ABSTRACT
Yfaurice Herben Dobb, arguably the most outstanding British Mandan political economist of his generation, brought to the study of the history of economic thought a penetrating intellect capable of the most lucid articulation of the highest realms of theory. Born on July 24, 1900, educated at Chanerhouse School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, his death in 1976 left an impressive body of work stretching across more than half a century which in content traversed the broad spectrum of political economy. Surveying this body of work for the present essay has led to the search for unifying threads to integrate its impressive distribution ac ross the subject matter of political economy. The concentration upon his his tory of economic thought and his economic history does not do justice to Dobb's ability to understand, comprehensively, the entire breadth of oUf discipline. Yfaurice Dobb had that increasingly rare talent to render complex theoretical problems comprehensible to the non-specialized reader. Apart of that skill was the casting of principal problems of political economy in an historical perspective. For Maurice Dobb historical analysis became a penetrating instrument to expose latent ideologies inside seemingly robust theoretical structures. Dobb's economic history is a masterful aniculation of the dynamic process of social reproduction within distinctively c1assica1 categories of political economy. In an age when technica1 vinuosity is blindly celebrated the work of Maurice Dobb stands as a trenchant rem inder of the limitations of an excessively formal approach to understanding a complex social reality.
