Oxford Don: Tutor, Lecturer and Author
Hall was considered ‘an excellent tutor and a kind, polite and charming man by his students', albeit he was not considered by them a good lecturer (Young and Lee 1993: 39, 52). Among those who took PPE under his tutelage were Anthony Crosland, and this in 1945 after Crosland resumed his studies at Oxford, transferring from Literae Humaniores (“Greats”) to PPE at the advanced age of 27.
According to one observer, Crosland, who would go on to be a member of both the Wilson and Callaghan cabinets, ‘wrote his Oxford essays on supply and demand for a Trinity tutor [Hall] who...coincidently was a Labour party man' (Reisman 1997: 69). A decade or so earlier, Hall is reported to have said that ‘Laissez faire is a lost cause which finds no home in Oxford' (Crosland quoted in Harrison 1994: 387). Moreover, by this time, Hall was tutoring Crosland using Marshall's Principles, Pigou's Economics of Welfare and Keynes's General Theory. In 1947, when Hall left Oxford to take over from Meade as Director of the Economic Section, Crosland replaced Hall as PPE tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, tutoring, among others, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, before moving into politics himself.Over the period from his appointment in 1926 onwards, Hall lectured on the entrepreneur system, wages, the theory of production, prices and the theory of distribution (see Young and Lee 1993: 42). From 1930 to 1939, he gave lectures on the economic functions of the State, equilibrium analysis, the economics of welfare, international trade, the price system in a collectivist economy, the forces determining price and output within an industry, questions in advanced economic theory, imperfect competition, and competition, imperfect competition and monopoly (see ibid.: 44). After the war, in 1946.
Hall also lectured on “Economic Planning in Great Britain”, and on price and output policy (see ibid.: 154).
Hall published two books derived from his lectures. The first was based on a lecture he gave in Michaelmas term 1933, entitled Earning and Spending (1934). Heavily influenced by Pigou's writings, it did not receive much attention. Hall's second book, The Economic System in a Socialist State (1937), was based on lectures given during Hilary term 1934. The book attracted interest, being reviewed favourably by Maurice Dobb in the Economic Journal (Dobb
1937), by Jan Tinbergen (in German) in WeltwirtscafilichesArchiv (Tinbergen
1938), and by Frank Knight in the Journal of Political Economy (Knight 1938). Knight's review was perhaps the most important and influential as it was part of a joint review of Pigou's Socialism Versus Capitalism (Pigou 1937) and Hall's book, which Knight called ‘scientifically more important' (Knight 1938: 241). Knight went on:
It is an important book for anyone interested in theoretical—or, as I should prefer to say, “analytical”—economics, whether or not he is particularly concerned with collectivism as such.. In this book we not only find unusually sound and penetrating economic theory in the technical sense; in addition, the work is sprinkled with penetrating common-sense observations about the probable workings of economic arrangements as affected by “human nature” (ibid.: 243-244).
Over the period 1930-1939, Hall himself reviewed books for various publications, including Economica, the Economic Journal and International Affairs.
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