). Federal Tracts No 2: Economic Aspects of Federation. London: Macmillan for the Federal Union Research Institute.— (1953). “Robertson on utility and scope”. Economica 20.78, pp. 99–111.— (1954). The Economist in the Twentieth Century and Other Lectures in Political Economy. London: MacMillan.— (1976). Political Economy: Past and Present, a Review of Leading Theories of Economic Policy. London: MacMillan.— (1978). The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy. 2nd edition, London: MacMillan.— (1981). “Economics and political economy”. American Economic Review71.2, pp. 1–10.— (1997). Economic Science and Political Economy: Selected Articles. Edited by Susan Howson, London: MacMillan.Scarantino, A. (2009). “On the role of values in economic science: Robbins and his critics”. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 31.4, pp. 449–473.Suprinyak, C. E. and Oliveira, T. D. (2017). Economists, social scientists, and the reconstruction of the world order in interwar Britain. Cedeplar: Texto para Discussão, n. 566.