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 destruction of Classical 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 long stretch as chairman after 1907, 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" ideas.

Though Cannan, in his early years as an economist, was a critic of classical economics and an ally of interventionists, 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.

Cannan 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.

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