Robertson and the Cambridge Approach to Utility and Welfare

The paper investigates Dennis Robertson's effort to defend the Cambridge utilitarian tradition against the “new welfare economics”, developed in the 1930s and 1940s on the basis of Lionel Robbins's influential criticism of the scientific legitimacy of interpersonal comparisons of utility. It is shown that Robertson's sustained endeavor to rescue Marshallian cardinal utility attracted some attention from economists at the time. Robertson claimed that welfare economics should be based on cardinal utility and that the ordinalist revolution in the consumer and welfare theories should be rejected. Robertson's claims were based on a careful discussion of what he saw as theoretical inconsistencies of the ordinalist approach. The paper brings to light an unpublished lecture about cardinal utility delivered by Robertson in Oxford in 1962