Maurice Herbert Dobb

Abstract

Maurice Dobb (1900–1976) was undoubtedly one of the outstanding political economists of this century. He was a Marxist, and was one of the most creative contributors to Marxian economics. As Ronald Meek put it, in his obituary of Dobb for the British Academy, ‘over a period of fifty years [Dobb] established and maintained his position as one of the most eminent Marxist economists in the world’. Dobb’s Political Economy and Capitalism (1937) and Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) stand out as his two most outstanding contributions to Marxian economics. The former is primarily concerned with economic theory (including such subjects as value theory, economic crises, imperialism, socialist economies), and the latter with economic history (particularly the emergence of capitalism from feudalism). These two fields — economic theory and economic history — were intimately connected in Dobb’s approach to economics. He also wrote an influential book on Soviet economic development. This was first published under the title Russian Economic Development since the Revolution (1928), and later in a revised edition as Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (1948).