Ronald Coase and Arnold Plant

In my previous two posts (see here and here), we attempted to trace the intellectual origins of Ronald Coase’s reciprocal-harm axiom to Wesley Hohfeld’s theory of legal relations and to the “LSE tradition in cost theory” developed by Lionel Robbins and F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. A more likely source, however, is Arnold Plant (pictured below), Coase’s favorite professor at the London School of Economics. Why Plant? For starters, because we have no evidence of Coase attending any lectures by Hayek or Robbins during his undergraduate years — in fact, Hayek did not join the faculty of the London School of Economics until 1931,[1] when Coase would have been studying abroad (see, e.g., Coase 1991)[2] — and furthermore, by his own admission (see, e.g., Coase 1982), it was Professor Plant who exerted the greatest influence on Coase’s intellectual development during his formative student years at the London School of Economics.[3] By way of background, Coase…