Decision-making processes and multilayered institutional order: Lionel Robbins’s legacy

Lionel Robbins is mainly known for An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, where he allegedly illustrated the neoclassical epistemology of economics, based on mechanistic maximizing behaviours of atomistic individuals whose aggregation results in the social order. Despite Robbins’s attempts to make it clear that this was not his concept of how the society works, this misrepresentation of his thought perpetuated in the methodological debates of the 1960s and is still dominant today. The aim of the paper is to challenge this caricature and illustrate the complex idea of social order held by Robbins, based on individual and collective processes of choices and a multilayer system of public institutions.